RealClearSports recently talked with Joe Posnanski, sports columnist at the Kansas City Star, and as of recently, Senior Writer at Sports Illustrated. "Joe Po's" newest book, The Machine: A Hot Team, a Legendary Season, and a Heart-stopping World Series: The Story of the 1975 Cincinnati Reds, is set for release on September 9th.

RealClearSports: Sportswriters seem to be cliquish. But toward you there seems to be unanimous praise. When we interviewed Gregg Doyel he said, "There's definitely a place in this business for subtlety, but only if the writer is talented enough to pull it off. And the bar is awfully high on that. Joe Posnanski clears that bar. Me, I trip over the thing." Sentiments from others have been similar.

What is it about your approach that makes your writing seems particular thoughtful?

Joe Posnanski: That's a tough one to answer. I don't know. I think that what I try to do is I try to think through things, and try to get across a point that maybe has a little nuance in it. I kind of feel a like in a lot of ways, we're losing that in today's world.

One of the things that's always been true about me is that I've never really been in this for fame. I don't really do radio. I don't do TV. I don't particularly want to be recognized going down the street. So for me it's just a matter of trying to write something as well as I can do it, and try to get across a point of view I think is balanced and hopefully considers the whole version of what's going on. People have been very very nice to me, and people have always treated me very well. So I guess that's part of what they would see. If I had to come up with a reason for why, I think it's probably because people see that I take my job very seriously and try very hard to present a balanced picture.

RCS: In doing these interviews we try to put a lot of research into the questions. Two things we learned about you is that you hate doing radio and television, and you are really hard to research because your big thoughts rarely come in a phrase or a sentence, but rather in a paragraph or a passage.

Do you think the latter explains the former -- that radio and television are not the best mediums for a long thought?

Posnanski: Yeah. I think that would probably be a pretty good explanation.

I had a radio show very very briefly a long time ago; twelve thirteen years ago. At that point I didn't really have any sense of what kind of radio person I would be or if I would like it or not. I did it for a very short period of time, six weeks maybe. I hated it. It was always hard for me to sort of explain to people why. I think part of it is I feel I'm really bad in that medium. I just don't feel like I do very well in that at all. And nobody likes doing something they're not good at.

But I think the second thing is exactly what you're presenting. I feel like that's a medium for people who are glib, and people who can make a point very quickly, and people with real conviction in a point of view. I just don't know that those are my strengths. I mean I do have opinions obviously, I've been a columnist for a while. I do have points of view but they tend to be nuanced and I tend to really like the written word to get those points across.

I find that even if I could do it on television or radio, even if I had the time to do it, I just don't know that my mind works that way. I need to hammer something over in my mind over and over again to kind of get it really get it to crystallize exactly into what I'm trying to say. So yeah, I think that's probably as good a description as I've heard -- probably better than anything I've ever come up with -- as to why I don't really do really well or feel very comfortable doing television or radio. It's because I feel like to get a point across, I need not only the space to write it, but also the time to really present the way I'd like to present it.

RCS: Bill Simmons gets a lot of the credit for creating a type: the rambling fan who writes online. But in a lot of ways your approach seems similar, but with press credentials. If you have a longer point to make, you won't be limited by an 800 word limit. Instead, you'll go to JoePosnanski.com and write out your entire point.

To what extent do you owe your career and the perception of you to the internet and your personal website?

Posnanski: Probably to a great extent, and in a lot of ways that's very surprising to me. I've been writing a newspaper column for probably about twenty years before I started writing anything on the internet, as far as a blog goes. And you mentioned Bill, and I've always liked Bill, going back to his days as Bostons sports guy, and I've always really enjoyed his work and still do. But he was not somebody I was thinking about when I started doing the blog.

The way the blog came about was I had written a book about Buck O'Neil and I wanted some way to promote it and I thought that, hey, I would start a blog, because that seemed to be what everybody was doing.

It then evolved into this big thing, because at first when I did it it was just intended to tell people where I was going to appear and maybe a couple of thoughts about the book. It evolved into this enormous thing where I just basically would write whatever happened to be on my mind at the time and it started to take off and people started to read it. I was stunned, because I just never expected any kind of readership. What I ended up finding was not only a very large readership, but also a very large and kind of influential readership. I would expect that that blog is a very big reason why Sports Illustrated called, it's certainly a big reason why people have come to know me a little bit. It's weird because it was absolutely not my intention and not my goal at all And now it's all happened and it just sort of seems like I plotted it out that way. It just sort of seems like it was sort of a natural progression, and it wasn't that way at all. Every step along the way has been very surprising to me.

RCS: You mentioned that you admired Bill Simmons going back to the Boston sports guy days. Who are the other sports writers, both past and present, that you admire?

Posnanski: Well there are a lot of people. The past guys are undoubtedly the classics: the Jim Murrays, the Red Smiths, the Frank DeFords and people like that. I'm sort of a sports writer junkie in that way. I've read a lot of people: W.C. Heinz, Jimmy Cannon and all of these people going all the way back. I definitely feel like I'm a sports writer historian.

But currently I feel like everybody sort of gravitates to people who are their friends in a lot of ways. To me guys like Mike Vaccarro at the New York Post, he's like a brother to me. We've known each other for fifteen years, and we think almost precisely along the same lines in so many ways. So that's a guy that I not only admire and feel like he's had a huge impact on my career as a writer, but he's had a huge impact on my career as a friend.

Then there are guys like Michael Rosenberg in Detroit, Tommy Tomlinson who's a non-sports writer in Charlotte, North Carolina, and Adrian Wojnarowski. I'm going to miss a bunch of people, but overall people who I've become very good friends with have had as big an impact on me as a lot of the people that I just read. Those people have a big impact on me too, but I definitely feel like I've been impacted by a lot of different people.

RCS: During the Raul Ibanez/Jerrod Morris controversy, people looked to you a voice of reason. In your Sports Illustrated column you wrote, "This is the Twister game sportswriters play now. We are skeptical but hopeful, cynical but cautious, vigilant but docile. In other words, we are lost. Nobody can ignore the PED issue or the fans' mistrust, not in these times."

In this era, in which it's nearly impossible to tell which players have taken steroids and which haven't, how should these types of conversations ideally take place?

Posnanski: I don't know what the ideal is today in today's world, because we're sort of stuck in this weird middle ground where it's very, very difficult the trust anything and yet on the other hand who wants to mistrust everything when it comes to sports.

Sports are supposed to be about an escape from the daily life, and it's still supposed to be fun, and it's still supposed to resonate with you in ways that other things don't. So it's tough. I think what struck me about the whole Raul Ibanez-Jerrod Morris thing is that I'm pretty close with Raul. I've known him since he was in Kansas City and I've known him a long time, and to me he's one of the most admirable people I know in sports. He's a wonderful wonderful guy, and I would have absolutely no qualms about saying that I have absolutely no doubt he's never used steroids. As much as we can know about somebody, I mean we can always be surprised, but I have no doubt that he doesn't.

Yet at the same time I thought what Jerrod Morris wrote was exactly what I think people were thinking, which is "Hey look, I'm not saying he's doing it, I'm just saying in today's world where all of these guys are putting up sort of unusual numbers at ages that don't match up, in this environment and this world, how can you not be a little bit mistrustful?" What he did was he went and tried to find some numbers that would indicate that maybe he didn't do it, and he wasn't able to find those numbers. I think it's risky poker to try to figure out things just through the numbers, but I thought it was a genuine attempt to try and bring some sanity to it. He just got hammered for it, probably because of a poor headline choice on his part. But he got hammered for it and I thought it was really unfair because I think it's exactly what we're all wrestling with.

You ask me what the ideal is, but I don't know that there is an ideal. The ideal would be that none of this ever happened. In the world that we're in now people are going to have distrust about certain things, and I think we need to be upfront about it and face it. One thing I don't think we need to do is charge people unfairly for anything. But by the same token we can't have our heads in the ground anymore. This is out there, and this is what people are thinking and talking about, and I don't think it's going to go away any time soon.

RCS: In your book, The Soul of Baseball, in which you travel across the country with the great Negro League player and even greater personality Buck O'Neil, he gave you an amazing quote. He documented all the ways players in his day cheated and said "The only reason players in my time didn't use steroids is because we didn't have them."

In the steroids debate, is this an overlooked point?

Posnanski: I think it's a very overlooked point. I would even take it one step further. I mean he repeated that point numerous times, I've heard him say it probably twenty to twenty five times. Every time he would say, even when he was still alive and people were talking to him and he was saying these words, people refused to think that that's what he really believed. They'd always be like "Well, yeah, I know what you're saying, but don't you think these players are terrible and they shouldn't have ever done this and so on and so forth."

But that was honestly how Buck felt, and it was honestly his belief was that everyone in baseball and probably various other things as well, people are looking for and edge. These are prime athletes playing at the very, very peak of their games, and they need an edge to survive and to be successfully. Buck would talk about them cutting baseballs, and spitting on them, and taking different, not necessarily illegal things, before a game. Things like drinking 20 cups of coffee before a game, and other things like that. Anything to get that edge.

I can tell you, because I heard him say it enough times, there is no doubt about it that Buck O'Neil feels like if the players of the forties and fifties had the steroid option, many of them would have taken them. He never said he would have, and I don't know the answer to that question because Buck has always been kind of a guy who sort of rolls above his time. But he was adamant saying the reason we didn't use them was because we didn't have them, and that was absolutely the way he felt about it.

RCS: Next month, your book "The Machine" will be released, about the 1975 Cincinnati Reds. After all your research and writing -- having talked to Morgan, Rose, and Bench among others -- what do you think is the the most overlooked aspect about that team?

Posnanski: I would say there are two things that really struck me. One is that now we look at that team now as this incredible team, and probably one of the most famous lineups probably in baseball history. Even now people can still recite it. But that team got off to a really bad start in 1975. They came into that year having never winning the World Series as the Big Red Machine. They'd been to the World Series twice and lost both times. They were sort of facing this not quite good enough existence. When they came into that year they were not favored to win. The Dodgers were pretty clearly favored by most people to win the division. Then they got off to a terrible start and they were absolutely under .500 at the end of May, and there was this feeling it was all falling apart. There was talk about Sparky Anderson getting fired. It was definitely a much, much more turbulent year than even I remembered. Of course you look back on it in the end and they won by twenty games and clinched in early September and it sort of seemed like it was kind of a breeze. But it really wasn't. I don't know that they ever are. But that year in particular was very, very turbulent.

So that was really fun because the book is entirely about that year. That was the year that they played the Red Sox in the great World Series, and that was just a lot of fun to kind of relive that year and go through it both on and off the field.

And then the second and most overlooked thing about that team is probably for me is just specific to Pete Rose. It's so interesting to me that Pete has sort of developed this reputation throughout the country, throughout the world of people who care about baseball. And it's not an unfair reputation, but it's very, very specific. He's sort of this pathetic figure who gambled on baseball and got thrown out of the game and kind of has just been lying his way through the last fifteen years. Now he shows up in Las Vegas to sign autographs. That's the entirety of what so many people seem to remember about Pete Rose.

One of the real fun parts for me was going back to 1975 when the feelings about him were very very different. That year he played every single game even though the team won by twenty, and Sparky Anderson kept begging him to take a rest; he refused to take a rest. He played the game exactly the way you'd want somebody to play it. He played it hard. he played it fiercely. He ran out every ground ball, and ran out every walk. He did all those things that today the players don't do. They don't play the game that way -- and I don't if they ever as a pro, played it that way -- but pete rose did. And it meant so much to him baseball was so important to him. He was wonderful to the media; he was wonderful to the fans. There was just a lot of good about him, and there was certainly a lot of bad too, but there was a lot of good about Pete Rose and I think that's a bit overlooked and a bit forgotten.

Hopefully, if people read the book they'll at least get to see that side of Pete Rose. It doesn't change what's happened to him in his life and it doesn't change the person that he has become, but I think it hopefully gives a fuller picture.

RCS: Last week, you wrote a pretty devastating indictment of Blue Jays GM J.P. Ricciardi, listing 15 bad contracts he signed and then concluding, "In fact, really, we should just start referring to bad baseball contracts as 'Ricciardi.'"

When will Ricciardi be fired?

Posnanski: I don't know. I've obviously gotten tremendous response to that column, and many of them are defenders of JP, which is good, because I'm glad that people are out there defending him.

I don't know the inner workings of the Blue Jays and I'm sure that there were numerous political deals that were involved in all of the sort of strange moves that Blue Jays have made. But I don't know. This is his eighth year and they've never made the playoffs, and they never really ever came all that close to making the playoffs. They've had a couple of pretty good years, and a couple of pretty bad years. So they just seem to be treading water.

From my perspective, that doesn't seem to be good enough, but I don't know. The Blue Jays have stuck with him for all this time. I know he's got a contract for at least next year. Maybe they feel like they're on the brink of something. But to me as an outsider looking in, I don't understand it. I don't understand the situation there, and I'm not privy to any information to make me feel otherwise. All the people who have even defended him have not been given anything that has been so overwhelming that has changed my view. I just don't understand that situation up there.

RCS: In an interview last year when you started writing for Sports Illustrated, you said, "I can't even put into words how special it is for me to get to write for SI. And if they would ever send me a free sweatshirt, I wouldn't even know what to do I'd be so happy."

For a young journalist in the changing media environment, is writing for Sports Illustrated, still the ultimate aspiration?

Posnanski: I guess it's been a while since I've been a young journalist. But here's what I honestly think, because I've certainly heard this from people who say "I'm glad this is your dream, but I'm 27 and that's not my dream." So I've certainly heard that point of view. But I would say this, and this is coming from someone who still really loves the written word and loves the opportunity to really explore issues and topics.

I think for a certain kind of writer I don't think there's a better job in the world than Sports Illustrated. I think that for the kind of writer that I am, and the kind of things that I want to do that hasn't changed for me. It still gives me every opportunity that I've ever wanted. As a sports writer, our editors want us to dig deeper and the opportunity and the resources and the space and the mission to try to write really good stuff. In a lot of sports, in my mind, nobody does that better than Sports Illustrated.

I know that through the years there's been this feeling that Sports Illustrated has sort of tailed off and every so often you'll read this story about somebody writing how they can save themselves and all that. I don't have any doubt in my mind as a reader of Sports Illustrated that their have peaks and valleys. But I think the mission has stayed true.

Now I'm on the inside a little bit. I know the editors. I know the writers. I still think it's the best collection of sports writing and sports editing talent in the country. So I think for a certain kind of writer it is.

Now the opportunities that I don't want, but I certainly don't begrudge other people, the opportunity to sort of be known, the opportunity to speak to a huge huge audience, the opportunity to reach out into a community of sports fans, I think that there are plenty of things and plenty of places that are as good or better as Sports Illustrated. I certainly would not begrudge anyone if they wanted to be the next Bill Simmons. I certainly would not begrudge anyone if they wanted to be the next Pat Forde. Pat is a very, very good friend of mine and a guy that does an amazing job of working along several different media types. He's on TV and radio and in Newspapers, where is terrific. And in magazines, he's terrific and online, he's terrific. That's a new paradigm for sports writing. And if I'm 26-years old maybe I want to be the next Pat Forde, and that's an absolutely admirable thing to want to be. If that's the dream job than I could not be happier for those people.

But for me as somebody who doesn't really want all of that, I think Sports Illustrated is still the very peak.

RCS: Alright, last three questions. What's your favorite infomercial? What infomercial does the best job selling a crappy product? And what's the best actual product to be sold via infomercial?

Posnanski: So the first one is what is my favorite infomercial and I just have to go with the classic Slap Chop. It's sort of just him at his prime, doing prime informercial work. It's sort of his hamlet. So I'll say that's my favorite.

The one that does the best job of selling a crappy product is not even close: It's Snuggies. By far. Nobody is even close to that. They created a whole new genre, in my mind, of the infomercial. It wasn't just that it was a crappy product, because there have been lots of crappy products, but it was crappy product that nobody could possibly have any use for. They invented this use, and they invented this sort of crazy, hey, you need a blanket that allows you to use your hands. And people were like, yeah, I need that. They definitely created a whole new market. I think that's done the best job and I think that's the Citizen Kane of the infomercials.

Then the best product. I've not really had a great product from stuff that I've bought off of infomercials. I never got to buy the Magic Bullet, and I've heard it's great. I'm thinking it would be really great, but my wife wouldn't let me buy one. So I'm going to say the Turbo Cooker is probably the best one that we've bought and not because it worked -- cause it didn't -- but we still use it in some form. Usually use it as a planter or something. But we still use the Turbo Cooker, so I'm gonna say that's the most successful one that we've purchased.