As a short-attention-span blogger, it makes my head hurt to think about travelling a couple thousand miles, talking to someone for hours and then spending several days writing several thousand insightful words about the experience. Really, I tend to lose interest in what I’m writing approximately two minutes after I think of the snarky punchline.
Thankfully not everyone else is like me or else we’d be in a journalistic wilderness. We need our nutrition as readers, and that nutrition comes in the form of long-form feature pieces on the people and events that shape the game we love. There isn’t anyone who does that better than ESPN’s Amy K. Nelson. She pretty much knocks every subject she chooses out of the park, and today is no exception: Jim Joyce: infamous umpire:“I think about it still, almost every day,” Joyce says. “I don’t want to be known as Jim Joyce, the guy that blew the perfect game. But I think that’s inevitable.”
Why?
“Because I’m Jim Joyce,” he says, “the umpire who blew the perfect game.”Take your early-afternoon coma off today and check out Nelson’s piece about the man who cost Armando Galarraga his perfect game and somehow came out better for it on the other end.