The Lost Legend And Secret Legacy Of Table Tennis Master Rong Guotuan
This is an excerpt from Eric Nusbaum’s new weekly Substack newsletter Sports Stories, where he’ll be writing about sports, history, and sports history. He hopes you will subscribe here, and share these stories with your friends, families, and table tennis practice partners. The version of this in t...
The Immigrant Sport: What Ping-Pong Means In America
I am standing in a gaggle of table tennis players in a dark bar in Grand Rapids, Mich., on the Fourth of July. Before us, another table tennis player named Donald Hayes is playing Millipede. Donald and the others are all competing in the U.S. Open, the biggest ping-pong tournament in America, but ri...
Hideo Nomo Changed Baseball Forever, And Then He Disappeared
Having purchased a Hall of Fame ballot, which we'll be filling out in accordance with the wishes of our readers, we're examining the merits—and relative lack of merits—of all 36 players on this year's ballot for the purposes of better informing the electorate, i.e., you. All entries in the series ca...
Bud Selig, The Commissioner Who Didn't Matter
There is a popular line of thinking among statistically minded baseball fans that declares the manager more or less irrelevant. In the course of 162 games, over tens of thousands of pitches, the impact of his strategic decision making is statistically negligible compared to the inherent quality of h...
The Man Who Doesn't Exist: How Canelo Álvarez Became A Myth
Juanacatlán, Jalisco, sits on the slopes of lush foothills, 20 miles southeast of Guadalajara. To reach the town from the highway, you have to pass through its industrial neighbor El Salto, then cross the Río Grande de Santiago, one of Mexico's most polluted rivers, on a two-lane bridge adorned with...
Where Yasiel Puig Comes From
A couple of months before Yasiel Puig announced himself with three hits and a game-ending Scud missile launched from the warning track in right field in my hometown of Los Angeles, I found myself in his: Cienfuegos, Cuba....