Posnanski Becomes a Blogger
A couple of weeks ago, I stumbled upon a new blog by Joe Posnanski — the best baseball writer in the country – that was started to promote “The Soul of Baseball”, his book about Buck O’Neil. At first, Posnanski stayed close to the idea of promoting his book, but as he says:
I started the blog for two reasons.
(1) Because I love writing about baseball.
(2) To raise some awareness for my new book: “The Soul of Baseball: A Road Trip Through Buck O’Neil’s America.”OK, I just lied. Well, I didn’t exactly lie. I just put those two reasons out of order. See I’m really not too good at the self-promotion thing.
Lately, though, Posnanski has been churning out great articles about everything from Gil Meche to Curt Schilling to Barry Bonds to the tenured announcers of baseball towns. I think Joe’s beginning to discover the freedom that sportsbloggers have to write about what they love. He’s gone from posting just four times in the first three weeks to a post every day for the past week and a half.
Posnanski’s comparison of Ambiorix Burgos to Michigan J. Frog left me laughing, but it’s dead-on. Here’s my favorite excerpts:
You know the story. Guy finds a frog who sings (“Hello! Ma baby”) and dances. The man sees great riches (you can tell this because dollar signs float over his head) and he invests whatever meager savings he has to put on a show. And then the show begins, and the frog just sits there. After a while, the man puts the frog in a box, buries him and many years in the future another guy finds the singing frog, dollar signs float over his head … and so on.
…
Burgos can throw just about as hard anyone in the world. He has a split-fingered fastball can dive like Liston in Lewiston (hey, I love Ali and think he would have won the fight anyway. But I don’t care what ANYONE says … that was a flat dive). You watch Burgos pitch and, yeah, those dollar signs will float over your head too.
And then the lights turn on. The people show up. And Burgos stops singing.
…Meanwhile, the Mets are entranced by the stuff. Their jaws drop when just hearing his fastball. My buddy Vac is thinking the Mets got themselves one heck of a steal. I only have this to say: “Hello! Ma baby. Hello! Ma honey …”
That’s just fantastic. Check out Posnanski’s stuff at the KC Star, too. When someone can make Royals baseball that interesting, that’s talent. He’s easily my favorite sportswriter today, and I highly recommend anyone who’s unfamiliar with his writing to make a point to start reading his columns for the Star, and his blog.