Grantland so far

He actually said he wasn't a good pitcher? Why do I have a feeling that is not exactly what was said in the book.

 

I really don't remember exactly how it was written. It was the first one, I think, 30 years ago, when I was covering baseball. It was so ridiculous I threw it away and never considered his stuff again.

 

You mean "not McSweeney's or one of its subsidiaries."

http://www.believermag.com/

One day, I don't know when, there will be a great story written about Grantland, about how a middlebrow populist writer (Simmons) who devours cheap culture by the mile, teamed up with the ultimate boutique artist (Eggers) and recruited pecuniary, tunnel-visioned bloggers and paired them with Charles Pierce, ripping Penn State and the Catholic Church a new one.

I am secretly ruling for a site so unwieldy to fly for many years. It really is something. Virtually no reporting. Constant, first-person navel-gazing. Random lists and fixations on grand slam tennis. Th id of this industry.

 

I believe this says more about you than him.

 

He just wrote that Ryan is not as good as everyone thought he was, both as a pitcher and as a box-office draw. That "controversy" actually made up a portion of the Daniel Okrent SI piece that really launched Bill James to a national audience:

http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/vault/article/magazine/MAG1124493/1/index.htm

James wrote the following on Ryan in the 2001 update of The Historical Baseball Abstract:

 

So SOCALDUDE is full of shit.

 

I don't know if I would go that far. I have a lot of James stuff on my bookshelf, but not the 1981 Baseball Abstract from which Okrent apparently drew those anecdotes. It's possible he trashed Ryan more than that in the full article.

 

First Abstract was '77? Couple years in there for Mr James to have written some contrarian stuff about Ryan.

(*And still waiting for that spelling correction, which seems not be forthcoming.)

 

Uh, think that if you choose. It was just my feeling that if we're going to analyze Nolan Ryan, we'd do it by talking to Dusty Baker and Reggie Smith and Ron Cey and Bill Russell and Ken Landreaux and Pete Rose and Mike Schmidt and Andre Dawson and Tim Raines and Joe Morgan and Jack Clark and Dale Murphy and Bob Horner and Steve Garvey and Steve Yeager and Mike Scioscia ...... and not Bill James or Paul DePodesta or Dick Whitman or Rick Stain. And we'd do it by going to the ballpark and watching the games, not going to the basement and watching the computer.

 

I finally read it all, and I'm a bit underwhelmed as well. But then again, James is past 60. Everyone runs out of ideas and creative ways to express them eventually.

But today's effort doesn't diminish what James did when he was in his 30s. He was unparalleled — both as a conversational writer and as an innovative thinker about all things baseball — 25 or 30 years ago.

 

He's still a great writer when he's focused and well edited.

Whoever read (I choose my verbs carefully) this piece before it was posted should be ashamed. It's loaded with bad grammar and poorly structured sentences.

 

" " " "

And a weak premise.