Remembering Michael Steinberg
by William Meiners
Michael Steinberg (1940-2019) was one of a few established writers that found Sport Literate in its earliest days. Even as we were trying to figure ourselves out. His essay, “Elegy for Ebbets,” earned him (and SL) a nod in Best American Essays — our first of many.
After I moved to Michigan in 2013, I got to know him personally, and he became a friend mentor. I last saw Mike (that’s him in his New York high school pitching days) in mid-October 2019 in Lansing. I dropped off a box of Elegy for Ebbets, his final essay collection that we published. He signed a few copies to early buyers, and we talked some playoff baseball, which he would have had trouble seeing due to his upcoming eye surgery. I didn’t know I wouldn’t see him again. He died at home in December, a metastasized cancer newly discovered in his body. Of course, I wish our October goodbye could have been more meaningful.
Mike wrote a lot about baseball. But these essays are just a short lead off first base because he always looked at something bigger. That final collection includes four new essays alongside three previously published gems that all earned BAE nods. All capture a life around baseball. He writes about finally quitting fastpitch softball (to the betterment of his marriage) in his mid-forties, recapturing the focus from his high school pitching days to become a memoirist in his fifties, and, in an angst-filled story about throwing out the first pitch at a Michigan State game, he’s pondering his own mortality, then in his sixties.
In “LA Breakdown,” which you can read here, Mike offers an unflinching look at his freshman year at UCLA. Many writers knew the man Mike became… the attentive professor who wrote alongside his students, the award-winning writer, and a groundbreaking editor in the field of creative nonfiction. But in Los Angeles, in 1958, he was just an 18-year-old kid who couldn’t get out of his own way. Not until the transplanted New Yorker found familiar ground on a softball field, shagging flies and tossing the horsehide around, coaching up his fraternity brothers, and losing himself in the game he loved.
William Meiners is the founding editor of Sport Literate.