It’s that time of year again, time for the new crop of baseball books to hit the shelves.  The Joe Torre/Tom Verducci book made a splash several weeks ago, and Selena Robert’s forthcoming biography of Alex Rodriguez is sure to make the best-seller list when it comes out in mid-April.  But there are a bunch of other interesting titles set to drop this spring as well, including “As I See ‘Em,” Bruce Weber’s book about professional umpires; “Heart of the Game,” S.L. Price’s account of Mike Coolbaugh, the minor league coach who was killed by a foul ball in 2007, and “Odd Man Out,” Matt McCarthy’s evocative and entertaining look back on his brief minor league career with the Angels.

McCarthy pitched at Yale, played for a year with the Angels, and then moved on to a career in medicine.  He’s now an intern at Columbia Pres uptown, just a stones throw from where the New York Highlanders once played.

Last week, Sports Illustrated ran a long excerpt from “Odd Man Out”, and on March 3rd at 6:00 p.m., Matt will  be at The Corner Bookstore (1313 Madison Avenue at 93rd street) to talk about the book.  I was fortunate enough to get together with Matt recently and talk about his life in professional baseball.

Enjoy.

BB: John Ed Bradley wrote a terrific memoir about playing football at LSU called “It Never Rains in Tiger Stadium.” His experience might have been unique, but he describes the bond between his teammates almost like something soldiers feel. But I don’t get that same sense of being a team in baseball, even in college. Did you?

MM: Minor league baseball is a unique environment. It’s hard to be a good teammate when your primary goal is to leave the team- to be promoted to a higher level. And I was as guilty as anyone. If I pitched two scoreless innings and our team lost, I was relatively happy. No one makes the big leagues solely because they were on a winning minor league team. College baseball couldn’t be more different. We rooted for each other and still do. I still get a dozen texts every time Craig Breslow (my teammate at Yale who now pitches for the Twins) gets a big strikeout.

BB: Can you talk about the arrested development of the clubhouse culture. How do boys become men in that world?

MM: See: Kotchman, Tom. The Angels are very fortunate to have Kotchman. He could easily be a big league manager but instead he’s chosen to coach a rookie ball team. He’s able to influence players who’ve just signed very large (and very small) contracts and instill in them a culture of winning and for that the franchise owes him a large debt of gratitude. I don’t know if there are many guys like him still around, but I hope there are. That lucky charm of his- a large black dildo with two baseballs glued to the base- is something I’ll never forget. And the same is true of his Andrew Dice Clay impression. I’ve been out of baseball for six years and I still think about the Dice Man. He’s mentioned in recent interviews that he’s planning to retire from coaching sometime soon to become a full time scout. As I say in the book, I hope he reconsiders.

BB: Some of your teammates busted your chops about coming from Yale and assumed that you had a privileged life set up for yourself as a fallback in case baseball didn’t work. While they were wrong about you being on any kind of gravy train, you did have another career to turn to. How aware were you of that while you played?

MM: When you’re on the bottom rung of the minor league ladder, you can’t help but be aware of how expendable you are. That life after baseball is not just a possibility, but a reality. I was surrounded by guys who were coming to that realization and it was interesting to see how they responded. The realization came to me rather quickly- the first pitch I threw as a professional resulted in a bases-clearing double. I’m not sure if I ever recovered.

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One of the reasons I enjoy reading Joe Posnanski’s blog is because he relishes talking about sports the way fans do. He takes bar room topics, often in list form, and riffs, with reason and humor and a sense of fun. Who was the best so-and-so, what was the greatest such-and-such. The enthusiasm he shows for this kind of banter is what makes Pos so appealing–and he’s as well-liked a sports writer as I’ve ever met. The sabr-numbers crowd dig him and the mainstream guys like him too.

I was in Pos-mode the other day when I read Chris Ballard’s SI cover story on LeBron James. King James is only 24, a man-child, physical-mental freak of historically great proportions. The guy is twenty someodd pounds shy of 300, for crying out loud. I had no idea he was that big. And he’s so fast. He could play strong safety in the NFL.

Along with Kobe Bryant, James is the greatest player in the game and he’s only getting better. So I thought, when we talk about the greatest basketball players in the post-Jordan Era, it’s got to be Shaq, who you can’t really compare with Jordan because of the position; Kobe, who has won three titles and is certainly great, but not at Jordan’s level, especially off the court in terms of mainstream popularity and influence; and James.

Of course the league has been filled with other iconic players since Jordan level, including Allen Iverson, Tim Duncan and Kevin Garnett, but not ones whose appeal crossed over to a wider audience. They are just hall of famers in the game. Nobody has reached the level Jordan attained. Jordan followed the greatestness of Magic and Bird seemlessly and he brought it to a crescendo that was peerless.

I thought about guys on that level—Jordan and Tiger Woods, Babe Ruth—as I read an old GQ article by the novelist William Kennedy. In 1956, Kennedy was a kid reporter working for the Albany-Times Union when he interviewed Louis Armstrong, who was in town for a gig. Kennedy went up to his hotel room and talked with him for an hour and a half. He wrote a short nothing piece on it for the paper but saved his notes.

My awe and reverence for Louis continued to grow through the ensuing years, and somewhere in the late 1970s I conducted an after-dinner poll as to who was the most valuable person who had ever lived, and Satchmo won, with five votes. William Faulkner got four, Michangelo three, Beethoven, Muhammad Ali and Tolstoy two each, and Dostoyevsky and Busby Berkeley one each.

…He was a giant in his youth: the first major soloist in jazz, the man to whom every last jazz, swing, modern jazz and rock musician after hism has been and is indebted, some via the grand-larceny route. Music has changed radically since the seminal days of jazz, but Satchmo’s achievement has not been diminished. No one has superseded him in jazz eminence the way Crosby superseded Jolson and Sinatra superseded Crosby and the Beatles superseded Elvis, and I will never know who or what really superseded the Beatles.

Who else, in sports, in the arts, in popular culture, is on this level?

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Unlike many of my contemporaries, I did not grow up reading Bill James. I wasn’t familiar with James’ Baseball Abstracts until my cousin gave me his collection in 2002, but in many ways, Bill James is the Internet–the outsider, the guy writing in his basement, intellectually curious, irreverent, superior, caustic and funny. The guy who doesn’t have to actually face the athletes, who really doesn’t have any interest in talking to them.

There have been other writers who played a big part in influencing the current generation of baseball writers–from Tom Boswell and Peter Gammons to James’ protogee Rob Neyer and Bill Simmons.

But for me, the early role model was Roger Angell because he was a writer and a fan. Here is Angell discussing his first baseball assignment for the New Yorker in the spring of 1962 (from a wonderful interview conducted by Jared Haynes “They Look Easy, But They’re Hard,” originally published in Writing on the Edge in 1993):

I was in my forties–I was forty-one–and I knew enough to know that I didn’t know a great deal about baseball, even though I was a true-blue fan. I’d followed baseball all my life. But I was wary of talking to players; I felt nervous about that.

…And also, although it was not a conscious plan, I wrote about myself, because I was a fan. It set a pattern for me. I am a fan, I refer to myself as a fan, and I report about my feelings as a fan, and nobody else, to my knowledge, does that. It’s not great thing, but those old restrictions on reporting seemed to say that you can’t put yourself in the piece and you can’t betray emotion. It’s funny, because most of the beat writers are just as much fans as the rest of us, or more so. If you sat up there and didn’t care about baseball in some personal way, it would be a deadly assingment, I think, year after year.

Angell is an editor first and a writer second. So who influenced his approach to writing about baseball?

A great model for me was Red Smith, who was a model for almost every sportswriter. The great thing about Red Smith was that he sounded like himself. His attitude about sports was always clear. He felt himself enormously lucky to be there in the pressbox. He was not in favor of glorifying the players too much–Godding up the players, in Stanley Woodward’s phrase. But was Red Smith in every line. You knew what he had read and what his influences were.

I don’t try to be a literate sportswriter; I try to be myself. It’s as simple as that. Everybody’s got to find what their voice is. You’ve got to end up sounding like yourself if you’re going to write in a way that’s going to reward you when you’re done. If you end up sounding like somebody else, you’re not going to be any good. You won’t get anywhere. Readers are smart. They will pick up whether the tone is genuine or not. Tone is the ultimate thing writers have to think about. You could write on a given subject–a ball game or a national crisis or a family crisis–in twenty or thirty different ways. You only have to pick what you want people to make of this.

Words to live by.  Angell has often said that writing and baseball may look easy but they are both extremely hard. I try to never forget this because neither gets easier with practice.  I can’t get away from the reality with writing because I do it regularly, but it’s more tempting to lose track of how hard it is to play the game.  

I’ll always be grateful to Angell for making this clear.  And for setting a wonderful example of the writer as fan.

For most of us, death will not announce itself with a blare of trumpets or a roar of cannons.  It will come silently, on the soft paws of a cat.  It will insinuate itself, rubbing against our ankle in the midst of an ordinary moment.  An uneventful dinner.  A drive home from work.  A sofa pushed across a floor.  A slight bend to retrieve a morning newspaper tossed into a bush.  And then, a faint cry, an exhale of breath, a muffled slump.

Pat Jordan, “A Ridiculous Will”

My father died on this day two years ago.  He was at home with his wife.  They were getting ready to watch their favorite TV show.  He had just eaten his favorite pasta dish.  He slumped over in his chair and that was it.  He officially lasted until the next day but really that was when he left us.

I always imagined that he would have a dramatic death.  He was a big-hearted and volatile man.  He was unafraid to get into it with, well, virtually anyone.  I saw him kick the hub cap off a moving vehicle that had cut us off on West End Avenue and 79ths street, and was with him when he pulled a vandal out of a parked car.  I thought he’d die in a pool of blood.  I worried about it constantly.  But he left quietly.

I think about him less now.  Of course, I still think about him but I am not consumed with it as I was for the first year after he died, when his absence was acute.  Almost every block in the city, certainly on the Upper West Side where he lived, holds a memory, some happy, others not so much, of the old man.  I miss his stories, I miss asking him questions about the theater and the Dodgers and Damon Runyon.

But I don’t miss how tough he was on me, or the fact that even as an adult, I felt anxious around him.  I don’t miss how competitive he was with me, and I don’t miss worrying about his financial state.  When he was alive, I don’t think there was a time when I wasn’t afraid of him, even if it was on a subtle or subconscious level. 

I feel relief now that he’s not around. I loved him very much and the feeling was mutual.   He was proud of me, he was proud all of his kids, as well as his neices and nephews.   He and I buried the hachet long before he died and I tried my best to accept and love him for who he was not what I wanted or needed him to be when I was a kid.  Like most parents, he did the best that he could.

But I don’t compare myself to him these days.  I am my own man. I remember his warmth and compassion, his laugh and his righteous indignation, and that for all his flaws he was a good man.  I’m proud to be his son.

Last Friday night, I had the pleasure of listening to George Kimball read from his new book at Gelf Magazine’s Varsity Letters reading series.  (Here are two video links: One and Two.) The book,Four Kings: Leonard, Hagler, Hearns, Duran and the Last Great Era of Boxing is a must for anyone interested in the fight game.  

Kimball was there for it all and conveys the excitement these four champions brought to the game in this expertly reported book that is written in pleasing, straight-forward prose.

For a sampling of Kimball’s work, check out his archive at The Sweet Science.  For example, here is his story on the Hagler-Hearns brawl: 

Nearly a quarter century later it remains a high point of boxing in the latter half of the twentieth century. Some knowledgeable experts have described it as the greatest fight in boxing history – which it probably wasn’t, if only due to its brevity. But its ferocious first round, which to this day remains the standard against which all others are measured, was undoubtedly the most exciting in middleweight annals, and one of the two or three best opening stanzas of all time.

What did Bob Arum know that the rest of us did not? Already in the midst of an age in which it had already become obligatory to sell every big fight – and many smaller ones – with a catchy slogan, the promoter who had already staged (with Don King) the Thrilla in Manila, as well as served as the impresario for Evel Knievel’s ill-fated attempt to jump the Snake River Canyon, christened the 1985 matchup between Marvelous Marvin Hagler and Thomas Hearns simply “The Fight.”

This Friday, Kimball will be interviewed by none other than Pete Hamill (who wrote the foreword for the book) at the  Barnes and Noble in Tribeca (97 Warren street).  7 pm, ya heard? 

Again, anyone with a remote interest in boxing should brave the cold and check out what promises to be a riveting chat.

There used to be a spot in the Times Square subway station where dance crews used to set up and perform for the tourists.  It’s right as you get off the Shuttle train to Grand Central.  Now, an electronics store is there instead, but they still draw a crowd because a famous fight is always playing on the flat screen TV in their display window.  The first couple of times I noticed a crowd huddled around, the Ali-Forman fight* was playing. 

Nothing brings men together like a fight.

Last weekend, I saw them playing the great Hagler-Hearns bout.  One guy watching served as the commentator.

I remember seeing the fight when I was a kid, and being electrified by the fury of violence.  Here it is, brief, savage, and bloody:

Round One:

Round Two:

Round Three:

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I was at the final game at Yankee Stadium and wrote a bonus piece for SI.com on what the night was like for Ray Negron:

It was just before one o’clock in the morning on Sept. 22, but the scoreboard clock was frozen at 12:21. The last game at Yankee Stadium was over, Sinatra had finally stopped singing New York, New York, and organist Ed Alstrom was playing Goodnight, Sweetheart. The home team had won 7-3 in a game that meant nothing in the standings but everything in a deeper, gut-felt way. The Yankees would not be going to the postseason for the first time since 1993, yet they had drawn 4.3 million fans, including another capacity-plus 54,640 on this night. And now, as the last of them drifted out of the ballpark, it felt like closing night for a hit Broadway show.

Now it was just the clean-up crew swinging into action and a select group of others clinging to the night — players and their families, reporters, radio and TV personalities, cameramen, front office workers, the grounds crew and cops, lots of cops. People hugged and slapped hands and talked and laughed. Players scooped up dirt and grass and put them in paper cups and Ziploc bags. Grown men had their pictures taken at home plate, on the mound and sliding into second. It was like Never-Never Land — everyone was a child. Why would anyone want to go home, knowing they were the last precious few to soak in the Stadium? They stayed, stuck between history and the wrecking ball, until the head of security announced that it was time to leave.

Ray Negron was out on the field, right where he belonged, with the players and sportswriters. Ray had seen them all — from DiMaggio and Mantle to Reggie and A-Rod. He was there when they came to play at the Stadium and he was still there when they left.

Looking for that ideal last-minute holiday gift for the sports fan in your life?  Look no further than The Best American Sportswriting of 2008, edited by Bill Nack, who is one of the finest sports writers we have.  

Nack is a first-rate reporter, a dedicated craftsman, and a true storyteller.  He came up with Newsday in the late Sixties and wrote about horse racing.  His experience in the field culminated in the seminal book, Secretariat: The Making of a Champion.  In 1979, Nack joined Sports Illustrated where he excelled at the bonus, or take-out piece, writing beautifully about Willie Shoemaker, Keith Hernandez, Rick Pitino, Bobby Fischer, Rocky Marciano, and, of course, Secretariat, to name just a few. (Nack’s best work is compiled in the stellar collection, My Turf.)  

Nack now works for ESPN.com.  Roger Ebert, who has been friends with Nack since they went to college together, wrote a wonderful essay about his friend last week.  If you love words, and care about language, you must check this out.  It could be the highlight of your week. 

I recently caught up with Bill recently to chat about The Best American Sports Writing 2008.

Bronx Banter: As a writer, how do you approach a project like this?

Bill Nack: I just look for the stuff that I liked the most. The stuff that I thought was the best written and best told stories. I read 70-80 stories that Glenn Stout sent me. I got it down to 35-40 and then it became really tough to pair it down. The last ten were very difficult.

BB: Did you work with Glenn or alone?

BN:  I did it on my own. There were a couple of pieces that I had questions about but not many. He left it up to me totally. I trusted him to give me what he thought were the 70 best and after that I felt it was up to me to find the ones that I thought were the best. And occasionally, I’d call him up and say, “What do you think of this one?” Some to me were slam dunks, in fact most of them were. Jeanne Marie Laskas, SL Price. The only problem that I had was in trying to get a mix–of traditional sports with obscure sports. And I was very conscious of the mix.

BB: Did you also want to mix-up bonus pieces and newspaper stuff?

BN: Yeah I did actually. I wanted to make sure there was an adequate representation of newspaper columns which are a dying species. And when I read Rick Telander’s piece on Doug Atkins that was a no-brainer. Same thing on Rick Reilly’s piece. The piece on Bo Jackson, by Joe Posnanski, that was kind of a column, that to me was an easy one. That raised a problem because I wondered if we should have two Bo Jackson stories in one book. And I really liked the ESPN.com piece by Michael Weinreb. I loved both of them. And what I liked about them together is that they were completely different takes on the same guy. I think I did consult with Glenn on that one. I said, “Do you mind if we have two Bo Jackson stories?” And he said, “No, no, they are both very different.”

BB:  I actually like having them back-to-back for just that reason.

BN:  The one thing that I noticed in the first batch of stories that Glenn sent me was that there was no humor. It was very serious. The poor woman who was lost in the wilderness and saved by her dog, the Terry Fox run across Canada, the world’s tallest tree, Scott Price’s piece on the poor coach who died from a foul ball.  And I looked at it and thought, “God, some of this stuff is really gloomy.” I happened to be a subscriber to Golf Digest and Dan Jenkins is a regular contributor. I started looking through my old issues and ran across Dan’s piece about trying to play golf as you grow old. I started laughing as I read it, because he’s one of the funniest writers that’s ever written about sports. I finished it and thought this has got to go in there. So that’s the one humorous piece that I found. I also liked it because I’m 67 and play golf. And there are a lot of older men who still play, so I thought it had a wider appeal. It was not just funny, which I needed, but it was something that a lot of guys could relate to. You don’t have to be 67, all you have to do is be 50.

BB: Was there a sense with the Tom Boswell column on Clemens and the Hank Aaron story that you wanted to get in pieces that were timely?

BN: Oh, definitely. I did think of that. I thought people would like Tom Boswell’s piece because it is a comment on Clemens.

BB: I thought the Aaron piece was phenomenal.

BN: I showed some of the pieces around before I made my final choices. Some people loved the Tommy Craggs thing and other people said, “You can’t put this in there. Who is this guy?” I just laughed. But they were bent out-of-shape because Craggs is criticizing the press in his piece. Who is this guy to criticize the press? I said, “I have no idea and I don’t care who he is.” I thought he had a very interesting, sharp take. And when I read it I thought, you know there is a lot of truth in this. I might not agree with everything, but I thought there was a lot of truth in it. I had friends in the piece that he criticized but I ran it anyway.

BB: The collection has some good young talent, like Wright Thompson, who has made the series several times now.

BN: I thought that was a terrific piece he did on Beijing. Really well done. Almost personal in a way. He didn’t just write a piece. He got you into it with vivid imagery. I’ve never met Wright Thompson, I’ve only read a little bit by him but I thought, this is really good. I didn’t know anything about him, but like Tommy, I liked his work and was happy to put it in this book. If you want to know the bottom line, I didn’t consider personalities, I didn’t consider names, I just put in people who contributed to making this the best possible anthology I could put together.

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Relax, all right? Don’t try to strike everybody out. Strikeouts are boring. Besides that, they’re fascist. Throw some ground balls – it’s more democratic.

Crash Davis

Of course Greg Maddux is retiring tenth on the all-time strikeout list (3371). Still, when I think back on Maddux in twenty, thirty years from now, my guess is what I’ll remember the most about him is a dinky ground ball to second base. That was the signature out of his prime, a crappy grounder, a squibber that rolled harmlessly to a waiting infielder. Or maybe a little jam shot pop-fly.  Or yeah, even a strikeout, the late-breaking fastball tailing back over the plate leaving hitters with their asses out, hands up and bats still on their shoulder.

In his prime, you rarely saw good swings or heard solid contact against Maddux.

There will be a host of tributes to Maddux this week. Here are the early birds.

Joe Posnanski:

I never presumed to think with Maddux or have a deeper understanding of why he was so good. I just loved watching him pitch, loved the whole scene, loved seeing the frustration batters would show, loved the way umpires over the course of a game became willing co-coconspirators, loved the way catchers would just let the ball tumble into the glove without moving, loved the way Maddux would fidget when he didn’t have all of his stuff working, loved it all. He was Mozart, I was Salieri, and no I couldn’t reproduce it, no I couldn’t get close to it, but I felt like I could hear the music.

Over at SI.com, Tom Verducci writes:

The magic show is over. I dislike absolutes, but of this I am sure: Greg Maddux is the most fascinating interview, the smartest baseball player and the most highly formed baseball player I have encountered in 27 years covering major league baseball. There is no one alive who ever practiced the craft of pitching better than Maddux.

…I will miss watching him pitch. In his prime, Maddux never received enough credit for the quality of his stuff. Too many people equate power with stuff, but Maddux’s fastball, at least back when he was throwing 90 mph, had ridiculous movement — late, large movement. Think about this: he dominated hitters with no splitter and a curveball that was no better than high-school quality.

That’s how good were his fastball and changeup. It wasn’t just location.

Here is Verducci’s 1995 feature profile on Maddux for SI.

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By Glenn Stout

It was a nothing game.

September 24, 1992. A Thursday night. The Yankees in fourth place and the Tigers in sixth, neither of them close to the Blue Jays, or, apparently, with any chance of ever getting close to the Blue Jays or anyone else atop the division for at least a few more years. A young Scott Kamienicki vs. an aging Frank Tanana, one-time hard thrower whose fastball had come and gone and left behind a pile of guts and guile.

We were down from Boston, my girlfriend and I. She’d recently moved back in with me after getting a grad degree from Columbia and living and working in Mount Vernon for a few years, and we had some business to take care of in the city.

It had already been a funny day. Taking a bus somewhere downtown I’d seen Liza Minelli poking around outside some antique bathroom fixture store. Down by City Hall I’d used of one of those high tech public bathrooms that had cost 50 cents and gave itself a shower afterwards, like something from the Jetsons. Then I saw Rudy Giuliani walking down the street.

We went to the game – a nice early fall night. Only about 12,000 people were in the Stadium, so we had pretty good seats, probably the best seats I’d ever had for a major league game anywhere at that point – the main boxes, not too high up, almost dead on a line with the left field foul line. We might have paid twelve dollars a ticket, which also would have been the most I’d ever spent on a baseball ticket at the time.

I saw Nicolas Cage. He had better seats, right behind the plate, but still 20 or 30 rows up.

There wasn’t a whole lot of care on display on the field that night. Mattingly played hard, as always, and cracked a couple of doubles, and this new kid in center field, Bernie Williams, had a good night. But almost everyone else one either team – Charlie Hayes, Rob Deer, Tartabull – was packing it in; you could tell.

Seventh inning. Yankees ahead 4-0. Tanana throwing changeups off changeups and the occasional big sloppy curve – nothing much over eighty miles an hour. The crowd was already starting to file out.

Leading off, Gerald Williams. Rookie. I remember liking Gerald more than Bernie at first. He moved like a ballplayer, while Bernie moved like an antelope still wet from birth.

Gerald Williams hadn’t done much so far – a fly out, a strikeout. But now Tanana, thirty-nine years old and in his nineteenth year of major league baseball, gave him a pitch.

Williams didn’t miss it. I’ll never forget the trajectory – almost straight down the line, a little hook to it like a golf shot, that one bright spot against the black going smaller…

And Gerald Williams watching it, and walking, slow toward first before, barely, breaking into a trot. His first major league home run.

I was watching him saunter toward first when I heard someone yelling, not just to get someone’s attention, but REALLY yelling, I mean angry “I’m gonna ruin your face” kind of mad.

It was Frank Tanana. Pissed. Chewing Williams’ ass out every step he took all around the bases for standing there and showing him up. And Williams did speed up – not much – just enough to let Tanana know he heard but at the same time not so much to let him think he had been intimidated. And Tanana kept yelling.

Baseball-Reference tells me that Pat Kelly followed with a walk and Bernie Williams, this time running like an adult antelope, tripled, knocking out Tanana, and the Yankees went on to win 10-1, but to be honest, I don’t really remember much else about the game.

But I’ve got a great excuse. You see, when I was down by City Hall earlier that day, my girlfriend and I had applied for a wedding license. We went back the next day and got married in a ceremony that took precisely 27 seconds.

Or about as long as it took Gerald Williams to run around the bases.

Glenn Stout is the series editor of the Best American Sports Writing and the author of many books, including Yankee Century.

Remember when Mickey Rourke was going to be the next big thing? 

He had nice turns in Body Heat:

and Diner:

Some people swear by The Pope of Greenwich Village (I am not one of them): 

But as soon as Rourke became a star, he became less interesting, predictable, a flat-joke, and then he wasn’t a star long, unless you account for his runaway fame in France (and there’s no accounting for that, is there?).  He left Hollywood and became a boxer and then returned to the movies, mostly B-level action movies made for DVD.

Now Rourke is back in the mix. The critics liked him in Sin City. And you can just smell an Oscar nomination for him in The Wrestler, his new feature, which looks to be a downbeat, arty riff on Rocky.

Pat Jordan profiles Rourke (His Fists Are Up and His Guard is Down) in today’s New York Times Magazine:

You meet Mickey, you can’t help liking him. He rescues abused dogs! He cries a lot: over his stepfather’s supposed abuse; the loss of his brother to cancer and his dogs to old age; the failure of his marriage to the actress Carré Otis. He admits he destroyed his own career, because, as he puts it: “I was arrogant. . . . I wasn’t smart enough or educated enough” to deal with stardom. He is candid about the people he has crossed paths with: Nicole Kidman is “an ice cube”; Michael Cimino, the director of “Heaven’s Gate,” “is crazy” and “nuts”; and the producer Samuel Goldwyn Jr. is “a liar.”

So what if he cries at the same moment in the same story in every interview? So what if his candor sometimes sounds like the bad dialogue from one of his many bad movies (“I have no one to go to to fix the broken pieces in myself”) or that his self-deprecation seems culled from the stock stories of so many fading actors (“I was in 7-Eleven, and this guy says, ‘Didn’t you used to be a movie star?’ ”)? So what if he seems disingenuous, at best, when he says he can’t remember that critics nominated him one of the world’s worst actors in 1991 (“I probably would have voted with them”) or even making a terrible movie that went straight to video, “Exit in Red,” in 1996 — despite the fact that the love interest in that movie was then his wife?

Mickey Rourke is, after all, an actor. The roles he has played and the life he has lived have so blurred one into another in his mind’s eye that even he doesn’t seem to know when he’s acting or when he’s being real. He has spent his entire adult life playing not fictional characters but an idealized delusional fantasy of himself.

Some of my favorite magazine pieces by Pat Jordan are about his past–his failed baseball career, and his childhood growing up with a father who was a professional grifter.  Here’s a fine example of the latter, from the SI swimsuit issue in February, 1987.

Bittersweet Memories of My Father, The Gambler:

I remember the day I first became aware of the pervasiveness of my father’s gambling in our lives. I was eight years old and just beginning my love affair with baseball, which was encouraged by my parents. We were Italian-Americans and my mother loved the Yankees—DiMaggio, Rizzuto, Crosetti, Lazzeri, Berra, Raschi. She hated only Eddie Lopat and, later, Whitey Ford (my secret idol) with their pink, freckled Irish faces. (Today, approaching 80, my mother has a photograph of Dave Righetti taped to the mirror in her kitchen.)

My father was a Yankee fan, too. Only for him they were less a team he could point to with ethnic pride than one he could confidently lay 9 to 5 on.

One Sunday afternoon in July, my father invited three of my “aunts” and “uncles” to the backyard of our suburban house for a cookout. None of them was, in fact, my real aunt or uncle—they were my father’s gambling cronies—and, even more significantly, my father was not a cookout kind of guy. He took no pleasure in neatly mowed suburban lawns, especially if he had to mow them.

…The afternoon of my father’s cookout was hot and sunny. My “uncles” stood around the barbecue fireplace under the shade of a maple tree and sipped Scotch. They made nervous small talk while simultaneously listening to a Yankee-Red Sox game coming from a radio propped on the kitchen windowsill. My father was bent over the barbecue, lighting match after match and cursing the briquettes he was unable to ignite. He was a dapper little man who dressed conservatively—gray flannel slacks, navy blazer—and he always wore a tie, even around the house. He was very handsome, too, in spite of his baldness. He had pinkish skin, youthful eyes and a neatly trimmed silver mustache. He truly fit the part, at least in his dress, of a suburbanite entertaining guests. Even if those guests did look as if they had just stepped out of the cast of Guys and Dolls.

…My mother, a dark, fierce little birdlike woman, and my “aunts” sat around a circular lawn table that was shaded by a fringed umbrella. They were sipping Scotch, as well, while playing penny-ante poker—deuces and one-eyed jacks wild—and chatting. I stood behind them and followed their play of cards.

Soon I got bored with the adults and I lost myself in the baseball game. When DiMaggio hit a home run for the Yankees, I shouted, “Yaa!” and clapped my hands. Suddenly, I was aware that everyone was looking at me. My father’s face was flushed. I caught my mother’s eye. Her lips were pursed in a threatening smile. She called out sweetly, “We musn’t root for the Yankees today, Sweetheart! Uncle Freddie is down 50 times on the Red Sox.”

For those of you who are so inclined, I hope you took the Jets and the over today.

“My motto was always to keep swinging. Whether I was in a slump or feeling badly or having trouble off the field, the only thing to do was keep swinging.”

Hank Aaron

Head on over to the Sport Magazine Gallery and check out Pat Conroy’s 1974 cover story on Hammerin’ Hank Aaron.

The stunning fact about Aaron’s assault on The Babe was that he came on so suddenly. For years, Willie Mays was the leading pretender to the throne. Willie made a hard run for it until time sent its battalions up against his flesh. Those of us who loved Willie watched our hero backed against the outfield wall by the caprices of old age, by that semi-death of extraordinary athletes who dance too long, then stumble home in a last graceless waltz that is the cruelest, most public humiliation of sport. Years ago, the world knew that The Babe was safe from Willie. But in 1971, a 37-year-old man hit 47 home runs and the chase was on again. The next year Aaron hit 34. Last year he hit 40 and at the end of the season was staring eyeball-to-eyeball with Babe Ruth.

…It was…in many ways, one of the most boring sports stories of the century. Every sportswriter in the country searched the rills and slopes of his brain hoping to find the different angle, the fresh approach or a new way of looking at Hank’s assault on Babe Ruth’s record. They asked Hank every conceivable question. They interviewed every person who had known Hank in the past 40 years, from Vic Raschi, who surrendered Hank’s first home run, to Aaron’s daughter, sons, sisters, brothers, mother, father, managers, coaches, players and friends. There was something about the obscenely crowded press conferences with Hank that made a reporter feel like a participant at an orgy. After each game last season, the flock gathered to ask Hank the same watered-down questions and Hank, salivating on cue, would render the same colorless, good-natured answers he had delivered the day before and the day before that. The chase ate up a lot of good words, and left a lot of semi-burned out reporters staring into the outfield lights.

And if you missed it, do yourself a favor and check out Tommy Cragg’s wonderful 2007 piece on Aaron for Slate:

Because he was so outwardly bland in personality and performance, Aaron seemed to take on character only in relation to things people felt strongly about: Willie Mays, Babe Ruth, civil rights. On his own he was, and remains, an abstraction, someone whom writers could only explicate with banalities like “dignified.” Our perception of Aaron today stems almost entirely from his pursuit of Ruth’s 714 home runs, in 1973 and 1974, during which time he faced down an assortment of death threats and hate mail. By then, Aaron had shed his reticence and begun to speak out against baseball’s glacial progress on matters of race. Still, very much his own man, he seemed to dismiss some of the loftier interpretations attached to his home-run chase. “The most basic motivation,” he wrote in his autobiography, I Had a Hammer, with Lonnie Wheeler, “was the pure ambition to break such an important and long-standing barrier. Along with that would come the recognition that I thought was long overdue me: I would be out of the shadows.”

No matter. Aaron was fashioned into something of a civil rights martyr anyway. “He hammered out home runs in the name of social progress,” Wheeler recently wrote in the Cincinnati Post. And Tom Stanton, in the optimistically titled Hank Aaron and the Home Run That Changed America, dropped what has to be the most unlikely Hank Aaron analogy on record: “[P]erhaps it’s The Exorcist, the period’s biggest movie, that provides a better metaphor for Hank Aaron’s trial. … Hank Aaron lured America’s ugly demons into the light, revealing them to those who imagined them a thing of the past, and in doing so helped exorcise some of them. His ordeal provided a vivid, personal lesson for a generation of children: Racism is wrong.”

Small wonder that, upon eclipsing Ruth, the exorcist told the crowd, “I’d just like to thank God it’s over.”

The just-completed series against the White Sox had some interest beyond the impending closing of Yankee Stadium thanks to Chicago’s fight for the AL Central, Mike Mussina’s still-active quest for 20 wins, the return of Phil Hughes to the Yankee rotation, and the major league debuts of three Yankee prospects last night. This weekend’s series against the Orioles has none of that. These last three games will be about Yankee Stadium and nothing else. With that in mind, here are the three other opening and closing dates in the Stadium’s 86-year history:

April 18, 1923 – the first game at Yankee Stadium, Yankees beat the Red Sox 4-1 behind Bob Shawkey, who scored the first run at the new park on a single by third baseman Joe Dugan in the fourth inning. Ruth followed Dugan with a three-run homer, the Stadium’s first. Second baseman Aaron Ward had picked up the park’s first hit in the previous inning.

Sept. 30, 1973 – the final game at the original Stadium, Yankees lost to the Tigers 8-5 as Fritz Peterson and Lindy McDaniel combined to allow six runs in the eighth inning. Backup catcher Duke Sims, in his only start of the year, hits the last home run at the old park in the seventh. Winning pitcher John Hiller gets first baseman Mike Hegan to fly out to center fielder Mickey Stanley to end the game.

April 15, 1976 – the first game at the renovated Stadium, Yankees beat the Twins 11-4 with Dick Tidrow picking up the win with five shoutout innings in relief of Rudy May and Sparky Lyle getting the save. May gave up the first hit and home run in the remodeled Stadium to Disco Dan Ford in the top of the first. Twins second baseman Jerry Terrell, who led of the game with a walk, scored the first run ahead of Ford. The first Yankee hit was delivered by Mickey Rivers in the bottom of the first. The first Yankee home run at the redone park would come off the bat of Thurman Munson two days later.

The relocated St. Louis Browns first played at the Stadium as the Baltimore Orioles on May 5 and 6 of 1954, losing to Eddie Lopat and Allie Reynolds by scores of 4-2 and 9-0. The O’s first visit to the renovated stadium came in a three-game weekend series starting on May 14, 1976. The O’s took two of three in that series, beating Catfish Hunter in the opener. The first batter in that game was Ken Singleton, who struck out looking, but the next six Orioles delivered hits off Hunter, among them a two-run homer by O’s center fielder Reggie Jackson (!) as the O’s cruised to a 6-2 win behind Ross Grimsley.

For the curious, the action depicted in the Merv Rettenmund card pictured here occurred on August 9, 1970 in the seventh inning of the first game of a Sunday doubleheader. With the O’s leading 1-0 behind Jim Palmer, Rettenmund led off the seventh with a double off Fritz Peterson. Andy Etchebarren then hit a hot shot to third base that Jerry Kenney either booted or bobbled, allowing Etchebarren to reach and Rettenmund to advance. The photo on the card freezes the action as Kenney, ball in hand, checks Rettenmund at third base. The O’s would go on to score three unearned runs in that inning, but the Yanks got two in the eighth and two in the ninth to tie it, the latter two on a single by Roy White after Earl Weaver had replaced Palmer with Pete Richert. White would later end the game in the 11th with one out and Horace Clarke on first base by homering off Dick Hall to give the Yankees a 6-4 win.

Finally, here’s an account of the last game at the original Stadium from Glenn Stout’s outstanding Yankees Century:

The Yankees ended the season on September 30, closing down old Yankee Stadium to accommodate the scheduled renovation. In the final week of the season, the Hall of Fame hauled away a ticket booth, a turnstile, and other memorabilia. Anticipating souvenir takers, the club had already removed the center-field monuments and a hoard of equipment scheduled to follow the Yankees to Queens.

The club hired extra security to head off bad behavior, but the crowd of 32,328 arrived at the Stadium in an ugly mood and packing wrecking tools. Disappointed at the late season collapse, banners urging the Yankees to fire [manager Ralph] Houk ringed the park.

The game was only a few innings old when it became clear that souvenir hunters weren’t going to wait. In the outfield and the bleachers fans turned their backs on the game and started demolishing the park. The Yankees took the lead over Detroit but lost it in the fifth [sic]. When Houk came to the mound to change pitchers, exuberant fans waived parts of seats over their heads like the angry they had become.

As soon as Mike Hegan flied out to end the 8-5 loss, 20,000 fans swamped security forces and stormed the field. The Yanks had plans for objects like the bases, but the mob had other ideas. First-base coach Elston Howard scooped up the bag for a scheduled presentation to Mrs. Lou Gehrig, but he had to fight his way off the field, clutching the base like a fullback plowing through the line. Cops stood guard at home plate to make sure it went to Claire Ruth, but a fan stole second base, and third was nabbed by Detroit third baseman Ike Brown. Some 10,000 seats ended up being pulled loose.

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Mannish Boy.

Barry Zito is the focus of Pat Jordan’s latest profile for the New York Times Magazine. Another stellar job by Jordan. I always figured Zito was a superficial guy, a pretty boy phony, but he comes off as an interesting dude:

Zito told me his pitching problems were caused by the fact that he hadn’t been himself the last few years.

"I wanted to be more ‘professional,’ " he said. "This new guy. Because of the Contract, I wanted people to know I was serious about pitching, not this flaky guy. I allowed the seriousness of things to creep into my mind. The city. The Contract. The fans. My new teammates. I wasn’t a blue-collar Oakland guy anymore."

…He was particularly stunned by the vehemence with which the media and fans greeted news of the Contract. And then he was stunned by the fans’ booing his failed pitching. "Actually, I think the San Francisco fans have been pretty good to him," Righetti said. "If he was in New York, the fans would be off the chart." But Zito wasn’t used to being booed and criticized. His flaky persona had deflected such criticism for years, as if people felt it was unfair to be too harsh on such an innocent sprite. But he’s not a sprite anymore, and his critics are no longer so forgiving. Which is why he has assumed a new persona: the abused guy who can no longer be himself with people. "But it requires so much energy to be inauthentic," Zito said. Which is the point. Zito was never truly "authentic." The free-spirited kid was always something of a construct. Now that he’s a man, it’s time for "serious things," like the apparently premature demise of a once-brilliant career. This is what Zito is struggling with. But how to rewrite the narrative of his life?

"I never thought I was invincible at everything, just baseball," Zito said. "At 30, I became aware of why things happened." He now saw his parents’ psychobabble — "Don’t expect to struggle" — as something that could lead not only to awareness but confusion. "Zen is a double-edged sword," he said. "It guarantees nothing. When I went 11-1, it worked. Next year it won’t. Zen helps you solve some problems, but it’s better at creating problems. Thinking too much is good for life, but not functional for baseball." He’s searching for that mind-set all great, intelligent pitchers have. Compartmentalize. Complexity for real life, simplicity for baseball.

Can an athlete be too smart for his own good? I think so. Being bright might make a jock a more well-rounded person, but also less of a performer. Reminds me of Billy Beane in Moneyball, realizing that he would never be a great player after rooming with Lenny Dykstra who was "dumb" in all the right ways.

"Bill Heinz is a walking contradiction of the stereotype of the phlegmatic Teuton. He is emotional and demonstrative. He can sink into depressions so deep they would give a sandhog the bends. His highs are several stories high. As cityside reporter, war correspondent, sports columnist, freelance journalist, and novelist, he was and is a dedicated craftsman and a penetrating observer who never gives half measure.

‘Bill,’ his doctor once told him, ‘if you don’t stop trying to be the greatest writer in the world, you’re going to kill yourself.’

‘I’m not trying to be the greatest writer in the world,’ Bill said, ‘I’m only trying to be the best writer I can be.’"

Red Smith, from the Introduction to Heinz’s collection, American Mirror.

W.C. Heinz, one of the finest journalists this country has ever produced, died earlier this year. A few months ago, a tribute was held in Vermont in his honor, and Adam White wrote a fine piece on the event for the Bennington Banner. In it, he quotes Bob Matteson, who was the editor-in-chief of the Middlebury College newspaper when Heinz was sports editor in 1936-37.

"He could spot make-believe – or phoniness – right away in a person," Matteson said. "And he wanted no part of it."

White continues:

Therein would seem to lie the key to Bill Heinz’s writing, his true method for distilling parable from the mundane. There is a sort of universal admission among those who were close to Heinz that he could be averse to, even dismissive of, certain people and personality types – but there is equally compelling evidence that such an attitude stemmed from his heightened sense of intuition regarding truth. Without such intuition, it is unlikely that he could have even recognized – let alone captured – the majesty and romance that pervades so much of his work.

"The secret is love," (Jeff) MacGregor said. "It’s his empathy, [though] not for individuals; I don’t know that [Heinz] even liked people. His genius was his empathy for the situation that we all share, that common cause of human enterprise. The truth that [Heinz] wrote about is the struggle that we all face, every day, when we get out of bed – and how good a fight we put up before the end of the day."

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We all know about pitchers who can write: Pat Jordan, Jim Brosnan, Jim Bouton. But there are also a handful of writers who can pitch too. Historian Glenn Stout used to pitch in an over 30 league. Kevin Kerrane pitched semi-pro ball too. And veteran New York sports writer Bob Klapisch has been pitching since he was in college (he used to pitch against Ron Darling when he was at Columbia and Darling was at Yale). For the past couple of years I’ve been meaning to go watch Klap pitch in a game, thinking it would make for an interesting story.

Unfortunately, Klap’s playing career came to an abrupt end last week when he was struck in the right eye by a ground ball. In a recent e-mail, Klap explained what happened:

I was pitching Thursday night in Parsippany NJ for the Morris Mariners, one of the two semi-pro teams I play for. (Hackensack Troasts is the other). Batter hit a hard comebacker which took a wicked bounce over my glove. It was one of those old-fashioned configurations, with a bowling alley-like strip of dirt connected the pitching mound to home plate. So the ball was traveling on dirt, not grass, and must’ve hit a rock. It flew up towards my face, like a stone skipping on a lake. Caught me flush in the right eye.

Had to have emergency surgery that night. It was just my right eye that was damaged. I can do everything (read, write, play with the kids) with the left. The right suffered a partially detached retina, and damaged cornea, which will require a transplant. I also have multiple fractures which will require plastic surgery. The whole process starts on Monday when I go under for repair of the retina. After 3-6 months, the doctors say I’ll have my vision back. Worst case, 20/200, best case 20/50. It sure beats the alternative, which is what I’m experiencing now – a black curtain over the right side of my face. Very strange.

My baseball career is over, so my goal is to play catch in the backyard with my kids. I am determined to make that happen.

Man, talk about a bad break. What a humbling way for the universe to tell you it’s time to stop playing ball. Klap does seem to be taking it exceedingly well, however. And he’s one tough cookie.

Still, it must be a scary spot for him to be in. So here’s sending best wishes to Klap. Let’s hope that his surgeries are a success. Hang in there, Klap, you’re the man.

A few months ago I invited myself to Ray Robinson’s apartment, ostensibly to get his list of ten essential baseball books, but really so I could lay eyes on his library of sports books.  Robinson, an author (Iron Horse) and longtime magazine editor, grew up on the Upper West Side, near Columbia.  When he was a kid, Robinson got a delivery job at a local liquor store, and he found himself making stops over at Babe Ruth’s apartment at 110 Riverside Drive. He’d say, ‘Thanks keed,'” Ray told me.  “He called everybody ‘keeed,’ because he couldn’t remember anyone’s name.  And he would invariably honor me with a couple of dollar bills.”

Ray and his wife, Phyliss were wonderful with me.  We chatted in the living room of their comfortable New York apartment for about an hour and Ray shared his selections of favorite baseball books with me.  I poked my nose through his collection and as I was about to leave, Ray said, “Oh, would you like to see my scrapbooks?”

“Sure, I would.”

Ray picked-up a bright orange plastic bag from the bottom of the bookshelf, the kind you’d get from the local Chinese take out.  He pulled out two weathered books, practically falling apart, one dated 1932, the other, 1933.  They were filled with pictures of players from every team in baseball.  Ray cut-out images mostly from The New York Sun, The Saturday Evening Post, assorted baseball magazines as well as baseball cards.  Then, along with some friends, he’d scout the hotel lobbies where the out-of-town teams stayed, to get autographs.

The books are lovingly, obsessively assembled, filled with small notations.  Ray expressed some embarrassment when I complemented him on how wonderful, how personal the books are. He dismissed his sketch of the Babe as being awful, but I liked it and his wife did too.

Ray asked if he should sell the books–after all, he’s got a couple of Lefty Groves in there, a Honus Wagner, Dizzy Dean.  Phyliss said that she didn’t think that was a good idea. I quickly agreed.

“You can’t sell these,” I said.  “They belong in a museum or for your grandkids.”

As I looked carefully through the two books, Ray kept wondering if he should sell them.  I said, “No way,” but when I left I felt foolish.  Who am I to say that he shouldn’t sell them?  There is probably some serious money in those two books.  Still, they feel too personal to part with.  They are not kept under a glass case, they are in a plastic bag on the shelf, a secret baseball treasure on the Upper East Side.

Yesterday, the New York Times featured a short essay by Ray Robinson about his scrapbooks.

Check it out and dig what I was able to see:

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Eliot was one of the great characters in baseball.
–Jim Bouton

 Eliot Asinof, the accomplished author most famous in baseball circles for Eight Men Out, his classic narrative of the 1919 Black Sox Scandal, passed away yesterday at the age of 88. Asinof enjoyed a long, varied career, that saw him through the dark days of the blacklist, and later found him flourishing as a screen writer, journalist–he was a frequent contributor to the New York Times magazine in the late ’60s and also wrote for Sports Illustrated–and author (he wrote about civil rights in Bed Stuy, Brooklyn, the television industry as well as many novels).

One of his novels, The Fox is Crazy Too, about a con man/master criminal who pretends to be insane to escape responsibility for his crimes, was found alongside a handful of books and a postcard addressed to Jodie Foster in John Hinckley Jr’s hotel room the day Hinckley shot President Ronald Reagan. Asinof was once married to Jocelyn Brando, Marlon’s sister, and he also dated Rita Moreno.

This morning, I received the following e-mail from Roger Kahn:

Eliot was a fine and gifted friend, with a remarkable work ethic and an enduring anger at what he perceived to be injustice. Aside from his writing, quite an aside, he was a good ball player, a good carpenter, a good chef, and an excellent pianist.

He was an Army lieutenant during World War II, sent to lead a platoon on Adak Island. Since a Japanese invasion of the Aleutians seemed imminent, this was not exactly a plum assignment. "You’ll love it on Adak," his colonel told him. "There’s a beautiful woman behind every tree."

As Eliot told me more than once, "When I got there, I found there are no trees on Adak Island."

Ralph Blumenfeld, writing in the New York Post, once described Asinof as "balding and muscular, a cross between Ben Hogan and Leo Durocher on looks." After graduating from Swarthmore college in 1940, Asinof played in the Phillies farm system for a few years before being drafted. "My bonus was a box of cigars," Asnioff told Blumenfeld, "and I didn’t smoke."

In 1955, Asinof published a baseball novel, "Man on Spikes," roughly based on the career of a friend as well as his own stint in pro ball. In a recent e-mail, John Schulian told me: 

You could smell the sweat of honest labor on Asinof’s work.  If you’ve read "Eight Men Out," you know what I mean.  But there’s something about "Man on Spikes" that touches me even more profoundly, for here was a guy who’d kicked around in the bushes describing just how back-breaking and heartbreaking that life can be.  I never met Asinof, but I like to think that he carried what baseball taught him to his grave.

In the original New York Times review, John Lardner wrote:

Eliot Asinof, in giving his reasons for writing "Man on Spikes," says, "The folklore and flavor of baseball fascinated me then [when he was playing ball in the Philadelphia Phillies’ farm system, some years ago], and it still does today." That sounds a little ominous; but Mr. Asinof, I’m gald to say, has not let his sense of the game’s folk-meaning involve him in a Bunyaneque or a comic-Faustian or a dream-symbol treatment of baseball. "Man on Spikes" is a plain and honest book, the first realistic baseball novel I can remember having read."

Years later, in a piece on the All-Star team of baseball fiction, Daniel Okrent wrote (also in the Times):

In print for about an hour and a half in the middle 50s, Asinof’s book is about a young man of endeniable talent, whose career is thwarted and eventually destroyed by the arrogance of the men who ran baseball back then, and the servitude players were forced to live in. It is a harsh book, unsettling and, finally, depressing. It is also perhaps the truest baseball novel ever written.

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My cousin Jonah is an avid Met fan. He and his wife live in Brooklyn and they are great movie-lovers too. But they do not have cable TV, so Jonah listens to virtually every game on a small, old-fashioned transistor radio. When he’s out and about, he has a small, white earphone plugged into one ear to keep up on the action. When I’ve asked why he doesn’t just get cable like every other “normal” person he says that he doesn’t like the idea of being held captive in front of the television. The thought of it is oppresive to him, even in the age of Tivo.

He can do as he pleases and take the radio with him. I admire him for this quality. I can’t imagine doing such a thing, not with Lord Sterling as the Yankee play-by-play announcer–that would be too much to bear. Still, baseball on the radio can be a wonderful experience for the listener and many of my favorite childhood baseball memories are made up of evenings secretly listening to the Yankee broadcast while I was supposed to be asleep.

I got to thinking about all of this when I read a short essay, “Recalling the Joy of Watching Baseball on the Radio,” which is featured in the collection Diamond: The Baseball Writings of Mark Harris. Most famous for his Henry Wiggens trilogy, Harris doesn’t argue that radio is superior to television, just that they each offer distinct pleasures:

Radio left things to the brain, to the imagination, and to fantasy. On radio we saw the whole baseball field because we saw it in our minds through wide-agnled fantasy. We knew no limits upon our vision. We were our own camera. Pictures arose in our imaginations from the merest hints of things. Our minds were tubes that seldom blew.

This is not to say that radio was better than television, or that one age of mankind was better than another. But that radio was significantly different from televsion, and not always less efficient, cannot be denied. Radio was awe. The awe produced by remoteness…Television reduces awe.

The last bit reminded me of Nicholas Dawidoff’s new memoir, The Crowd Sounds Happy. In it, Dawidoff describes following the Red Sox of his childhood on the radio. Just yesterday, Dawidoff had a compelling piece in the latest edition of Play:

Recently I turned 45, which I think of as a mortal age for a baseball fan; by now, with the rarest exceptions, you are older than every major leaguer. What I notice at midlife is that the passion doesn’t abate; it simply changes. Thinking of the Red Sox as heroes was an innocent fantasy and, for that reason, a seductive one, but adulthood meant finally coming to terms with ballplayers as real people. That wasn’t so difficult in our time of heightened public scrutiny. We wanted to know them, and now we know them too well. Much of it is the money, the millions they earn while most of us are struggling with the rent. Our pastime is a big, mercenary business, and we’ve learned that players will deform themselves with steroids, cheating mortality and their opponents in an effort to stay forever young and powerful. Those of us who are offended by steroids may feel that what’s most unpleasant is that we can’t look at a juiced physique and still think, That could be me.

Athletes are often amazingly unformed as people, and much as I retain the naïve, nostalgic longing for them to be good in all ways, when they aren’t it helps to exercise a little circumspection. I can do that, because the older I get, the more I see that the fun of it is not the results but the process. What’s magical now about baseball is the continuity of having these splendid performers there for me month after month, year after year. I didn’t savor the Red Sox’ long-awaited World Series victory as much as I enjoyed the growing possibility that they could win. These days, I try not to know too much about the players. I want to care — and by being more distanced, I find I still feel close to them.

I recall having a conversation a few years ago with a couple of Baseball Prospectus writers. They wanted to know as little as possible about big leaguers, at least about their personal lives, because they didn’t want that to get in the way of what they were watching on the field. I can appreciate that. Having worked in the movie business, and to a lesser degree, in the world of sports, I understand what it is like to be meet a favorite actor or director only to find that they are lacking (or worse). I think it is critical to separate the artist (or the athlete) from their art. At the same time, I have a curiosity bordering on desire to not only want to know more about my favorite jocks and artists but also a childlike need to like them, to know that they are good people. As if their personality has anything to do with their gift.