My latest from the June 18, 2012 Boston Globe BARRINGTON, R.I. – Dana Quigley will never forget the route. A straight shot down 45th Street to St. Mary’s Medical Center in West Palm Beach, Fla. Easy. Five minutes to reach his son, to see his best friend. Whenever the phone rings at night in his West Palm Beach home, [...]

Internship? Meet fire. My first week with the Globe sports department concluded with the Sox’s three-game series at Fenway against the Nationals. They got swept, and I wrote some articles about some players, which you can read on Boston.com, if you really want. In one of them, I rhymed. Try to find where. Byrce Harper . David Ortiz . Stephen Strasburg . [...]

Seven semesters ago, an ephemeral time period by any standard except perhaps one labeled “Kardashian Marriage,” I began writing this column. Today marks my penultimate penning, the final weekly installment of “Live From Mudville.” And there are so many people I would like to thank before the orchestral music plays me off the stage.  Thank you [...]

On Patriots’ Day, that glorious Massachusetts and Maine−only holiday when two states get to bask in our New England eliteness while the rest of the country suffers a painstaking case of the “Mondays,” I undertook the most grueling task I have ever faced, one that promised to test — and likely break — my every [...]

CHAPTER SEVEN: RESOLUTIONS AND CATHARTIC HOMECOMINGS The inherent nature of the scapegoat involves permanent exile. Leviticus explicitly states that the community’s gates closed on the goat, leaving it to wander alone in the wilderness with society’s sins, never to return them to their origins. Interestingly, both Merkle and Buckner defied this clause, experiencing cathartic homecomings of sorts [...]

CHAPTER SIX: STEVE BARTMAN AND THE OUTSIDER In winning the 2004 World Series, the Boston Red Sox at once ended 86 years of futility and expunged Buckner of his transgressions in 1986. The Chicago Cubs, Buckner’s former team, have not been nearly as lucky. The Loveable Losers have not won a World Series title since 1908 and [...]

CHAPTER FIVE: ‘THE BALL GETS BY BUCKNER’ The Red Sox went on to win the 1912 World Series after Snodgrass’ gaffe, and again in 1915, 1916 and 1918. Boston fans then suffered eighty-six years until the 2004 squad finally broke the “Curse of the Bambino.” And along the way, in 1986, the Red Sox returned to the [...]

In the final game of the 1912 World Series, Fred Merkle hit a clutch RBI single in the top of the 10th inning that gave New York the lead over Boston, putting himself in a position to be the hero and officially atone for his transgressions that made him a lifelong goat. The first batter [...]

For traditional scapegoating practices, the scapegoat was the “means by which the accumulated ills of a whole year are publicly expelled an animal.” Expelling moral wrongdoings, disease and ill will was the primary motivation for scapegoating. And if this approach is transferred to the realm of sport, the parallels are too noticeable to ignore. Sport [...]

Editor’s Note: Jason Wippich, of Cool Wip  fame, is making his triumphant return to Live From Mudville with a few thoughts about the Super Bowl. This blog was originally published on Jason’s >Missing the Flop I am a self-described poor man’s Steve Czaban. He doesn’t know who I am, nor have I ever met him. He’s from Virginia, as am [...]

René Girard, a French philosopher who has written extensively about the scapegoat mechanism and ancient ritual sacrifice, exemplifies the implementation of the scapegoat ritual into academia. His works reflect a focus on the origins of violence and religion, and how the two are inextricably interwoven through what he dubbed “mimetic desire,” or desiring the same [...]

Any discussion of the scapegoat necessitates a journey to the Old Testament, to get a sense of the term’s historical origins before proceeding into its connections with Major League Baseball. In 1536, an English translator of the Bible named William Tyndale was strangled and burnt at the stake by the Catholic establishment, but when an [...]

These are my friends on Facebook (identities protected, for obvious reasons), and here is what they said about Joe Paterno’s death. Some joked, some grieved, some lamented the grieving. I’ll reserve my commentary about Paterno, mostly because I have none. Death is a complicated matter, the discussion of which I am ill-equipped to handle. I have been [...]

This past spring, I took a class called “America and the National Pastime,” more colloquially known as “History of Baseball.” It consisted of 12 weeks of glorious history, tracing baseball back to its origins — no, not the ones that involved Abner Doubleday — and culminated in an absolute opus of a 45-page research paper called “Scapegoat and [...]

College football’s bowl system is at an impasse, and it has absolutely nothing to do with an LSU-Alabama rematch in the BCS Championship Game or Virginia Tech somehow getting selected for the Sugar Bowl over Kansas State and Boise State. It has nothing to do with BCS or Oklahoma State’s relegation despite the Cowboys’ stomping [...]

Every friend I have on Facebook was talking about Christmas this weekend. Roughly 18 percent were inundated with the holiday spirit, presumably catalyzed by a tryptophan−induced food coma, and wrote about how excited they were to move from Thanksgiving to our glorious Christian nation’s next major holiday. The remaining 82 percent all posted some derivation of [...]

Now I realize that writing about Tim Tebow only perpetuates the cycle of the rest of the media writing, talking, blogging and childishly gossiping about Tebow. But to strike at the root of an issue, one must confront it head−on. Tebow is unconventional in every sense of the word. He is a left−handed quarterback with a [...]