Joe Posnanski pitches another gem in new book Why We Love Baseball: A History In 50 Moments

Joe Posnanski. // Courtesy photo

One of the most celebrated sports columnists of our time, former Kansas City Star writer Joe Posnanski, will be making a stop in Kansas City on Friday, Sept. 8, as part of the signing tour for his new book, Why We Love Baseball: A History in 50 Moments.

When this 363-page hardcover from Penguin imprint Dutton Publishing officially hits shelves on Tuesday, Sept. 5., Posnanski will begin an eight-city, 12-day trek, which will include that Sept. 8 appearance at Rainy Day Books (707 W 47th Street) and closes with a Sept. 16 event at Topeka’s 12th Annual Kansas Book Festival at Washburn University.

The Rainy Day Books event will begin at 7 p.m. with a conversation on the book between Posnanski and his friend, podcast co-host, and Red Sox fan-consultant, Mike Schur—a television writer with credits on shows including The Office, Master of None, Parks and Recreation, and Brooklyn 99.

Posnanski, 56, has long been heralded as one of America’s great sports writers, but—just to illustrate what that looks like for the initiated—I’ve included a specific note from his description of Ken Griffey Jr.’s swing. On page 52, Posnanski writes, “Junior’s swing was violence and music, danger and candy, rage and sunshine.”

Candy, rage, and sunshine? This moment stuck out to me because it paints such a vivid, punk-rock image, which also, really, has nothing at all to do with the act of swinging a bat. It’s the perfect pull quote to support a great many of Posnanski’s reflections in this book.

What follows that line, however, is the real greatness. 

“I asked him once about his swing—a mistake, as it turned out, because Junior was not one for self-analysis or dreamy sportswriter inquiries.”

Posnanski here is humbled by one of the game’s most enduring legends. Baseball is just as much about feeling as it is about the cold, hard statistics. And choosing those moments to feature is a labor of balancing those opposing forces.

Courtesy image

Why We Love Baseball, Posnanski’s sixth book, serves as a spin-off of sorts to The Baseball 100—a countdown of the game’s most legendary figures that was originally published in late 2021. 

This time around, Posnanski says the writing process presented an altered set of challenges from the last.

 “When you’re ranking the players, there are all sorts of statistical ways you can go about getting at least a starting list. You have something to work from. This one is much different,” Posnanski says. “It really was sort of a process of discovery. You start writing things down off memory, and while you’re looking for one thing, you discover another thing, and it leads to another thing. It really was just sort of a building process.”  

Some moments, such as the Cubs’ rain-delayed, extra innings victory in game seven of the 2016 World Series, were fairly obvious inclusions. Others took more digging and offered infinitely rewarding tidbits for baseball die-hards and human-interest savants alike.

The game will inevitably continue to outpace these 50 worthy moments, however. In fact, after Posnanski had finished his draft of the book very early on in 2023, he had to go back in to include more Shohei Ohtani—the phenomenic Japanese-born pitching and hitting star who has double-handedly flipped the MLB upside-down over the course of just four seasons.  

“Well, I finished writing it sort of at the beginning of the year. And I did a rewrite around the end of March. I just got to Shohei Ohtani-Mike Trout,” he says, referring to the landmark baseball moment in March when Ohtani struck out his Angels teammate, Trout—perhaps the second greatest player in modern baseball in his own right—to deliver the 2023 World Baseball Classic title to Japan. 

Relatedly, Posnanski penned an Aug. 15 piece for the Washington Post titled, “Shohei Ohtani is doing things on a baseball diamond that scramble the mind.”

In it, he discusses the state of the game of baseball and how calls for its decline and death have been littered across the sportswriting world for well over a century now. These ruminations are also frequent in Why We Love Baseball. Throughout, Posnanski argues that the rise of Ohtani and other, more minor, adjustments to the game suggest baseball’s most recent period of atrophy seems to be on its way out.

“The games were just so long, and even though great young players were coming up, it was hard for a lot of them to stay healthy. It was a tough time in some ways. And, look—the game was still great,” Posnanski says. “But it was definitely stagnating. Now, Shohei [Ohtani], the rule changes, and some of the other young players that are that are coming up now have really put a whole new energy into baseball.”

After the rewrites, his thesis of baseball’s timelessness only continues to be supported by… well, that very same 29-year-old soon-to-be-former Los Angeles Angel who is making Babe Ruth look like one of those giant-wheeled, old-timey bicycles in a race against a Green Goblin glider that can hit and pitch. 

“Of course, since then, [Ohtani] has done about 10 more things that could have been in this book. So you know, that’s the thing… the game keeps going,” Posnanski says. 

The book touches on so many other classic moments, from Jackie Robinson and his heroics during and after his time with the Kansas City Monarchs to Jim Abbot’s one-armed no-hitter, The Big Unit’s bird-sniping fastball, Stan Musial’s five-homer double-header, Joe DiMaggio’s iconic hitting streak, Babe Ruth’s “called shot” (or, shots, maybe?), and the legend of some seventeen-year-old girl who once struck out that very same Babe in an exhibition game. 

And, yes, George Brett’s “pine tar incident” is in there, too.