Joe Posnanski Interview

Check out Gelf for a lengthy, fantastic Q&A with Joe Posnanski about his book The Machine: A Hot Team, a Legendary Season, and a Heart-Stopping World Series: The Story of the 1975 Cincinnati Reds.

Really, it is an absolute joy to read.

Some Pos (and don't forget to bookmark his blog):

The disconnect between Morgan the player and Morgan the announcer is one that I'm just not sure anyone has figured. ... You're right about Joe Morgan being the ultimate Moneyball-style player, too. It wasn't just his style of play, either; Joe Morgan quotes from 1975 sound like they could have gone into the book Moneyball, verbatim. He talked all the time about how batting average was overrated, and how you had to get on base, and how RBIs were just a context statistic, and how you had to steal bases at a high percentage, and so on and so on. ... He is anti-Moneyball, I think, not because he has spent a lot of time analyzing it but because it was written by a guy who didn't play baseball (and it's about a guy who wasn't good enough to play baseball). He is anti-Bill James because James didn't play baseball.

There is something about pacing in writing that has always fascinated me. You wish you could be there with every reader and say, "OK, this part you're supposed to read really fast. And this part, no, slow down, take your time on this part. And that part, yeah, just skim over that part." I suppose the writers who can get the readers to do that -- to speed up and slow down instinctively -- are the special ones.

I think one thing the internet provides for a writer is infinite space and a motivated audience. ... The blog has been a great gift to me because, honestly, I don't care if anyone reads it. I don't want that to come out wrong -- I love that people read it, and I love the connection that the blog has given me to brilliant readers all over the world. My point is only: I'm motivated simply to write what interests me. No money involved. ... I think that people do crave that sort of writing. I know we hear all the time that people don't have time to read, people don't want long stories, people don't want digressions. Well, maybe people don't, but some people do, and that group is probably larger than anyone would think.