So, Thursday I ran out to Barnes
and Noble to buy my usual three baseball magazines—Athlon’s, Lindy’s, Street
and Smith’s—like I do every March, but not this time. It was as if somebody’d picked the magazine
rack, which runs a good thirty feet if it’s an inch, clean of news about the
national pastime.
On to Plan B, aka Amazon. Oh, Mr. Bezos had the magazines in question
all right, plus $11.95 for shipping and handling, which would be like paying
for a fourth magazine, if one were out there.
Where are the advantages of Prime Membership when you need them most? On to Plan C.
That entailed driving to a
neighborhood newsstand yesterday morning.
Let me note here that there are two kinds of newsstands in the world,
ones with newspapers and magazines and ones with newspapers and magazines, some
of which start with the letter X, as in XXX.
This was a XXX newsstand.
I pulled up, lowered the
passenger-side window and took in a conversation between the two guys manning
the stand. Let’s just say physicians
don’t discuss human anatomy the way these fellows were. The discussion stopped long enough for me to
make my purchase of three magazines, all X-free.
Then, today, I asked a friend I
used to ride dinosaurs with growing up if he’d gotten his baseball magazines
yet, and he told me he’d been to two drugstores with no luck. Dear Commissioner Manfred, your sport has
reached the point where it’s getting hard to impossible to find the supporting
literature that once made it such a joy to follow. The Baseball Register and Who’s Who in
Baseball are gone, and those magazines I bought will be next. If nobody wants to carry them, that means
nobody’s asking to buy them.
At some point, nobody is going to care, about the sport let alone the supporting literature.
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