Some of my heroes are people who have discovered new ways of thinking about how sports are played and then have written about it. These works inspire me like no other category of works, intellectually.
Michael Lewis' "Moneyball" will forever stand as a literary turning point in baseball ethos, the book that broke Earl Weaver's back, if you will. Aaron Schatz's footballoutsiders.com offers intelligent and ground-breaking analysis to fans of a sport that's vast majority of paid analysts appear by their analysis to be relative morons. Lewis, Schatz and Bill James are among the great modern philosophers of the sports world.
Author Malcolm Gladwell is another. You can learn more about how great players become great from his 2008 book "Outliers" than from watching 30 million hours of SportsCenter. His recent piece in The New Yorker titled "Annals of Innovation: How David Beats Goliath" again proves Gladwell a master at transposing conceptually simple ideas to a sports world wrought with archaic thinking that's not only prevalent at sports' highest levels, but rampant.
I give this article my full recommendation. If I could make every sports fan in Buffalo read all this stuff, I would. We could change the world.
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