The Gist

An Outsider’s Take on America’s Game

For 15 years, Tabitha Soren followed a group of baseball minor league draft picks with a camera. The results are stirring.

A photo from Tabitha Soren’s Fantasy Life.

Tabitha Soren/Aperture

Listen to Episode 714 of Slate’s The Gist:

Tabitha Soren is not a natural baseball fan. She got interested when her husband, Michael Lewis, was working on his book Moneyball. As Lewis became obsessed with teaching his readers another way to watch the game, Soren focused on showing people how to see the players in a different way: as fallible and broken people who sacrifice their bodies for a chance to play in the major leagues. The result is Fantasy Life, a 15-year span of photographs of a group of minor league draft picks for the Oakland A’s.

In the Spiel, yeah, we’re having a hard time understanding this whole “unmasking” business, too.

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