For other Warm Thoughts for a Cold Winter, click here.

As I’ve written here before, Joe Posnanski is one of my favorite baseball writers. I’m hardly alone in that opinion; in fact, it seems redundant to sing his praises because so many people have already done so. He pens lengthy, digressive columns, yet his work is such a pleasure to read, it never seems all that long. A bit like Bill Simmons, his writing takes full advantage of the freedom afforded by the internet. Except he’s a hundred times the writer Simmons is, and doesn’t fill his columns with the same 5 pop culture references over and over again.

Posnanski is great when reacting to news–his recent assessment of the whole Mark McGwire situation at SI.com was one of the best takes I’ve read, if not the best. But he’s even better when tackling general issues, as he did last week in a speech given to Sports Turf Management. The talk was ostensibly about playing surfaces in baseball and how they’ve changed in the last 30 years or so. But of course, it was about a lot more than that.

The speech was transcribed and posted to Posnanski’s blog last Friday.  It may not sound like the most interesting subject in the world, but he could write about lint weave a compelling story around it. Read it and you shan’t be disappointed.