Not being a big sports fan in general, it takes a lot to convince me it’s worth investing the time it takes to plop down in front of the television to watch a sports event–even more to actually go out into the elements to suffer the hords of fans from opposing teams lobbing carefully crafted insults at one another, the most successful resulting in episodes that end with bloody knuckles or, if especially creative, arrests. I normally just don’t have the patience and need extra inspiration to see the true value. For instance, until that famous David Foster Wallace article about Roger Federer came out in the New York Times Play Magazine in 2006, I couldn’t really care less about tennis. Now I actually go out of my way to watch a Grand Slam tournament. It takes a keen eye and a certain sort of critical expertise to communicate to the uninitiated why something is great or important and should be appreciated by everyone. Wallace was excellent at providing that.

But I actually kinda like baseball. I’m a fair-weather fan, to be sure, but come October I’m watching the playoffs and the World Series no matter who’s playing, and this year is no exception. Watching Sunday night’s game when Madison Bumgarner, the 21-year-old San Francisco Giants ace, pitched 8 shut-out innings against the Texas Rangers, I knew I was watching something special. The New Yorker’s Roger Angell has been covering the series, and his report had all of the elements of great sports writing that provide the kind of context ignorant schmoes like myself need to understand what’s great about what I just saw:

Twenty-one-year-old Madison Bumgarner, in shutting down the Texas Rangers last night, 4-0, and bringing his Giants to the brink of a World Championship, put aside much of the florid bunkum that now surrounds the famous festival–the hankies, the quarter-acre flag, the famous faces in the stands, the din, the lightage, the comic signs–and reminded us once again that pitching is meant to be imperious and silencing, and can impose a pleasing clarity to the flow of things. He gave up three hits in eight innings, and threw first-pitch strikes to twenty-one of his twenty-seven batters. His batterymate, Buster Posey, is twenty-three, and their combined dewiness and brusque success brought references to kid heroes of the classical past. Spec Shea and Yogi Berra, of the 1947 Yankees, were the last previous all-rookie World Series battery. Bullet Joe Bush, in 1913, and Fernando Valenzuela, in 1981, are among a handful of pitchers who started World Series games at a younger age. Babe Ruth, by contrast, was twenty-three when he threw a shutout for the Red Sox in 1918.

Among other literary types covering this World Series, Dave Eggers, author of Zeitoun and founder of 826 National, has been doing some pretty entertaining illustrated dispatches for the San Francisco Bay Citizen. Of course, he’s not really covering the games so much as he is the fans. But still, entertaining nonetheless. Too bad it’s over–I was looking forward to more of these: