Tag Archives: joe posnanski

Amazin Avenue, Baseball

Amazin’ Avenue Annual’s Potent Lineup

AAACover.jpgI’m contributing a few pieces to the Amazin’ Avenue Annual, a Mets-centric stat-friendly companion to the upcoming baseball season which should be out by March 1 (in both print and Kindle-y versions). I was already excited about this, but I got doubly-triply-quadruply excited when the outside contributors were officially announced yesterday, and it’s a fearsome lineup indeed.

Who, you ask? Why, Ken Davidoff from Newsday. Deadspin editor emeritus WIll Leitch. SNY blogger/sandwich enthusiast Ted Berg. Greg Prince and Jason Fry from Faith and Fear in Flushing, my favorite Mets blog I don’t write for.

But best of all, the book will include Joe Posnanski. Yes, that Joe Posnanski, the best baseball writer there is by a country mile. SI.com scribe, author of The Machine, and, again, the best baseball writer there is. His blog posts are always a treat to read, in spite of–actually, because of–their enormous lengths. Kinda like what Bill Simmons would be like if he dialed down the douche from 11 to 0 and excised the Karate Kid references.

Knowing that I’m going to have work in the same book as Joe Posnanski is at once humbling and terrifying. It’s like living on the same street as a famous architect; you feel like you have to keep your house in tip-top shape if Frank Lloyd Wright is just down the block.

So if my prose won’t get you to purchase this tome, I hope some of the aforementioned heavyweights will. And also Joe Posnanski because JOE POSNANSKI. C’MON ALREADY.

In conclusion, Joe Posnanski.

Warm Thoughts for a Cold Winter

Warm Thoughts for a Cold Winter: The Turf Speech

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.

Baseball, Literary Endeavors

Profiles in Righteousness: Joe Posnanski

If you’re a fan of baseball, or a fan of sports, or just a fan of good writing, do yourself a favor and start reading Joe Posnanski’s blog at SI.com. Or his own blog, which publishes a lot of his SI stuff plus some other tasty bits.

Posnanski belongs to that rare breed of baseball scribe who isn’t allergic to numbers and doesn’t hate things invented within the last 50 years. And he is also a joy to read, prose-wise. The only other writer I’d put in his category is Tim Marchman, who–near as I can tell–remains unemployed now that the NY Sun has folded, which is a shame. (Marchman’s joblessness, I mean. The defunctory-ness of the NY Sun is neither here nor there for me.)

Prime example: A recent post wherein he argues that just because a particular stat wasn’t considered important during a player’s career (or didn’t exist), that doesn’t mean said stat isn’t important. In Posnanski’s opinion, new stats (or renewed focus on older stats, like OBP) recognize that certain things are not random or unimportant aspects of a game, but skills that should be recognized as such.

He’s been around for quite a while, most notably as a columnist for the Kansas City Star. In fact, I’m pretty sure I’m coming late to the Joe Posnanski Is Awesome Party, but I figured I’d pass it along. My first New Year’s Resolution for 2009 is to berate people for doing things I should have been doing all along.