Play Ball

Letter from the Editor: Play Ball

By Scott Bolohan
The Twin Bill founder

On September 19, my parents, girlfriend, and dog piled into the car and drove down to Detroit. We were going to a baseball game.
 
It was the last night game of the season, a chilly fall night in the Midwest. We had no trouble finding free parking in the adjacent neighborhood, put our masks on, and walked over to Comerica Park.
 
We stood in leftfield, behind the statues of Tigers greats, and peered through the holes in the fence. In the distance, we could make out real, live baseball players. From hundreds of feet away, we could hear the ball pop in the catcher’s mitt and the umpire’s strike call. A stream of passerby’s stopped to peer in, mostly for the novelty of the brief reminder of what life was like all the way back in 2019.
 
I don’t know when or if I’ll ever go to a game with my parents again. I’ve learned not to take anything for granted, so there we were, squinting through a fence to see two-thirds of the fielders.
 
I think back to when I decided to make The Twin Bill, in the snowy weeks after leaving New York City—recently unemployed, without a permanent address, and no idea what the future held. With nothing to lose, I saw the pandemic as a chance to do something I’ve always wanted to do. I knew there were people out there like myself who loved baseball and wanted to write about it, and maybe if I made a website, I might get a couple of submissions. Someone once said something about if you build a literary baseball website, writers will come.
 
And they did.
 
Within a week, I was overwhelmed and realized I couldn’t do it all by myself, so I brought on Bryan to be the fiction editor.
 
Another funny thing happened. We didn’t even ask for poetry, but we kept getting submissions. I thought we have a chance to do whatever we want here, let’s go for it, and I brought Chris on to edit poetry. Then we received comics, visual art, incredible illustrations, photos, things I didn’t even think of asking for. It was exciting to open up my email and have no idea what would be in it. I wasn’t thinking big enough.
 
We will file for nonprofit status and, hopefully through grants and donations, will be able to pay our contributors soon. We are publishing again during the Winter Meetings in early December. This is a dream for me.
 
Let’s play two.