Joe Posnanski on Baseball

The Sports Illustrated columnist says the best sports books tell human stories – and tells us why nostalgia is intrinsic to baseball

If someone had just arrived from outer space – or, as in my case, from Europe – what would you say if they asked: What is it about baseball that so captures the popular imagination?

To me, baseball feels like the most literary of American sports. I think that’s largely because of the pace: It’s a fairly slow-moving game – at times a very slow-moving game. There’s a pastoral sense to it. It’s outdoors, it starts in the spring, it ends in the fall. It feels like a rebirth every year. There’s just this wonderful feeling about it, which is why people have written very poetic things about it.

Also, among the sports here in America, baseball is the one that has the greatest history. It goes back well over 100 years. Football, basketball and hockey don’t really go back that far. There are all sorts of myths about the beginning of baseball, how it started, and how it connected to American history. All of these things make it something that has interested writers for a very long time. I don’t know if it has influenced the greatest writing, but certainly some of the best writing about sports has been about baseball.

What do you think it is that makes for good baseball writing?

It’s probably the same things that, for me, make good writing in all areas. It’s the description, it’s the narrative, it’s the story. With baseball, you have 162 games a year – it used to be 154 games a year. No other sport plays so often. They play almost every day throughout the spring and summer. Because of that, there are vast amounts of events and games and moments and stories. You can be a bit overwhelmed by it. Every year, around this time, people and managers start talking about how “baseball is a marathon and not a sprint”. It’s a long season and you shouldn’t get too caught up in today. I think the best baseball writing really captures that, this long march from beginning to end.

It captures the real American stories behind baseball. The greatest story in American sports history is the story of Jackie Robinson. When he broke the colour barrier in 1947, in many ways, for us, it had to be a baseball story. Some of the great characters of all time – Babe Ruth, Ted Williams, Lou Gehrig – it’s almost like they had to be baseball, because of the sport, because of America’s connection to it. The best baseball writing is the writing that best captures the enormity of the sport.

The Boys of Summer

By Roger Kahn

Buy

Let’s start with The Boys of Summer, by Roger Kahn, as it ties in with what you’ve been saying. One review says: “To say that this is the best baseball book ever written would be doing it a disservice.”

I don’t think there’s any question that The Boys of Summer has always been larger than a baseball book. On the surface, at least, it’s about the 1952, 1953 Brooklyn Dodgers – their triumphs and their inevitable failings. They were good enough to get to the World Series, but not good enough to win. But they were a great team, and Jackie Robinson is a prominent part both of the story of the book, and of the team as a player. But it’s so much larger than that, because it’s really a story about Roger Kahn and his father.

The first half of the book is written somewhat chronologically, about those two seasons, and Roger Kahn’s own place in them. He was a young reporter, just learning how to become a writer, and all of this was happening around him. Then, in the second half of the book, he goes back and revisits the players 20 or so years later. There’s real depth in every element of the book, to my mind, as a reader. It touches on things that are much larger than sports.

It’s quite a sentimental, bittersweet book, isn’t it – because he does revisit them when they’re all over the hill?

Yes. I’ve heard Roger Kahn say that the quintessential story of sport is the fact that great athletes die two deaths. They die the first death when they no longer play their sport, and then they also die, of course, like all of us do. Their second death is, in many cases, much much later. Roger Kahn goes back to see Jackie Robinson, who was this extraordinary lion of a player – but at the end, by the time he sees him, is having troubles with his son. He’s come crosswinds a bit with the civil rights movement. And Jackie Robinson is one of the players on that team who died young as well. So there is this tremendous bittersweet nature to the book, which is a big part of it. There’s a humanity to the book. There’s this exciting baseball part in the first half and then this bittersweet part of it in the second half that is, in many ways, even more touching.

Do they end up doing fairly drab things later in life?

They do in many ways. One is working in a bar; one is working in construction. (This wouldn’t necessarily be the case today, since baseball players make so much more money.) But in other ways they were almost heroic. They had this glorious past and now they’ve come back into society, into civilisation. It’s really very interesting to see how these great players are now living their lives. Some are living it with more success than others. But that effort to try to be ‘normal’ – for lack of a better word – I found to be really touching. I didn’t find it to be heartbreaking at all.