Spink Award finalists

Judas Priest, it was an outrage!

 

Disagree. Kahn's written the same book about the Dodgers 3 or 4 times. I lost count.

 

Tell you what: You write a book as good as "The Boys of Summer," and I'll be happy to let you live off it.

Snark aside, you're overlooking at least a decade's worth of solid magazine work that he did.

 

If there had never been a Jim Murray, Melvin Durslag probably would be regarded as the all-time best columnist in L.A.

 

"The Boys of Summer" was the last gasp of the "Gee Whiz" style of writing that Kahn grew up on. Paul Gallico would have been proud. But a number of those old stories have been debunked. It doesn't hold up well now.

Angell can, and does, write circles around Kahn.

 

Roger Kahn is really good at writing about ... Roger Kahn.

 

Not related to this topic, but was just reading Ben Yagoda's enjoyable About Town, a history of the New Yorker. It's amazing to think that as good as Angell is as a baseball writer, he had an even greater impact as a fiction editor. Some of my favorite parts of the book are Yagoda quoting from archives and Angell's rejections and acceptances of some of the most famous short story writers in history, and the details of his work with them.

He must be one of the great writer/editors ever. His current boss, Remnick, would of course be on the list too.

 

Fetishizing? I'm showing a healthy respect for the talent and diligence it takes to cover a baseball beat full-time. There's the challenge of competing against other media, developing sources, navigating the fragile nature of being essentially embedded with a team, and conveying information to readers on an everyday basis from March through October.

A lot of people who have done that well over a long period of time deserve recognition.

It's a much different job that sitting in a garret, puffing on a pipe and delighting people in tweed jackets with month-old flowery reflections on the World Series.

Giving the award to a part-time essayist is like giving the Frick award to some NPR egghead who occasionally comments on baseball rather than someone who works full-time at broadcasting games.

 

Voted for Angell. I lean toward the beat writers too but there wasn't one on this year's ballot. So shifting into another gear, I felt the "poetry" of baseball -- hey, c'mon, at least I use quote marks on that -- merited a nod and Angell is the gold standard for that. In a word association test, he'd be the one (of these three) who most often would elicit "baseball writer." With Bisher, I think "Southern columnist" and "college football" rather than baseball. Durslag? "Los Angeles columnist."

 

Durslag was actually more influential as an NFL writer, given his involvement with helping Al Davis move to LA.

 

Working as a baseball beat writer is a demanding, thankless, everyday job. I think a baseball beat writer is similar to a catcher in baseball in that I think the demands of the position can obscure the talents of the individual. But if Bob Boone- who is second all-time on the list for number of games played by a catcher- was a Hall of fame candidate that there would be a torrent of columns from BBWAA members about how letting Boone in would desecrate the memory of Babe Ruth, because the Hall of Fame should only be for the truly "great". I think the same argument holds true about limiting the award to beat writers. Working for a long time is certainly deserving of recognition but I don't think the Spink award should be basically for length of service.

 

My Phil Pepe is long overdue for the honor. Bisher and Durslag are deserved.