The Pitcher and the Poet

Coping with Loss in Baltimore

I never had the chance to meet Mike Flanagan, the former Baltimore Oriole pitcher and baseball executive who took his own life over the summer.

But if given the chance, I would have thanked him for one night on the South Side of Chicago, when he relieved my pain.

The nine timeless innings of baseball are designed to remove us from life’s stressful machinations. In his poem “At the Ballgame,” William Carlos Williams wrote,

the crowd at the ballgame
is moved uniformly
by a spirit of uselessness
which delights them.

Whenever I head to …