My short story, “Unauthorized Person,” appears in Habitat Literary Magazine. You can read the whole issue here.
Author: Kenny Kelly
Absentees
Seconds into their set, Reilly got a circle pit started. He’d grown his hair out and done it up in bloody liberty spikes. It looked like a shark’s fin swimming through us in the gyre. Before Reilly could make three revolutions, a kid in an apron broke it up. The punks fell in line and bobbed their heads to the rapid-fire bass triplets, the parabolic and dissonant guitar melody, the tom rolls organized only by chaos, a cacophony not unlike rain, muted and rhythmic, then suddenly torrential. In the chorus, the front man sang in an eagle’s cry, It doesn’t bother me to see you die. It ended with one last burst of frenetic energy, and in the last measure, the time signature changed. The absence of the final note tore the breath from my lungs.
Read the rest at Joyland.
The Case for Shifting Behind Brett Anderson
In 2016, teams employed a defensive shift more than ever before. Across the majors, teams shifted 28,072 times. The Cubs, whose defense maintained a historically good BABIP, shifted the least with just 603 batters faced with some sort of defensive shift in place. The Cubs appear to be one step ahead against the rest of the league since Russell A. Carleton has found that teams are shifting too much. Carleton found that while BABIP on groundballs against the shift has decreased, line drive rates have improved for batters facing a shift and pitchers are throwing more balls, thus increasing the likelihood for more walks and higher pitch counts. Hitters may actually be getting more hits when the shift is in place which, of course, defeats the purpose of shifting.
The Cubs, however, may have a prime candidate for employing a shift in spite of all of this.
Read the rest at BP Wrigleyville.
My Quest for 100 Rejections (and 50 Books Read) in a Year
It shouldn’t be new information that to be a successful writer, one has to endure a lot of rejection. Being told that your writing isn’t good enough can sting, especially if it’s for something like a fellowship attached to real currency you can use to exchange for food or rent or heat. For the first few years of my writing career, I submitted with the goal of getting accepted. The result was that I rarely submitted, or at least I didn’t submit as much as I should have. The desire to get accepted came with the fear of getting rejected.
But then I read Kim Liao’s piece over at LitHub, and I realized I had been thinking about submission all wrong.
You probably have one of [these] friends, too—you know the one I’m talking about, that friend who is a beautiful writer, but who also seems to win everything? I could barely believe that she had the balls to apply to—let alone, get accepted to—several residencies, a prestigious fellowship, and publications in journals I had actually heard of.
I asked her what her secret was, and she said something that would change my professional life as a writer: “Collect rejections. Set rejection goals. I know someone who shoots for one hundred rejections in a year, because if you work that hard to get so many rejections, you’re sure to get a few acceptances, too.”
I had a professor in undergrad who said that an 8% acceptance rate was what you should aim for as a writer. I don’t know where he got that number, but it’s stuck with me. If you were to accrue 100 rejections in a year and you had an 8% acceptance rate, you would also publish eight pieces that year. I don’t know about you, but that’s more than I had last year.
At the beginning of 2017, I decided I would also try for 100 rejections this year. I also decided I would try to read fifty books this year because the only New Year’s Resolution I ever make is to read more books than I did the year before. This is just the first year I’ve put a number on it.
We’re three months into 2017, or one-quarter of the way through. At this point, I should have 25 rejections, 2 acceptances and 12.5 books read.
Here’s what I’ve done so far:
Rejections: 9
Books Read: 11
Acceptances: 1
I’m behind in every category, but not unreasonably so. I could catch up on the books with a good week of reading. I currently have six submissions open, so if all of the rejections came back in the next hour, I would still be ten behind. I’m still not submitting enough to hit 100 rejections, but my increased submission rate has already netted me an acceptance.
*
The Books I’ve Read This Year:
- Up, Up, and Away! by Jonah Keri
- Conduits by J. Ryan Sommers
- Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehesi Coates
- Cartography of the Void by Chris Abani
- Once, I Was Cool by Megan Stielstra
- Self-Help by Lorrie Moore
- Middle Passage by Charles Johnson
- Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino
- Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders
- Drown by Junot Diaz
- Becoming Abigail by Chris Abani
Javier Baez on the Bases
In the 2017 World Baseball Classic, Javier Baez looked unstoppable on the basepaths, and a hyper-aggressive Baez is one of the most exciting things to watch. After stealing second and third in the sixth inning of Puerto Rico’s 6-5 win over the USA, the Cubs infielder danced down the line as if he were going to steal home, too. And he seemed like he could do it. After all, he did it in the NLCS last year against the Dodgers.
Baez, who swiped 12 bases last year, is a threat to steal, but he’s never been a sure a thing in that regard. At least, not until the WBC.
Read the rest at BP Wrigleyville
2017 San Francisco Giants Season Preview
Still, even after losing nine winnable games, the 2016 Giants made it to the playoffs and nearly forced a winner-take-all game against the best team in the majors and eventual World Series Champion Chicago Cubs. With a normal bullpen, who knows, maybe the Giants make it past the Cubs. Even Year Bullshit lives on and in October 2018, Giants twitter would be ablaze with an even stupider portmanteau/hashtag than #believen. With a normal bullpen, the Giants at least would have had a very good chance to win the NL West after the Dodgers underperformed expectations.
The 2017 Giants should have a normally functioning bullpen with a new, expensive pitcher who has been very good at getting outs in the ninth inning. Will this be the first year the Giants (or someone other than the Dodgers) wins the NL West since 2012?
Read the rest at Banished to the Pen
The PECOTA Gap Between the Cubs and Dodgers
On April 10th, the Cubs will play their first real game at Wrigley since the World Series, and they’ll do so against the Dodgers. The rematch of the NLCS should be a well-played series between two evenly-matched teams. This offseason, many comparisons of the two teams have been made, and the consensus seems to be that there’s no way to argue one team is clearly better than the other. PECOTA, however, disagrees.
Read the rest at BP Wrigleyville.
Kyle Hendricks Doesn’t Have to Regress
In some ways it’s hard to account for the right-hander’s success. His fastball barely touches 90 mph, and his breaking balls aren’t exactly electric. At first glance, he looks like a pitcher who is doomed for regression. His FIP in 2016 was a full run higher than his ERA, 3.24 and 2.13 respectively. His BABIP of .250 was twenty points lower than his career average of .273, benefitting from a historically good Cubs defense. Kyle Hendricks may very well regress toward his relatively-high-but-still-very-good FIP, and maybe it’s more likely that he will, but that doesn’t mean that he must.
Read the rest at BP Wrigleyville.
Robin Ventura: Scapegoat
Now, I want to be clear on one thing: Robin Ventura is not a good manager.
Ventura has a history of making some dubious decisions during games including not walking the bases loaded with runners on second and third with less than two out in the bottom of a ninth inning or later game, leaving his starters in too long, and starting Avisail Garcia. He’ll end his tenure with the White Sox with four consecutive losing seasons, the first Sox manager to do so, and a record of 375-435, good for a .463 winning percentage.
But Ventura doesn’t deserve all of the blame for the White Sox failings.
Read the rest at Beyond the Box Score.
Joe Panik and the Case of the Disappearing Line Drive
After a great 2015 season which saw Joe Panik make the All-Star team, the Giants’ second baseman and former first-round pick has had a relatively dismal year at the plate in 2016. Last season he hit .312/.378/.455 with a modest 136 wRC+, and this year he hit .239/.315/.379 with a below average 89 wRC+. Before the season started, projection systems expected him to regress slightly as Panik benefited from a high .330 BABIP in 2015 but not to this level.
Still, the Yankees would have taken him for Andrew Miller. Panik has been a valuable player posting a 2.1 fWAR mostly because of his defense, so this hasn’t been a lost season by any means. He is recovering from a back injury that sidelined him for the last few months of 2015 and a concussion that put him on the DL just before this year’s All-Star break so that would explain some of his troubles, but perhaps not all of it. Has something changed about his approach, or is he merely unlucky?
Read the rest at Beyond the Box Score
Kenny Kelly 