Lots of baseball in today’s Times.
- In the Play supplement, a slide show offers tips from stars like George Brett on how hitters keep their weight back, identify pitches, hit the other way, go for the long ball (which chicks dig), adjust to right- and left-handed pitchers, adjust to the count, and prepare their swing by their little ticks and practice swings.
- In addition, Nicholas Dawidoff, author of The Crowd Sounds Happy (see below), contributes an essay on why otherwise intelligent people become enamored with players and teams and sports with which they have no other otherwise discernible connection.
- Sam Stephenson reviews Dawidoff’s book.
- Edward Levine does the same for Everything They Had, a posthumous collection of David Halberstam’s sports writings. The writer, says Levine “wasn’t a sportswriter. No insult implied, but sportswriters tend to fall into two categories: stylists attempting to turn sport into literature in glossy magazines, and reporters serving it up as news in daily papers.” He was, rather, “a different animal.” Levine complains that some of the topics are repeated. I immediately thought, well they weren’t really designed to be presented like this, all together, a notion with which Levine agrees a little farther along.
“At book length, Halberstam could use sports to trace the expansive narratives of American history that always fascinated him. This is much harder to pull off within the confines of a magazine or newspaper article. Halberstam didn’t always succeed, but it’s to his credit that he always tried to think big, even when he was writing small.”
- Also in the book section, three kids’ titles are reviewed, including Six Innings, The Big Field (by Mike Lupica), and Keeping Score.
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