Brian Schwartz

Did you hear about Jack Kerouac’s fantasy baseball habit? Even if you don’t care much for the Beats, it’s still pretty amazing to read about how Kerouac invented his own fantasy baseball league, illustrated his own made-up rosters, and actually…

This past week, I should have been haunting Brooklyn’s British ex-pat soccer bars, nestling myself into a corner with an afternoon pint or two, watching as the Champions League semi-finals began. I should have devoted myself to top-flight, high-stakes international…

Baseball is back, and New York City, that modest little sports market, has just unveiled two new major league stadiums. This season, the Yankees will play at the shiny limestone rebirth of Yankee Stadium; the Mets will try their luck…

“In 1951 you couldn’t get us to talk politics. Ball players then would just as soon talk bed-wetting as talk politics.” These are the opening lines of Jim Shepard’s 1994 short story “Batting Against Castro,” in which a few feckless…

Is there an American sportswriter alive right now who’s better than Michael Lewis? Although his long Sunday Times Magazine piece on Houston Rockets forward Shane Battier feels mildly formulaic in its conception—another homespun story about an athlete whose lack of…

Last night, Super Bowl XLIII was interrupted by a twelve-minute segment devoted exclusively to the work of an important American poet. After taking the stage at halftime in front of thousands of screaming football fans and billions of television viewers,…