If the Boston Red Sox can take one more game from the St. Louis Cardinals, it will be the first time they’ve clinched a title at Fenway Park since 1918. Back then, the Sox had a pitcher named Ruth and game updates were delivered via carrier pigeons.

+ “I came to realize that professional baseball players are masochists: hitters stand sixty feet and six inches from the mound, waiting to get hit by a pitcher’s bullets; fielders get sucker punched in the face by bad hops, and then ask for a hundred more. We all fail far more than we succeed, humiliating ourselves in front of tens of thousands of fans, trying to attain the unattainable.” In The New Yorker, Adrian Cardenas explains why he quit big league baseball for creative writing. If you can make it to the majors and have an essay published by The New Yorker, that’s not a bad streak.