This week (Dec. 20) in Sports Illustrated, plus ESPN, The Magazine‘s “Movie Spectacular”

Actually, with the way it works, the Dec. 20 issue was last week (Tim Linceum graces the Dec. 27 year-end issue)), but there’s a goodly amount of baseball items in “The Year in Sports Media” issue that I didn’t want it to go by unremarked upon.

The robots are taking over! Steve Rushin writes about sportswriting software (shiver).
The SI 2010 Movie index grid cites “The first interview with Sandy Koufax in a decade, in Jews and Baseball“ as the most memorable/classy moment of the year. Other categories include “already forgotten” and “crass.”
Ken Burn’s Tenth Inning is chosen as the high “Brow Beat” TV item (“low” is Hard Knocks)
Craig Robinson’s Flipfliopflyball.com gets the nod for high “Brow Beat” in the digital category (low are tweets by Hoss Radbourn)
Josh Wilker‘s Cardboard Gods get the spotlight treatment for books. The Official MLB Opus Marquee Edition is deemed the high “Brow Beat”

Meantime, I also forgot to mention the Nov. 29 issue of ESPN The Magazine, which was quite fun as it considers the connection between sports and movies.

Sticking to baseball (of course):

“Coming Attractions” — baseball movies we to which we can look forward include the on-again, off-again Moneyball. In development: Keepers of the Pinstripes, a kids’ movie about Lou Gehrig’s ghost; The Million Dollar Arm (“Indian teens Rinku Singh and Dinesh Kumar Patel, novices who won a reality TV pitching contest and signed with the Pirates, get The Rookie treatment); “Untitled Bradley Cooper Dramedy: Will Cooper’s golden touch translate to this dramedy about an injured pitcher who’s forced to move into a retirement home after he’s reassigned to the minors?”
A profile of Chelcie Ross, who appeared as the junk-ball pitcher in Major League, as well as Notre Dame coach Dan Devine in Rudy and a “townie who organizes the resistance to coach Norman Dale” in Hoosiers.
Seattle Mariners pitchers Garret Olson and Felix Hernandez channel John Travolta and Samuel L. Jackson in an homage to Pulp Fiction.
A flow chart on “How to make a sports movie”: 1) select a sport; 2) pick a plot; 3) protagonist played by Kevin Costner, Dennis Quaid, or a horse (only choices); 4) antagonist (pick two); 5) supporting characters (pick 3); 6) climactic moment; 7) heartwarming outcome.
The best baseball movie you never heard of: The 1956 live TV version of Bang the Drum Slowly, starring Paul Newman in the Michael Moriarty role and Albert Salmi as Robert DeNiro. The worst baseball movie “you shouldn’t ever hear of” — The Bad News Bears Go to Japan.

As an aside, no baseball books were among the finalists for the PEN/ESPN Award for Literary Sports Writing. The winner was A Terrible Splender: Three Extraordinary Men, a World Poised for War, and the Greatest Tennis Match Ever Played, by Marshall Jon Fisher.