On the night of April 29, 1961, at dinner in Milwaukee, Willie Mays ate some bad barbecue. He was up all night, sick to his stomach, and so wobbly the next afternoon he told Alvin Dark, the manager of the San Francisco Giants, to erase his name from the lineup. Lew Burdette was scheduled to pitch for the Brave.

“I didn’t know if I could even swing,” Mays said recently on a brief trip to New York. “But during batting practice, a kid named Joey Amalfitano, he come up to me and says, ‘Try this bat.’ And everything I hit was going out of the ballpark. So I said, ‘O.K., I can play.’ ”

Mays hit four home runs that day — “Two off Burdette, one off Seth Morehead, and one off a kid named Don McMahon,” he said — and he drove in eight runs, maybe the finest day at the plate in a career that has had few, if any, equals.

The story of Mays’s bellyache and Amalfitano’s lucky bat is one of many juicy baseball tales in ”Willie Mays: The Life, The Legend” by James S. Hirsch, to be published in February by Scribner. An exhaustive accounting of Mays’s life, it is the first time Mays has cooperated with a biographer, and its imminent appearance has sent Mays on the promotional trail, an occasion for him to reminisce about his exploits and buff them. That day in Milwaukee, he said, he was robbed by Hank Aaron, who was not even playing his regular position.

“I should’ve had five,” Mays said. “Aaron caught one ball that was going over the center-field fence.”

Now 78, Mays is slightly stooped, and a somewhat rounder version of the streamlined, muscular athlete who hit 660 home runs in 22 major league seasons, thrilled millions with his fleet daring on the bases and acrobatics in center field and was inducted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame in 1979. He is 37 years beyond his playing career, which, after two decades with the Giants in New York and San Francisco, ended where it began; he played his final season and a half with the Mets. Although most fans recall his performance in those years as unhappily feeble, his final hit, a 12th-inning single up the middle against the Oakland Athletics in the 1973 World Series, put the Mets ahead in a game they hung on to win.

Mays wears hearing aids. He has had trouble with his eyes lately, and his voice is a little growly, without the high-pitched glee that reporters described during the early years of his career, when he was known and beloved as the Say Hey Kid.

Still, when he lights on a pleasing baseball memory, his eyes widen, his laugh becomes a whinny and years melt from his face. It is telling that just as the interview began, he reached for a Giants cap and put it on.

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INDIANAPOLIS — As he and his newly retired high school basketball jersey paraded to the center of the Conseco Fieldhouse floor Thursday, Oscar Robertson barely grinned. Even if no one else knew, he did. The moment was bigger than him, his Hall of Fame career or any number he ever wore on his back.

His graying hair and growing midsection told fans it had been a long time since Robertson and his Crispus Attucks High School teammates became the nation’s first all-black team to win a state championship. But 54 years, as it turns out, doesn’t heal all wounds. It doesn’t make the fight go away.

So when an Indianapolis promoter first approached Robertson last month about retiring his jersey as part of a celebration to honor the basketball traditions at Attucks and Washington high schools, he said no. Not unless they honored the entire groundbreaking 1954-55 Attucks team. Not unless they raised a banner for coaches Ray Crowe and Al Spurlock. And not unless they retired the numbers of eight other former Tigers who made the Indiana Basketball Hall of Fame.

“There’s a lot of insensitivity still out there,” Robertson said. “Because it’s a black school, people just don’t care. Nobody cares about black issues. And I simply won’t stand for that. Not with what we accomplished. I told ‘em, ‘Do it right or I won’t be a part of it.’”

His words are sharp, biting and fueled by decades of frustration. But you can’t blame him. In many ways, Robertson and his teammates are the forgotten Hoosiers, the players whose story is every bit as inspiring as that of the boys from tiny Milan but who never made it to Hollywood. Outside of Indiana, few know of Crowe and the discipline he demanded from his players in the face of blatant prejudice. Not many realize the nation’s first black high school champions came from a school that was the brainchild of the Ku Klux Klan. And few are aware that even after the Tigers won the state championship, they were given a celebration different from the one the white champions who came before them had.

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Justice B. Hill/Sportswritingtips.com

Nothing the sportswriter does will sate a reader’s appetite more than the piece that captures, to borrow a phrase from “The Wide World of Sports,” “the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat.” Just ask any veteran sportswriter, and he will gladly tell you the game story is central to what sports journalism is about. It’s always been that way, too – long before the icons of this journalistic era ever wrote a word.

It’s the news, stupid!

As Bruce Garrison, a journalism professor, said in his book Sports Reporting, “Game coverage has never been the only aspect of sportswriting, but it continues to be the foundation of most sports sections.”

I’ve quoted Garrison here simply to reiterate my point. Yet as fundamental to sports journalism as the “gamer” is, why do many sportswriters handle it so poorly? Why do so few journalism programs teach the art of the gamer?

I have no answer for the latter question. As for the former, my theory is that sportswriters today look at the gamer as easy, and they don’t stress it the way they stress the feature story. I also think young sportswriters – and some old ones, too -- don’t show up at an event with a plan of attack or with much research behind them.

Broadly speaking, sportswriters don’t know what the game story is supposed to accomplish, which is a gigantic mistake that all but dooms their work to mediocrity.

And what is a gamer?

Well, the gamer is not a blow-by-blow account of what led to victory – or defeat. If anything, it’s an analysis or a think piece.

That’s essentially the philosophy that Thomas Boswell, a gifted sportswriter for The Washington Post, espouses. In an essay for Professor Melvin Mencher’s News Reporting and Writing, Boswell advises young sportswriters that the best way – or right way -- to see a game is to look at it from a player’s perspective.

Here’s what Boswell says specifically about the art of writing the baseball gamer [his perspective, however, applies to any type of game story]:

Judge slowly: “Never judge a player over a unit of time shorter than a month … you must see a player hot, cold, and in between before you can put the whole package together.”

Assume everybody is trying reasonably hard: “ … giving 110 percent … would be counterproductive for most players. … Usually something on the order of 80 percent effort is about right.

Forgive even the most grotesque physical error: “It’s assumed that every player is physically capable of performing every task asked of him. If he doesn’t, it’s never his fault. His mistake is simply regarded as part of a professional’s natural margin of error.”

Judge mental mistakes harshly: “The distinction as to whether a mistake has been made ‘from the neck up or neck down’ is always drawn.”

Pay more attention to the mundane than the spectacular: “The necessity for consistency usually outweighs the need for the inspired.”

Pay more attention to the theory of the game than to the outcome of the game: Don’t let your evaluation be swayed too greatly by the final score. “If a team loses a game but has used its resources properly … then that team is often able to ignore defeat utterly. Players say, ‘We did everything right but win.’ “

Keep in mind that players always know best how they’re playing: “At the technical level, they seldom fool themselves – the stakes are too high.”

Stay ahead of the action, not behind it or even neck and neck with it: “Remember that the immediate past is almost always a prelude.”

I find no reason to quarrel with Boswell’s perspective. His viewpoints speak well to how a sports journalist ought to approach the writing life in the press box, which can be a pressure-packed place to produce high art.

Yet stylish prose can be crafted from a seat in the press box, particularly when writers have a solid understanding of the ins and outs of their sport.

In my opinion, I also think it’s helpful if sportswriters understood their audience well. While I don’t believe any sportswriter is writing for the readers [a point William Zinsser’s stress in his book On Writing Well], I do believe he [or she] must understand whom those readers tend to be.

At MLB.com, for example, the site’s audience is a mix of casual fans, closet historians and seam-heads, and that mix presents a challenge for beat writers in terms of writing gamers.

Overall, the approach to gamers at MLB.com calls for more of a second-day story or, to use a more familiar term, a feature lead. The world of baseball moves too swiftly to saddle finicky readers with play-by-play and a sprinkling of mundane quotes in game stories.

If that's all MLB.com can give its readers, they will stop coming back to the site because they know they can get this nuts-and-bolts stuff on the ESPNews ticker or elsewhere.

One of the senior editors at MLB.com put it this way: “We have to write gamers that put our finger on the pulse of the team and keeps it there. Our gamers need to tell diverse readership: What's going on with this particular team? How did this single game affect the journey it's on through this long, grinding six-month trek?

“Moreover, what is the goal of the season in the broader, deeper journey of a franchise? For a team, say, like the Kansas City Royals, the season's about development, not wins and losses, and identifying key pieces around whom you can build a championship team. For a team like the Milwaukee Brewers and Cleveland Indians, the season's about putting it together after years of rebuilding and breaking through to the postseason. For a team like the Detroit Tigers or Chicago White Sox or St. Louis Cardinals, it's playoffs or bust.”

The editor went on to say that writers at MLB.com should -- in fact, have to -- reflect those deeper journeys in their game coverage. The play-by-play/how they scored stuff is information the readers likely already have. A writer only needs enough play-by-play in his or her story for readers to get the gist of what decided the game's outcome. And beyond that, the writer has to give the readers much, much more insight.

Otherwise, what the writer does is nothing more than what readers can get from an AP story or some other wire service. They have no reason to visit MLB.com regularly if it can offer no more than the pedestrian prose found in an Associated Press story.

More than a decade ago, I ran across a handout that Dan Jenkins, a sportswriter and the author of “Fast Copy,” wrote about covering games. After reading his handout, I was struck by what he had to say. Here’s part of what Jenkins wrote:

“In any sports event, there is always a key moment, a big play which turns the tide. Seize on that moment. Hammer it. Kick it to death. It is worth sacrificing some play-by-play to do this and add ‘depth’ to your story.”

He is right, of course. Essentially, he’s talking about analyzing the game. Take the turning point and make that your story’s angle. Get comments to back up your view of what happened on the field, and, above all, keep your copy clutter-free.

So as you can see, writing the gamer is more than what many most sportswriters think it is, and it uses many of the same principles that J-schools teach for writing news stories, says Karen Brown Dunlap, director of the Poynter Institute for Media Studies.

“The major difference is that sportswriters must stress interpretation, how and why, more than in basic news stories,” Brown Dunlap says in Carol Rich’s Writing and Reporting News. “Good sportswriters try to do that by setting the tone and developing their stories with a theme”

Follow me on Twitter and Facebook @sportswriting

Jack Hart wears his passion on his sleeve, and his passion is for storytelling, “the joy of the second half of my career in journalism.”

Hart, a managing editor at the Portland Oregonian, has coached reporters through some notable narratives and on to the Pulitzer Prize. He came to the Free Press to talk with reporters and editors about writing and coaching. In sessions on nonfiction storytelling principles and techniques, Hart described the essentials for what he called a renaissance of storytelling in newspapers, a new golden age.

Although he is excited about what he sees going on in newsrooms across the country, he said that many journalists still must catch up to the movement. “We call most everything we do a story, but if you stop and think about it, you know that’s not true.” Most newspapers, he said, are filled with the ends of stories — the beginnings having been sacrificed at the altar of the inverted pyramid.

Hart illustrated his point by reading from “Ping,” a children’s story with all the classic elements of story, elements that often are missing from newspapers. Those elements are missing, he said, because they are not among narrowly defined traditional journalism’s qualities: urgency, proximity, consequence, prominence and exclusivity. None of those elements are needed to tell a good story. By contrast, the fundamental principles of story often do not spell out what is traditionally thought of as good journalism.

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Matt Leinart

MATT LEINART HAS FOUR DOLLARS in his back pocket, which is making it difficult for him to find just the right birthday present for his girlfriend, Brynn. He began this afternoon’s hunt with the best intentions, threading his broke-down white pickup–the “Danger Ranger” he’s had since he was sixteen years old–between the Mercedes and Hummers that clog the parking lot at Fred Segal on Hollywood’s Melrose Avenue. Ducking through the doorway, he found himself in girly-girl heaven, a brightly lit place filled with the latest in high-end cotton knits. But that promise has been dashed now that he’s glanced at the price tags and come to the hazy realization that all he can afford, maybe, is a single sock. Even then, he might have to put it on layaway.

“If I had two grand in the bank, dude, I’d be totally set,” Leinart says after deciding against the sock and heading back into the sunshine. “I could get by on that till the end of the year.” (By “the end of the year” he means January 4, 2006, when he hopes he’ll be quarterbacking the University of Southern California Trojans to a third straight national title in a sold-out Rose Bowl.) “Or maybe I could go to Vegas and win, like, twenty grand. Oh my gosh, that would be so sweet. . . . ”

Suddenly he puts the brakes on his dreaming, knowing too well what’s coming. You’re going to remind him, the way someone reminds him almost every day, that had he entered the National Football League draft–fresh off his undefeated season and a Heisman Trophy–Leinart would have millions in the bank, and millions more would be coming down the chute, and Brynn would be getting Pershing Square for her birthday.

Instead, he decided to come back to school for his fifth and final season. And instead, he has four dollars in his back pocket–as well as a broke-down white pickup, a roommate, and an international-relations class to attend Tuesdays and Thursdays.

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Justice B. Hill/czarjustice.com

He was an authentic American hero, not the made-for TV kind that those of us who watch SportsCenter, surf Fanhouse or read Sports Illustrated have grown accustomed to cheering.
No, that would be the right way to look at Bob Feller. He was a hero in the historical sense of the word.

So it saddens those who got to know Feller to hear that Wednesday, on a frigid Cleveland night, he died in a hospice. He was 92.

“Bob Feller is gone,” Indians owner Larry Dolan said in a statement team that officials issued. “We cannot be surprised. Yet, it seems improbable. Bob has been such an integral part of our fabric, so much more than an ex-ballplayer, so much more than any Cleveland Indians player. He is Cleveland, Ohio.”

That’s all most people cared to know about Feller, the most iconic figure in the history of Cleveland baseball. For unlike some famous athletes who jilted this city, discarding its affections so cavalierly, he never did. Feller was all that was good about athletes from the golden age of sports. To those men, fans mattered; an athlete’s standing in the public’s eye accounted for something; it wasn’t all about the benjamins or the Nike ads or the starlet on his arm.

For if it were, Feller could have had those things – some of them, anyway. But they didn’t mean much to him. Sure, he had the adulation; he made plenty of money in his life, too. Yet none of it meant as much to Feller as knowing his country came first.

Nobody can doubt he was an American hero, though most people would ascribe his fame to his ability to throw a baseball harder than anybody else in his generation. Feller was mindful of the fame that gift from God brought him; he was proud of it. His ability to throw a baseball drew crowds to him and earned him a plaque in Cooperstown.

But were you able to spend a couple of minutes talking to Feller, and he would have told you that all the achievements he had in baseball, grand as those achievements were, palled in comparison to what he had achieved for his country.

Feller would tell you no one in baseball or any sport was a real hero. How could anyone be when he had risked nothing? Yet Feller had risked all that he was – all that he might ever become – for his country.

After the bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941, Feller, 23 then and the best pitcher in the game, left his home in Van Meter, Iowa, drove up to a recruitment center in Chicago and, with former boxing champ Gene Tunney doing the swearing in, enlisted in the U.S. Navy.

“There’s a lot of things in my life I would do differently,” Feller once told as he and I waited for an Indians game to start at Progressive Field. “But volunteerin’ is not one of ’em.”

In World War II, 11 million men served America. Blacks, whites, Hispanics, Asians, Native Americans, each of them played roles in winning the war. About 450 of those men were professional ballplayers. Their names were Greenburg, Williams, DiMaggio, Robinson … and others. They fought as their brethren had in World War I; they fought to save America.

“I coulda stayed out of the whole thing – milked cows, planted corn, worked the farm or played baseball,” Feller said. “But there were some draft dodgers.  Well, I don’t call ’em draft dodgers; I call ’em traitors.

“You see, if you’re physically and mentally capable of helping your country in a situation like that, where the freedom and sovereignty of this nation was at stake, it’s about time to get busy – either fish or cut bait.”

So Feller fished. Refusing a stateside assignment, he fought with the Third Fleet off the coast of Saipan. He was all in on the war effort. If it meant never returning home alive or never playing in the big leagues again, Feller would accept those terms for freedom.

“You always know there might be one of those bullets out there with your name on it,” he said.

Bullets missed him, and he returned home in 1945 to resume a career that brought him more fame than anything he did for his country.

He never once considered baseball as more meaningful to him than his country and his decision to defend it. While the war might not have brought Feller the public acclaim, he derived a satisfaction from it that trumped anything sports brought him.

Yet he saw no heroism in what he did for America. He sought no ticker-tape parade down Fifth Avenue or fistfuls of medals for valor. He needed none; nor did he ask for any symbols of heroism.

“I’m no hero,” he once told me. “Heroes didn’t come back. I said that all the along.  The survivors returned. I came back.”

He came back to remind all of us the importance of country. He came back to finish the work he had began as a teenager. He was a baseball player then, and he was a baseball player till the end, which is how most people will remember him.

Not me. I’ll always remember Feller, “Rapid Robert” as he was called, as a man of conviction, as a man of strong opinions and as man who cared more for his country than he did about baseball.

Yes, his name will be revered in baseball circles forever, but fans do him an injustice when they forget who Bob Feller was: an American hero in the historical sense of the word.

Ray Bolger

“I think I’ll miss you most of all,” Dorothy whispered in theScarecrow ‘s ear. We shared her sentiment. The Cowardly Lion was funny, the Tin Woodman was dear, but theScarecrow had soul. Oz wouldn’t have been the same without him.

The rest of the world won’t be the same without RayBolger, the lanky and vivacious vaudevillian who played theScarecrow, his role of roles, in ” The Wizard of Oz.

Yesterday in Hollywood, at the age of 83, RayBolger died. He was the last surviving star of ” The Wizard of Oz” — made in 1939 but never far from the public eye — and even if his appearances grew rare in recent years, you knew he was around, and you felt that, just like you and the kids, he might have been watching the movie during its annual telecasts.

Bolger never expressed anything but gratitude about being known best for this one part, despite the many others he played on stage and screen in his long and rambunctious career. In 1976, he looked back on the film and said, “It’s a great American classic, and after I’m gone, it will be — and I will be — remembered. And very few people can say they were remembered for anything in life.”

Ray Bolger can be remembered for even more than this well-loved triumph. He electrified Broadway, dancing George Balanchine’s “Slaughter on Tenth Avenue” in the finale of Rodgers and Hart’s “On Your Toes” in 1936. The dance was constructed to become more and more frenetic, and Bolger said later that he fainted “many times” after his nightly performances. It, too, is an American classic, and so, really, was he.

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Before the seventh game of the 2003 American League Championship Series with the Boston Red Sox, Mariano Rivera, the New York Yankees star who is widely considered the greatest relief pitcher in the history of baseball, said a prayer. Rivera, a deeply religious man, prays with his family before every home game. But this was a special prayer, which he delivered within himself, because the two teams, so evenly matched, had fought their way down to this final contest. Rivera’s prayers remained unanswered until the bottom of the eighth inning, when, in one of the great comebacks in playoff history, the Yankees scored three runs against Boston’s ace, Pedro Martinez, to tie the game. Before heading for the mound, Rivera, the most stoical of athletes, had to leave the bullpen for a little shed nearby, where he proceeded, astonishingly, to weep.

“I feel a tremendous load on my shoulders,” Rivera recalled this past March, sitting in front of his locker at the Yankees’ spring-training camp in Tampa, Fla. Rivera was trying to convey something quite different from what that expression normally means. A closer, who generally comes into a game only in the highly pressurized ninth inning to finish off the opponent, must welcome the kind of burden most of us — and even some otherwise very effective pitchers — flee. “I know,” Rivera went on, “I am going to have a good opportunity to pitch.” Closers normally pitch one inning. That night, Rivera navigated his way through a supremely tense ninth inning. And then the 10th. And then, with the score still tied, the 11th. “It was always a battle,” Rivera said. “It was a beautiful game.” In the bottom of the 11th, Yankees third baseman Aaron Boone won the game, and the series, with a home run. And if he hadn’t? “Tell you what,” Rivera said, flashing a most unworshipful grin, “I would have gone out there again.”

In his 16th year with the Yankees, Mariano Rivera, who is 40, has become a kind of living god of baseball. While his regular-season statistics are remarkable, in postseason play, where the pressure is at its highest, he is sui generis. He holds the lowest earned-run average in postseason history (0.74) among pitchers with at least 40 innings pitched. On 30 occasions he has gone more than one inning to record a save; over the same period, all other pitchers combined have done so only a few more times more than Rivera alone. In 2009, when he was thought to be slowing down and yielding his place to the Red Sox phenom Jonathan Papelbon, he pitched 16 innings in postseason play and gave up one run, while extending his career postseason saves record to 39 as the Yankees won the World Series. (Papelbon gave up a two-run lead in the ninth to end the Red Sox’ season in the divisional round against the Angels.) Rivera, when pressed, attributes his gifts to providence; people of a more secular bent say that he combines one of the single greatest pitches baseball has ever seen — his cutter, or cut fastball — with an inner calm, and a focus, no less unusual and no less inimitable.

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