I'm no sports fan, but I read the sports pages in the Times and on Salon. (In fact, King Kaufman's daily sports column on Salon is one of my favorite features). A lot of sports writing--like most of any kind of journalistic writing--is a total snooze, but when you find a good article or an interesting feature the writing is usually twice as good as you find in similar articles about the arts. Maybe it's just that I find the arts themselves interesting and so the articles about them pale in comparison, whereas a good sports article makes me interested in something that generally I find to be quite boring.

Anyway, take a look at this wonderful column in the NY Times by Kevin Baker from a few days ago (they call it a blog entry, but I think paid writers writing for the New York Times is not quite "blogging"). I've been to one pro baseball game in my life and it felt like it went on for nine years rather than nine innings. But this wonderful article actually made me smile with wonder about how great it would be to be a die-hard fan. Of course, the hook here is that the article is as much about being a New Yorker and about the city itself as it is about baseball fandom.

Baker starts out with a wonderful statement: "I got a chance to feel like a classic, ugly New Yorker this week." Amen to that. Read the whole thing here.