Can we finally put away the snow shovels and winter coats and get the lawn mowers and summer clothes out of storage? We hope so, because baseball season is under way!
Athlon Sports’ 200-page preview issue is the best of show this year, narrowly edging out the competition by offering fans not just the in-depth stats that fans demand, but humor and insider stuff as well. Plus, and this point can’t be overstated, Editor Mitchell Light appears to have produced a yearbook that doesn’t completely suck up to MLB boss Bud Selig — writing about the steroid issue and that Selig appears to be holding one team hostage in its home town. Nice work, sir. Other features, like a calendar of weird 2013 season happenings and one on baseball’s unwritten rules, will make any person appear to be Joel Sherman-smart.
The Sporting News is to baseball stats, previews and yearbooks what the Yankees are to baseball itself: the all-time best franchise. So it is a little disappointing to see Editor Scott Smith has lost a little off his fastball. Multi-page features on Opening Day in Australia (complete with BS quotes from Selig), the rising tide of strikeouts and the replay rule (complete with BS quotes from Selig) will waste the time of die-hard fans and bore the casual fan. The story on being a baseball team mascot is good but it is followed by a 12-page preview of college and high school hardball. That is just too much. But the Sporting News does show its strong understanding of the game by providing a very cool list of where current players stand on a variety of all-time lists.
Forget what you might believe about fantasy baseball and those who spend countless hours fretting about draft choices and such. If you are among those who think the practice is a huge waste of time, then you might make the mistake of passing on Lindy’s Sports fantasy baseball preview. While it’s not an easy first read for the casual or hardcore hardball fan (pages of mock drafts and player draft values, missing the big shift of the Tigers’ Miguel Cabrera away from third base and Joe Mauer’s away from catching, no schedules or predicted orders of finish), its position-by-position analysis is the best among its peers and makes it the most distinctive preview in newsstands and the first choice as a second read.
Somebody reel in Tom Verducci. The Sports Illustrated baseball writer — one of the most astute observers of America’s pastime — appears to be reaching a bit too far for some colorful prose. He likens the line of black SUVs carrying baseball team executives queueing up outside a Beverly Hills mansion to offer a deal to Japanese pitching import Masahiro Tanaka to a steel Stonehenge. Later, in a story about the lack of right-handed sluggers, he proves his cliché finger is as durable as Tanaka’s arm by writing of the still struggling Chicago Cubs, with two sluggers on the way up: “The Cubs may be headed for a fifth straight losing season, but on a clear day like the ones in Arizona you can see all the way to their future.” Easy, boy! The disappointing SI baseball preview issue also contains the necessary stories on Robinson Cano in Seattle, Cuba imports into MLB and, yet again, on the Molina family producing standout catchers. SI picks Washington over Oakland in the World Series.
Looking at a photo in Time of “Mad Men” star Jon Hamm checking his iPhone between takes, it becomes clear what iPhones mainly have come to replace: cigarettes. Hamm, who is shooting the show’s seventh and final season, cites a convincingly nauseating 1960s advertising strategy to explain his reservations about Don Draper. “Put some Vaseline on that food, make it shine and look good,” Hamm says, declaring that the “inside is rotten” with Don Draper. “Can’t eat it, but it looks good.”
Veteran New Yorker scribe John McPhee gripes that in a July 2009 piece on Sarah Palin, Time magazine quoted him as saying “Alaska is a foreign country” in a book he wrote in 1977, clipping off the second half of the sentence which reads, “significantly populated by Americans.” McPhee seems a bit overheated about this, but he nevertheless spins a few entertaining yarns about his early days interviewing the likes of Jackie Gleason and Richard Burton. The latter’s wife at the time, Sybil, told McPhee Burton had consumed an entire bottle of Remy Martin cognac in the hours before his interview. “I failed to ask what size,” McPhee confesses.