Jane Leavy's BASW 2011 picks are out

Getting mentioned in the "also considered" section is nice if you don't make the cut for the book, but Glenn says they won't reveal those before publication. So there will be a few more names that get at least a little pop when the book comes out.

 

My recollection, and this could easily be incorrect, is that Frank Deford is the only guest editor to have done it.

 

I have less interest in that than I do reading why the guest editor turns me down every year. He, she and they are going to cost me a scholarship, goddamnit.

 

Glenn... thanks for your hard work. Reading BASW each year motivates me to step up my work. I'm 0-for-1 so far, though.

 

Leigh Montville did this after each story in the 2009 BASW.

 

Apart from space considerations, the GE's don't have to explain their picks because, in a book that gets published every year, if we had every guest editor explain, the intros for the book each year would be very much the same, which would become a bit tiresome, I think, for the general reader (although those of us who write would probably enjoy that kind of inside baseball). The GE is given free reign to write whatever he/she wants (as am I in the foreword), and to select anything to appear in the book - the GE doesn't have to use a single one of my recommendations if they choose not to. In many instances, either directly or indirectly, I think what they write in the intro provides the logic of their selections.

And I think the marketplace is the reason why there is no print collection of gamers/columns/etc. exclusively from newspaper. The old Best Sports Stories died a slow death due to poor sales, primarily (my opinion) because that by the time the book came out, gamers and the like were extremely dated. Don't for get that by the time the series died in 1989 there was already video to compete with and readers had already viewed some of the events (something even more acute today). Add to that the difficulty in securing reprint rights (bad enough in a book of about 25 stories, but nightmarish in a larger collection) and I think that explains why no such stand-alone collection exists today. And as I have explained many times before (including the forewords) stories cannot be selected if they are not seen, and each year I receive, relatively speaking, very few columns and even fewer game stories, either submitted by readers, authors, or the publications.

But I read BSS when I was a kid, too - they took up about a shelf and half in my local library and I have about 25 myself.

 

Glenn:

About how many stories were considered for this year's edition?

 

I've addressed that question in more detail in some interviews and in a few forewords - but it's almost impossible to quantify - I *read thousands, I am sent thousands, I easily spend a couple hours every day reading for the book, then read almost fulltime for most of February, so it adds up - 8,000? 10,000?

*(of course as I've explained elsewhere, once it becomes clear a story isn't going into my "read again" pile, I stop reading pretty quick, often within a few paragraphs, because if you lose me there, you are going to lose the reader of the book, and that's who I pretend I am).

 

Any DVD with a director's commentary would disagree with you, I think.

 

Mr Stout,

None of this should be construed as a knock. I think BSS is more interesting than others (and you) do because the gamers are at this point not dated but rather history as it was written at the time. Better now that 12 months after they played out. The best obits are those written when the deceased were still alive. And, again, I don't think that BSS was anything remotely resembling a collection of gamers. Lots of features, profiles and the like, columns, but the old sports sections in medium-sized markets were far more ambitious and committed than they are today.

Another neat aspect is that each sport gets at least a piece or two. You get a couple of boxing stories and at least one featured the biggest name in the sport that year. Again, probably more interesting from a purely historical aspect than that BASW, which showcases great writing but isn't a historical year-in-sports document per se.

But that's just the opinion of a guy who is, I think, 0 in the book and notable nine times or something. I wish I came along while BSS was still around.

YHS, etc

 

I'm still floating from getting an honourable mention two years ago.