By David Maraniss From Clemente: The Passion and Grace of Baseball’s Last Hero 2006 There was something about Clemente that surpassed statistics, then and always. Some baseball mavens love the sport precisely because of its numbers. They can take the mathematics of a...
By Alex Belth SI.com September 4, 2009 BRONX, N.Y.—I asked the first guy I saw if he knew Chuck, the counterman at a local Jewish Deli who collapsed and died on one of the nearby handball courts six years ago. We’re in Van Cortlandt Park, in the West Bronx, where...
By Alex Belth Bronx Banter August 20, 2003 Jane Leavy, author of last year’s smash hit, Sandy Koufax: A Lefty’s Legacy, is on a roll. Not only is Koufax due out in paperback this September, but Perennial (a division of HarperCollins) has issued a paperback edition of...
By Hank Waddles Bronx Banter September 25, 2009 You probably don’t know Arnold Hano. How could you? You live in a world of bullet points and exclamation points, a place where sportswriters aspire either to the pomposity of ESPN’s “Sports Reporters” or to the cacophony...
By Peter Richmond GQ May 2001 One by one, day by day, they’d glide to the witness stand, this procession of improbable women, a spangled harem of them, drifting into the courtroom and out again, leaving the scent of their perfume and the shadow of their glitter and...
By Nicholas Dawidoff From The Crowd Sounds Happy 2008 I acquired a clock radio of my own. It was a Realistic Chronomatic 9 model, low-built and squared-off at the corners like a shoe box, with a faux-oak plastic cabinet, chrome and clear-plastic control dials, and...
By John Ed Bradley From It Never Rains in Tiger Stadium 2007 You should’ve seen my father’s arms. He didn’t lift weights or do push-ups or exercise them in any way, and yet they were packed tight with muscle. When I was a boy and he lifted his highball in the evening...
By Alex Belth Bronx Banter July 28, 2003 The author of Moneyball was in Boston to throw out the first pitch last Friday night. (David Halberstam, eat your heart out.) A week earlier, Michael Lewis was in New York, putting the finishing touches on the press tour for...
By Alex Belth Bronx Banter March 31, 2003 I was lucky enough to meet Buck O’Neil, the legendary Negro League ballplayer, nine years ago when I was working as a production assistant on the Ken Burns documentary, Baseball. I escorted him around town before a screening...
By Lucy Sante For The University of Chicago Press 2009 The Parker novels by Richard Stark are a singularly long-lasting literary franchise, established in 1962 and pursued to the present, albeit with a 23-year hiatus in the middle. In other ways, too, they are a...
By Todd Drew Bronx Banter November 7, 2008 The memories will not stop. Sometimes they come in the middle of the night and you have to walk. So you head down five flights to Walton Avenue. You pass the spot on East 157th Street where a batboy once found Satchel Paige...
By Lucy Sante From Give Our Regards to the Atomsmashers! 2004 In a corner of my office, on top of a bookcase, lies a hunting horn—a sort of bugle, curved in the manner of a French horn. It has occupied a place in my inner sanctum wherever I’ve lived since childhood....
