Writing Worth Reading
Last updated 11 pm GMT
Writing Worth Reading
Tampa Bay Rays baseball player (and Stanford economics graduate) remembers historic day in September 2011 when his team made the playoffs. "Whether you put it into numbers or you just felt it, the odds against us were mind-boggling"
Australian writer moves to US, fails to take to North American sports. Here's what he makes of (American) football and why he thinks it reflects several distinctive American traits
If you're a Venezuelan in US major league baseball, you'd better be ready to buy some security at home. Family members get kidnapped for ransom. And so, now, might you. It happened to Wilson Ramos of the Washington Nationals
From Roth, Updike and DeLillo to Ford and Foster Wallace, an enjoyable consideration of sport in fiction. What makes American writers willing to think about sport's role in, and relationship to, wider society when others don't?
"Four criteria โ low-scoring game, quality pitchers on the mound, pitchers pitch well, and something is at stake." Enter the godfather of baseball stats, and Cliff Lee, Jered Weaver, Lincecum, Verlander et al
Ben Petrick played 240 games in major league baseball. More than 200 of those games were played after young-onset Parkinson's disease began to take over his body. He hid the effects as long as he could. This is his story
Former PR flack lifts lid on working for Boston Red Sox. What it was like to work with John Henry et al, and why Fenway's grass is so green. Good read? Yes. Reliable narrator? You'll have to be the judge of that
If you're a baseball fan, this is for you. Monumental analysis, kicking off with a look at the incomparable Babe Ruth, of what makes a MVP and why
On annual voting for baseball hall of fame. "Iโm not saddened by the possibility that Jeff Bagwell will never be a Hall of Famer. What saddens me is seeing his career reduced to a referendum on steroids or statistical analysis"
Re-evaluating principles of Moneyball, a system that shot Billy Beane to baseball fame. Do principles still work today? Yes, but not so easily. What can we learn from the world of finance? One key thing: "The lucky will appear wise"
You know how they compare different years and vintages for wine? How about trying it for baseball? That's to say, who was the best player born in each of the past 80 years, and which was the best year overall? Joe has some answers
Michael Lewis and Billy Beane discuss origins of Moneyball book and recent film. "What Lewis captures in his book โ the triumph of the highly educated over the lesser educated โ is exactly what happened in the American economy"
