Zach Helfand writes about the minor leagues testing the Automated Ball-Strike System. But isn’t yelling and screaming about bad calls half the fun of baseball?
Best New Yorker The Sporting Scene
The Sporting Scene covers sports with literary flair. These pieces examine athletes, games, and the culture of competition.
18 picks · 1962–2021
Top authors: Roger Angell (7), A. J. Liebling (2), William Finnegan (2)
Burkhard Bilger on the Bryan twins, Bob and Mike, who are as close as tennis may get to a genetically engineered doubles team.
Talk story about the upcoming World Series between the Chicago White Sox and the Houston Astros… Baseball has come up with a World Series so free of …
Nick Paumgarten skis with the mountaineer Andrew McLean, who specializes in chutes—steep, narrow flumes of snow that plunge like elevator shafts.
Ben McGrath writes about Tim Wakefield and the effectiveness of the knuckleball, a baseball pitch that moves unpredictably in the air.
The joys and boos of rooting for that other team.
How Cassius Clay became the most original and magnetic athlete of the twentieth century.
The second part of William Finnegan’s personal essay about his surfing days in San Francisco and his friendship with Dr. Mark Renneker.
Part 1 of William Finnegan's personal essay about his surfing days in San Francisco and his friendship with Dr. Mark Renneker.
In the N.B.A.’s big-man era of solo drives and long-distance shots, this unshowy Celtics star is known for passing the ball, Herbert Warren Wind writes.
From 1980: Roger Angell writes about the St. Louis Cardinals pitcher Bob Gibson.
Roger Angell on the brilliance of 1975’s Boston-Cincinnati games.
Roger Angell on the Pirates’ star pitcher Steve Blass, who retired at thirty-three owing to two years of mysterious pitching—a sudden, near-total inability to throw strikes.
THE SPORTING SCENE about the 1966 competition for the World Cup in soccer (football), won by England, which was also the host country. The competition was …
THE SPORTING SCENE about the recent World Series. Writer watched the games on television in local bars. He quotes a poem he found framed on the wall in the…
THE SPORTING SCENE about the return match between Charles (Sonny) Liston & Floyd Patterson July 22, at Las Vegas. Last Sept., Liston won the heavyweight …
THE SPORTING SCENE about the heavyweight championship fight in Chicago, between Floyd Patterson, (defending his title), & Charles (Sonny) Liston. Liston …
Roger Angell travels south for the sun-warmed, sleepy show of spring training.