Month: April 2016

The summer when I was twelve years old, I was the second best pitcher on my Little League all-star team. The best was a kid named Blake Snell. Yesterday, I watched him make his major league debut for the Tampa Bay Rays on the mound at Yankee Stadium. It’s safe to say I never quite caught up, skill-wise.

Blake was always the best baseball player in our little suburb, ever since we were nine years old. His dad, Dave, was a former minor league pitcher in the Mariners system, a hulking guy who constantly wore the ultra-reflective Oakley sunglasses that baseball players seem to favor. He always coached our all-star teams and taught us words that ten year olds probably shouldn’t know. I lived in constant fear of muffing a grounder and incurring his verbal wrath. But he was a great coach, and Blake was his prize pupil. Dave ran a training center out of a warehouse where Blake and his twin brother Tyler spent much of their time. I remember going there one time in high school with Tyler and some other friends to play Wiffle ball at 10 o’clock at night. It was their home away from home. Baseball was what just what the Snell kids did.

Continue reading “Watching Your Friend Make His MLB Debut Is Cool”

 

Kobe Bryant played his final game last week. You might have heard. Bit of a to-do.

With the end of Bryant’s career comes the end of something else, too, something that probably had just as big an impact on the NBA as the Mamba’s twenty-year career: the era of players who entered the league straight out of high school.

The population of preps-to-pros players drafted between 1995, when Kevin Garnett revived the trend, and 2005, the final year before the NBA implemented its current age minimum, is a relatively small one, well below 100 men. But the group has had an outsized impact on the league. From Garnett to Bryant, from Tracy McGrady to LeBron James to Dwight Howard, so many of the league’s marquee names from the past two decades never went to college.

With Bryant’s departure, it’s an apt time to reflect on this transformative generation of players, which is exactly what Jonathan Abrams does in his still-relatively-new book, “Boys Among Men: How the Prep-to-Pro Generation Redefined the NBA and Sparked a Basketball Revolution.” Abrams, a former newspaper reporter and Grantland longform ace, tells the full breadth of the prep-to-pros story, beginning with Moses Malone in 1974 and continuing to the present, as the final high-school draftees (guys like Martell Webster and J.R. Smith) enter the second decades of their careers. The book is a piece of NBA sociology, using the stories of individual players as a lens through which to examine the history of the league’s age limit.

Continue reading ““Boys Among Men” And The Prep-To-Pros Question”

I am decidedly late to this party.

“The Boys In The Boat,” by Daniel James Brown, and “Unbroken,” by Laura Hillenbrand, are two of the more popular nonfiction books of the past few years. “The Boys In The Boat” is still hanging around the NYT bestseller list three years after its release. If you haven’t read either of the books, you’ve probably at least heard of them. Maybe you saw the film version of “Unbroken,” written by the Coen brothers and directed by Angelina Jolie; in the future, maybe you’ll catch the “TBITB” movie, too, which is currently in production. Point being, these two tomes are as widely read and widely applauded as books about history can be. I’m not breaking any new ground by telling you to read them. They’re both well paced, tightly written and highly entertaining, the sorts of books you can read in a couple long sittings, if you’re into that sort of thing.

What jumped out to me the most, though, was their similarities. “Unbroken” tells the truly unbelievable story of Louie Zamperini, a kleptomaniacal California kid who turned into an Olympic distance runner before the age of 20. Then World War II begins, and Zamperini enlists and is sent to the Pacific theater, where his plane goes down over the open ocean. What follows is a cavalcade of gnar, including six weeks floating at sea in a six-foot raft, shark attacks, capture by the Japanese, and an ensuing marathon of torture as a POW, of both the physical and mental varieties. When the war finally ends in August 1945, Zamperini and his fellow POWs are a week away from being massacred by their captors. It’s no surprise his readjustment to civilian life afterward was a bit of an adventure.

Continue reading “Belated Book Reviews: “Unbroken” And “The Boys In The Boat””