Alex Belth — one of this blog’s favorites — is expanding his curatorial powers with a new feature on Deadspin called The Stacks.

He describes it as a “blog devoted to classic magazine and newspaper writing,” most of it sports, but not all. The initial posts are reprints of pieces by Gay Talese, John Schulian and Leigh Montville, with related links, as well as blogs, artwork and other material that has caught his finely-tuned eye for the good stuff thanks to his magnificent Bronx Banter blog. What a treat already.

In his introduction, Belth explains that his growing fascination with mid-20th century popular culture has inspired him to start this project:

The point is simple: find classic pieces of writing that can’t be found on-line and give them a home. Introduce them to a new audience or present them to readers who haven’t read them in years. That’s what I’ll offer in this space, a simulcast of what’s being reprinted in this Banter series.

This off-shoot site is intended to be a living archive, so there will be material that is reprinted for the first time on-line but also, I’ll provide plenty of posts with links to worthy material that’s already on-line but that you may have missed. It won’t all be sports, it won’t all be links to articles. Sometimes it will be interviews or author profiles.

If I were a pious soul, I’d say Belth is doing the Lord’s work here. It’s not a nostalgia trip to preserve “offline” classics and introduce them to new readers, but the realization of the best of both old and new media in one place.

Before the winter set in, Alex Belth penned this marvelous tribute to his late father and how “his remaining connection to the sport was the two Rogers, Roger Angell and Roger Kahn. They have been linked in my mind ever since.”

The SB Nation Longform article delves deeply into that linkage, what “The Old Man” thought of the writers and their works, and Belth’s more recent encounters with both Rogers after his father’s death.

Afterward, as he held his father’s copy of “The Boys of Summer,” the son admitted it was “about a father and son connecting through baseball:”

I imagined Dad reading the book when it was published forty years ago. He was married to a beautiful woman and his career in TV was flourishing, his fantasies being realized. I understood how he could have seen himself in Kahn. But he didn’t have Kahn’s drive or professional discipline. Yet if the Old Man never achieved the professional success he craved, if sobriety was not the perfect tool to repair his own spiritual wreckage, and if he wasn’t always the father I needed him to be, he was not a failure. He taught me about generosity and compassion, to value hard work and effort, and above all, how to appreciate a good story.

It was the difference, in the end, between what we want to be and who we are.

With the winter still doggedly hanging around as March and spring training have arrived, I’ve read over this story several times, trying to forge another connection that has eluded my grasp. Perhaps the timing isn’t anything more than coincidental, but I’ve always found the baseball off-season the perfect time to plumb the deeper chords of memory.

After all, this is a sport that, at least in America, is shrouded by its past like no other. The familial connections that Belth so eloquently explores are a strong example of why this is.

I have no such links, given that my father wasn’t a passionate baseball fan. I can’t recall him ever reading much about the game, much less watching or following it.

Not long after my parents were married, and before they started a family, he attended Milwaukee Braves games at County Stadium with my mother’s uncles.

After the Braves followed us to Atlanta, and as I was deeply immersed in my first sporting love, there were a few games we attended together at Atlanta Stadium. I remember wearing my full softball uniform, including stirrups, cap and glove. Only my plastic cleats had to be sacrificed, in the name of practicality, for sneakers.

Soon after the marriage dissolved, like that of Belth’s parents, and the memories of those times are rather short.

But they keep recurring as I proceed in middle age, fighting the urge to traffick in cheap nostalgia. Are memories what we try to revive and understand when we wonder if there’s not much more to look forward to? A devoted baseball fan would say not; there are always new memories waiting to be created. Their meaning, like a fine wine, requires years to distill.

And now I’m sounding like the baseball poets, something I avidly seek to avoid, and the subject of tomorrow’s post. Grapefruit and Cactus League games are underway, and a month of anticipation is counting down. A friend of mine, on Facebook, is posting a “Brave of the day” baseball card, which evokes even more memories. We’re roughly the same age, so we share the same timeline that predates the Braves’ spectacular success of the 1990s.

He remembers, as I do, “crowds” of 2,000 or so at Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium (the name change didn’t do much except placate petty politicians), and being implored by Milo Hamilton to show support for a team 35 games out of first place.

That scolding always rubbed me the wrong way, and he thankfully got out of town and off local airwaves. But it never soured me on the obsession of following an utterly hopeless team, or feeling devastated when the rare fat years (I’m especially thinking 1982 here) were followed by so many more lean ones.

My friend just wants the baseball season to hurry up and get here, and I have to admit I’ve been eager for it to return. After a number of years of feigning only idle interest stemming from the 1994 strike, I’ve come to realize that it’s such a foolish thing, to “boycott” something you love so much. You’re stunting your own understanding of the memories that have shaped you, and not just as a baseball fan.

I’ve truly enjoyed the last few summers of turning on a game and letting it take me back, way back. Steadily, this has helped me catch up to what the game has meant to me on a deeper level than who won, who lost, and what the standings look like today.

It’s that connection that gets switched on when March turns to April, and as the bitter cold of winter melts into an early spring.

Whenever I read something by Alex Belth, I learn something entirely new.

A former New York film editor and SI.com contributor, Belth runs the Bronx Banter blog, which is ostensibly about the Yankees and the arts and culture scene in New York.

But for someone who has no use for the Yankees and doesn’t live in New York, I’ve found his blog to be a gold mine for other reasons.

His category devoted to sports books has been a great recent discovery of mine; it’s such a treasure trove, especially for volumes about baseball. His interview with sports columnist-turned-screenwriter John Schulian is a pure gem.

Belth also penned this fabulous remembrance of the late, great, unforgettable Boston sportswriter George Kimball for Deadspin.

Last week Belth continued his new association with Sports On Earth, USA Today’s just-launched competitor to Grantland, in another of his signature Q & A interviews. This one was with Mickey Herskowitz, the legendary Houston sports columnist (and for a time George W. Bush ghostwriter) who for a few brief shining issues in 1969 and 1970 edited a monthly called Jock magazine.

The first issue featured the pennant-winning Mets at the dawn of what might be the last glory age of sports in New York.

Not being a native, I had never heard of Jock, but its list of non-sportswriting contributors was impressive: Woody Allen, William F. Buckley Jr., Pete Hamill and others.

As Herskowitz unfolds the story of Jock, it predictably becomes one of massive red ink and the inevitable quick death, after just eight issues.

“Oh, it was a heck of a magazine and a lot of intellectual people loved it, and I only regret that we never got a chance to do our best work. We didn’t have enough time, and we were under a lot of pressure in the time we did have. We had a small staff, but what we did put out we did well. Everything in it is something I can be proud of.”

As general-interest sports magazines continue to decline, it’s interesting to note that long-folded publications are getting a revival on their online successors.

Like The National, a daily sports-only newspaper that existed for too short a time in the early 1990s (also due to a shortage of funds to match its grandiose ambitions), Jock was full of pluck and personality and Herskowitz was always eager to try out new ways to write about sports.

As Charles Pierce pointed out about the place that gave him the job he loved the most:

“The important thing though is not that The National folded. The important thing is that it existed at all, and that there were people willing to take the chance to be part of it. For good and ill, the sports media universe was just starting to explode out of the box of what would become known later as the ‘mainstream media.’ “

If you love reading about sportswriters of another era, New York writer Alex Belth is a real treat. On his multifaceted Bronx Banter blog he recently interviewed sports columnist and Hollywood screenwriter John Schulian and has been reprinting manuscripts of articles from another legend, W.C. Heinz.

For Deadspin, Belth has penned this enormously robust remembrance of the enormously talented and unforgettable sportswriter George Kimball, who died last summer:

“Hunter Thompson lobbied Jann Wenner, the publisher of Rolling Stone, to hire George, who had been writing freelance music reviews. In a letter to George, Thompson wrote, ‘I want Wenner to have the experience of dealing with someone more demonstrably crazy than I am—so that he’ll understand that I am, in context, a very reasonable person.’ “

You buy the ticket, you take the ride, indeed.

“He drank, he smoked, he ate sticks of butter with mashed potatoes in a river of ketchup, slept in a coffin over McSorley’s tavern, and fretted that he’d never written a meaningful book.“

The latter haunts over this splendid retelling of Kimball’s life, and the speculation continues over whether his bad habits prevented that book from crystallizing. Kimball collaborated with Schulian on an anthology of American boxing writing, At the Fights, that Belth says “cemented his legacy:”

“Here was a chance to show that he belonged in the same collection as Mencken, Liebling, and Mailer. He wasn’t leaving it for fate or history to decide. He would anthologize himself. He would help select America’s finest boxing writing, and he would put himself in there, too, alongside Hamill and Schulberg and W.C. Heinz. If he wasn’t going to be elected to a hall of fame, well, fuck it—he would build one himself, right over his head.”

It would be tempting to read this and further bemoan the current state of sports journalism, with its racehorse emphasis on scoops, speculation and instant analysis. But this has always been the case, and there is plenty of great reporting, writing and commentary out there that is being revived online and recalled on sites like Bronx Banter that’s a subject for another post.

What’s new is the multiplatform punditry, the warp speed of 24/7 news, “confirming” stories others have reported, stupefying chatter about Tim Tebow’s Christianity and slovenly attire that is being countered with a dress code policy.

Although he came along after the age of television, Kimball reveled in the earthy grit of the sports and celebrity world of his time, and the story Belth weaves about his oversized life is well worth the read. In an age of preening, blow-dried blowhards, being reminded of the utter humanity of a complicated, gifted creature is a welcome departure.

Belth, who also writes for SI.com, has written a biography of Curt Flood and worked in the film industry, was interviewed earlier this year by baseball writer and sabermetrician Jonah Keri.

There’s a guacamole recipe in there too.