Recommended: Ray Ratto

You might have noticed my "Other Good Reads" list of links on the leftnav, and you also might have wondered who those people are and why I recommend them so highly. So occasionally I will tell you a little bit more about them.

Today's subject: Ray Ratto, sports columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle and CBSSportsline.com. Why do I like Ratto? I've never met the guy, but he seems like the kind of person I'd enjoy talking to. His writing style is conversationally formal -- i.e. he sounds smart without sounding like a professor. And his sense of humor comes shining through in every column. My earliest recollection of a Rattoism was his mention of a streaker at the Oakland Coliseum, "wedding tackle dangling in the breeze." I thought that was clever, and pretty bold for a mainstream newspaper, especially in the sports column. Plus, he's a tubby, cynical sports guy, so you could say he's somewhat of a personal role model of mine.

Here's a recent column from Ratto's Chronicle archive that helps illustrate what I like about him. It's about the possibility of Major League Baseball adopting some form of instant replay to correct umpire mistakes. Here's the lede:

Rumor has it that Major League Baseball is attacking its current spate of blown calls in a fascinating way - by flirting with the idea of using replay in the Arizona Fall League.

Which is to say that in its forward-thinking view, baseball thinks the way to test the efficacy of replay is to use it in venues where few people care about the original call, let alone a second view of it.

Other gems include his notion that the controversy is again a hot topic because the Yankees' Alex Rodriguez lost a home run to a missed call last week ("if a Yankee or Red Sox player sneezes, someone wants to make antihistamines mandatory"), as well as his description of player/manager/umpire arguments: "angry men in knickers who believe they have been wronged act(ing) as though wasp hives have been forcibly inserted in their delicates."

See? Who wouldn't like a regular dose of that kind of prose? Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Mr. Ray Ratto!