The Sunday Long Read

The inside story of how Cuban players make their way to the United States and into Major League Baseball, “Las Grandes Ligas.”

How is it that an orange oblate spheroid—a basketball—can make an impression on kids that transcends time and space? From childhood to old age, the game becomes a measure of skill and desire that endures. And this is true everywhere in the world. A series of strange coincidences brought the writer to discover that maybe the globe is really just an immense basketball.

When Katharine Graham and the Washington Post company decided to launch the Esquire of sports magazines in 1979, they were riding high. If anyone was poised to create something touched with magic it was at the Post Company. Why then did they sell it just a few years later despite launching the careers of some of the most talented writers and editors of its generation? The Inside story of the greatest magazine you’ve never read.