By Dennis D’Agostino From Keepers of the Game 2013 In the tradition of Jerome Holtzman’s No Cheering in the Press Box, enjoy this excerpt from Keepers of the Game: When the Baseball Beat Was The Best Job On The Paper concerning the exploits of battlin’ Dick Young:...
By Alex Belth Deadspin December 2, 2011 George Kimball hung upside down some seventy feet in the cold Manhattan air, still in need of a cigarette. Well, the doctors had said smoking would kill him, hadn’t they? The previous autumn, they had found an inoperable...
By Alex Belth The Classical February 2014 They came to Ted Williams the way those eight ill-fated adventurers came to Everest, thinking they could scale it, conquer it, reduce it to something mortals could comprehend. John Updike almost made it to the top when he...
By John Schulian Deadspin March 11, 2013 It was almost endearing how an ink-smudged, deadline-addicted newspaper editor of yore would squint through the smoke from his cigarette and ask a bright young man why the hell he wanted to write sports. An editor like that was...
By John Schulian Bronx Banter July 8, 2011 George Kimball was blessed with the kind of voluble charm you find in an Irish bar, and, brother, let me tell you he’d been in a few. No amount of drink, however, could rein in his galloping intelligence. It was as pure a...
By Jennifer Briggs The Dallas Observer June 4, 1992 I was 22 years old and the first woman ever to cover sports for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. Up until then, my assignments had been small-time: high school games and features on father-daughter doubles teams and...
By Alex Belth Bronx Banter September 22, 2012 The greatest stretch in New York sports came in 1969–In 70. It started when the upstart Jets won the Super Bowl, continued that fall when the previously hapless Mets won the World Series, and was capped off the following...
By Warren Leight and Charlie Rubin The Village Voice January 17, 1989 NEWS ITEM: Young dies in September ’87 When I first arrived here, I took one look at the place and I felt… well, let down. I figured Heaven should be a playground filled with stickball-playing kids...
By Jared Haynes Writing on the Edge Fall 1992 Roger Angell has been a fiction editor for The New Yorker since 1956 and has contributed to the magazine for close to fifty years. He is best known for his pieces on baseball, written for the magazine’s “The Sporting...
