Search Results for: baseball

The Last Act Of The Notorious Howie Spira

Longreads Pick

Howie hemorrhaged information about Winfield and Steinbrenner, the mafia, prison, baseball, women, clothes, the weather, his parents, his health. He jumped from one tangent to another, many of them fascinating and relevant, some bizarre, others difficult to fathom. Like the time he told me Winfield held a gun to him. Or the time he said Steinbrenner had sent him a prostitute. Even a hint of incredulity nettled him: “I know what’s been told to me in the past 22 years. That I’m the biggest scumbag in the world, that I’m worse than a pedophile, than a terrorist. I’ve made innumerable mistakes, but the only thing I don’t do is lie.”

Source: Deadspin
Published: Oct 26, 2011
Length: 44 minutes (11,134 words)

The Green Bay Packers are a historical, cultural, and geographical anomaly, a publicly traded corporation in a league that doesn’t allow them, an immensely profitable company whose shareholders are forbidden by the corporate bylaws to receive a penny of that profit, a franchise that has flourished despite being in the smallest market in the NFL—with a population of 102,000, it would be small for a Triple A baseball franchise. Of all the original NFL franchises—located in places like Muncie, Ind., Rochester, N.Y., Massillon and Canton, Ohio, and Rock Island, Ill.—Green Bay is the only small-town team still in existence. The Packers have managed not merely to survive but to become the NFL’s dominant organization, named by ESPN in 2011 as the best franchise in all of sports.

“The Green Bay Packers Have the Best Owners in Football.” — Karl Taro Greenfeld, Bloomberg Businessweek

See more #longreads about football

The Green Bay Packers Have the Best Owners in Football

Longreads Pick

The Green Bay Packers are a historical, cultural, and geographical anomaly, a publicly traded corporation in a league that doesn’t allow them, an immensely profitable company whose shareholders are forbidden by the corporate bylaws to receive a penny of that profit, a franchise that has flourished despite being in the smallest market in the NFL—with a population of 102,000, it would be small for a Triple A baseball franchise. Of all the original NFL franchises—located in places like Muncie, Ind., Rochester, N.Y., Massillon and Canton, Ohio, and Rock Island, Ill.—Green Bay is the only small-town team still in existence. The Packers have managed not merely to survive but to become the NFL’s dominant organization, named by ESPN in 2011 as the best franchise in all of sports.

Source: Businessweek
Published: Oct 20, 2011
Length: 16 minutes (4,218 words)

The Art Of Winning An (even More) Unfair Game

Longreads Pick

The secrets of Moneyball, eight years later. “The young men had heaps of fun, working crazy hours and, to blow off steam, knocking golf balls around the office, playing football among the cubicles and celebrating big wins with postgame refreshments at Boston watering holes. Then one day in 2002, a best-selling writer by the name of Michael Lewis walked into the Red Sox offices and knocked the smile right off Epstein’s face. Lewis was working on a book about baseball’s nascent information age, but Epstein wanted nothing to do with him. ‘I can’t believe Billy is letting him write this book,’ he told his colleagues. Billy Beane, Oakland’s general manager, had granted Lewis access to his front-office operations, which meant revealing how the A’s were mining information from statistical analysis, a tool used extensively at the time by only the Athletics, Indians, Blue Jays and Red Sox. ‘He’s handing out the blueprint,’ Epstein told Hoyer.”

Published: Sep 21, 2011
Length: 18 minutes (4,711 words)

Kei Igawa: The Lost Yankee

Longreads Pick

Plucked from a Japanese baseball all-star team roster in 2007 and introduced at a lavish news conference, Igawa was expected to be a staple in the Yankees’ starting rotation. He lasted 16 games, most of them regrettable outings that were sometimes spectacularly inept. Booed off the field, he was called one of the worst free-agent signings in Yankees history. After his last, losing appearance for the Yankees in early 2008, he was banished to the farm system and he has not come back.

Published: Jul 23, 2011
Length: 14 minutes (3,520 words)

The Cuban Grapevine

Longreads Pick

Somehow I’ve ended up helping to cater a party in Havana, and a burly, jovial architect called Rafael is asking me whether I’ve heard of Radio Bemba. Basically it’s the Cuban grapevine: “Bemba” is a slang word for big lips, and the expression has its origins in the way Fidel Castro communicated with his men in the 1950s when they were holed up in the Sierra Maestra building the revolution. Today, in a nation where the only official media are state-controlled, Radio Bemba has become shorthand for the word-of-mouth information network, which is by far the quickest (and often the most reliable) way to find out about anything from baseball chat to celebrity gossip to news of the latest defection to the United States.

Published: Jul 12, 2011
Length: 13 minutes (3,446 words)

Before Manny Became Manny

Longreads Pick

Hero. Cheat. Prodigy. Ingrate. Free spirit. Knucklehead. Hall of Famer. Pariah. Enigma. Manny Ramirez, one of the great right-handed hitters of his generation, who retired from baseball this month after once again testing positive for performance-enhancing drugs, was many things to many people — fans and family and teammates from Santo Domingo to Washington Heights to Cleveland to Boston. Sara Rimer, then a reporter for The New York Times, met Ramirez in 1991 at George Washington High School in Manhattan. Over two decades, she enjoyed a memorable and mystifying acquaintanceship with Ramirez.

Author: Sara Rimer
Published: Apr 26, 2011
Length: 12 minutes (3,181 words)

Gerald Marzorati: Five Longreads for Opening Day

Gerald Marzorati, a former editor of the New York Times Magazine, is an Assistant Managing Editor of the Times


“Early Innings,” by Roger Angell. (The New Yorker, Feb. 24, 1992) (sub. required)

America’s baseball belletrist here writes of how he came to love the game.

“The Silent Season of a Hero,” by Gay Talese. (Esquire, July 1966)

Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio? The author finds him in retirement, uneasily.

“The Streak of Streaks,” by Stephen Jay Gould. (The New York Review of Books, Aug. 18, 1988)

More DiMaggio, this from the renowned paleontologist and ponderer of evolution—contemplating, here, what it means to have a hot streak (i.e., to cheat death).

“Final Twist of the Drama,” by George Plimpton. (Sports Illustrated, April 22, 1974)

The boyishly witty inventor of field-level participatory journalism here is a careful observer—of everything surrounding Henry Aaron’s home-run that broke Babe Ruth’s lifetime record.

“Coach Fitz’s Management Theory,” by Michael Lewis. (The New York Times Magazine, March 28, 2004)

A piece I coaxed Michael to write—about his high-school baseball coach, and much, much more.

The Race That Is Not About Winning

Longreads Pick

I say “he” because my subject is the specific kind of boy who takes up running, and he is very different from the girl who is his counterpart. This boy, whom I know well, is just not good at any other sport. He may have tried baseball, but could not throw; he may have tried soccer, but could not kick. He is not coordinated or strong or big. So he runs. No American eight-year-old thinks it would be cool to be a distance runner someday. If he becomes one, it is not the realization of a dream, but the acceptance of reality.

Source: The Believer
Published: Mar 28, 2011
Length: 14 minutes (3,721 words)

Going…Going…Gone

Longreads Pick

Since his final at-bat, on September 26, 2007, Barry Bonds has been living in near total seclusion. He’s made only a handful of public appearances and declined repeated requests to be interviewed for this story. But from more than thirty conversations with his friends, former teammates, agents, and baseball insiders, a portrait of Bonds in hiding emerges. He’s at an inflection point between his baseball past and an uncertain future. On many days, he enjoys his involuntary retirement and the privacy it affords him. But part of Bonds still desperately wants to play. He looks around, sees a sport that’s lousy with known juicers, and can’t comprehend why no one will make him an offer, even for the league minimum of $400,000 a year.

Source: GQ
Published: Apr 1, 2009
Length: 18 minutes (4,552 words)