Great sports writing - by Thompson, Norlander, Keown & Chen

Four pieces of excellent recent sports writing included one on the World Cup, one the NBA draft and two the Oakland A's.

The World Cup piece was by Wright Thompson for ESPN with "Costa Rica 1990 squad's special bond" and it was just really cool work that showed what a team can mean to people, as shown through a powerful story of the team flying back home and seeing mirrors down below sending a message of appreciation.

For the CBS Sports website, Matt Norlander wrote "Isaiah Austin wins the night at the NBA Draft and starts a new life" and provided great in-depth reporting on the riveting details around Austin learning of his Marfan Syndrome diagnosis, ending his basketball career before he could begin it as a professional.

The other two pieces of really good sports writing to note here were on the Oakland Athletics with Tim Keown for ESPN The Magazine providing "How Scott Kazmir came back" on the starting pitcher and Albert Chen for Sports Illustrated writing "In Oakland, Brandon Moss emerges as unlikely star for Athletics" for the SI website a month ago and then expanding that into the longer (and not yet posted online) feature "Business As Usual" from the June 23 issue.

Great sports storytelling - writing by Joe Posnanski & video segments from ESPN

Two completely different sets of recent pieces struck me as excellent sports storytelling in columns by Joe Posnanski for the NBC Sports website and ESPN E:60 video segments.

The Posnanski columns were "Don't Call it a Comeback" a couple of weeks ago on Michael Phelps and his return to competitive swimming and "The Oakland Way" about this year's A's team. It's not surprising by any means to see it from Posnanski, but some interesting and insightful stuff from both pieces.

The ESPN videos were both really well done with the first "Dominic Moore: Coming Home" on the New York Rangers forward who several years ago lost his wife to cancer.

The second video was "Qatar's World Cup" about the migrant labor building facilities in for the 2022 World Cup. From the employment system controlling the laborers to their horrible living conditions and all too frequent deaths while in Qatar, it's a revealing and important piece.

Well done and interesting sports stories - by Davis, Sneed, Knapp & Adelson

There's a few recent sports stories to mention here that struck me for different reasons.

From SB Nation Longform came two excellent features with "The Prospect" by Brandon Sneed and "She Is Gone" by David Davis.

The feature by Sneed was about Montaous Walton, a 29 year old from Milwaukee who has consistently over the past decade fabricated stories of his baseball career, seemingly for the purpose of hoping to wish it into becoming true. It's a tremendously interesting read that walks through the details of Walton's life and lies and the piece inspired more than anything else a sense of pity for Walton and his never given up on dream of playing baseball for a career. Also interesting to me about the piece was both Walton's appearance in the comments attached to it and the note from Sneed about how he happened across Walton while doing research for an intended story on obscure baseball prospects.

The Davis feature for SB Nation also stood as a lengthy and compelling one that's really about two different topics, Dodgers baseball and the author and his family. A fascinating story in and of itself is detailed with how the home run ball hit by Kirk Gibson to win game one of the 1988 World Series hasn't been conclusively found. Beyond this, Davis writes about living in Los Angeles as a Dodger fan and his sister's mental illness and suicide two years prior to Gibson's famous home run. It's highly personal writing that would seem to be unrelated to the game of baseball, but Davis puts together two stories into a really great narrative.

Two other pieces of sports writing I saw about a month ago, but haven't yet linked to here weren't as long as the SB Nation ones, but each interesting. "Baseball's most entertaining fans" was by Gwen Knapp for Sports On Earth and about Oakland A's fans in the rightfield bleachers section 149 of the stadium. It's just a very nice look that contains some memorable stuff about positive interactions with opposing players like Jeff Francoeur of the Kansas City Royals. The final story to mention here was an update by Eric Adelson titled "Devon Walker shows strength in face of paralysis" for Yahoo Sports. It's uplifting writing about Walker and support received since his injury suffered last September while playing football for Tulane University.

Solid Sports Writing - on FC Barcelona, Oakland A's & Chris Kluwe

Three different excellent pieces of sports writing to note here... with a couple being a few weeks old and one just a few days.

The recent piece was "The Punter Makes His Point" for the New York Times by Tony Gervino. Well done profile of Minnesota Vikings punter Chris Kluwe, now best known for his brilliant and profane takedown of a bigoted Maryland politician posted to Deadspin.

Going back a few weeks were two pieces for Sports Illustrated, one on the website and one for the magazine. The shorter website piece was from Tom Verducci with "A's historic run to AL West title reminds us why we love this game" on... well, that. It's certainly true that as an A's fan I had more interest in the story than many, but it really was excellent writing that gets at what makes baseball such a captivating game to be a fan of.

The magazine feature piece also included this element of "writing about what makes something special" with Grant Wahl doing "The World's Team", a solid piece with the subtitle "FC Barcelona is more than a club, more than a champion and more than Lionel Messi-it is the embodiment of a sporting ideal that has made it beloved across the globe."

Moneyball Movie & Writing On It

In what would seem to be a highly improbable trifecta, the Brad Pitt vehicle Moneyball was an excellent movie loosely based on a great book sort of about a team that was often, but not always a great team to be a fan of. There's of course a lot of modifiers in that statement, but good things don't always come wrapped with tidy bows on top...

With my having attended 20-25 of their games a year from probably 2000-2005, I can say the Oakland A's provided some amazing moments to watch and countless instances of exhilaration as well as heartache (with both being necessary ingredients of fandom (see: Red Sox circa September 2011). One constant on this team of frequent roster upheaval was General Manager Billy Beane and what certainly seemed to be his "smarter than the average bear" approach to building a team.

When the Michael Lewis book Moneyball came out, I eagerly grabbed it like most A's fans and found it to be a pretty phenomenal read. While on-base percentage as a holy grail was the concept generally taken from the book, really what Beane appeared to be doing was using an undervalued asset that could be stockpiled using the limited resources (see: $ for salary) available. The fact that it was on-base percentage wasn't really as important as the approach of exploiting the overlooked.

Either way... a team that provided some great experiences and memories for the fan and a fascinating book.

Now, after several false starts including multiple directors, the movie was made and hit the theaters. I had high expectations going in and not because I expected it to be entirely true to real life (in this case, baseball) or to have the exact book presented in a different medium, but because I was excited to see what was done was the material available. After watching the thing, I walked away a fan... already was a fan first of the team for certain reasons, then of the book for others, and finally the movie for still other reasons.

In many ways, my view of what made the movie so good were elucidated by two pieces from a couple of my favorite sports writers. First Joe Posnanski on his blog and then Austin Murphy in Sports Illustrated wrote about how the story told in the movie didn't necessarily stick hard and true to the events that transpired, but was both tremendously interesting and unlike almost every other sports movie ever made.

Excellent writing from each guy on a very cool film (again, which was pretty much on a great book for the most part about the building of a great team)...