An official scorekeeper lost count at a softball game last week between highfalutin periodicals Harper’s and The Paris Review.
It was a nail-biter until the third inning, with Paris Review up 2-1 against a Harper’s Harpies squad outfitted in jerseys pronouncing “F—k the Internet.”
But when “a string of ‘Parisian’ homers” put eight more runs on the board, the scorekeeper “took ill” and the “mercy rule” was invoked — meaning nobody kept count.
“It’s impossible to say whether the game stayed quite as close throughout,” sniffed a Harper’s fan.
“What’s not in question, however, is the style and spirit with which the Harpies finished out the proceedings.”
A spy said of the Paris Review’s crew that also pummeled The New Yorker two days earlier: “Their team was so good-looking and so coordinated, I could hardly believe any of them actually knew how to read. Let alone know what to do with a semicolon.”
A Parisian heavy hitter intimidatingly tweeted last week: “It’s ‘Bring Your Bat to Work Day.’ ”
On Tuesday they face Vanity Fair, which “tends to be pretty competitive.”