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.

The writer known best for his mountainous study of the 1988 presidential race, “What It Takes,” was remembered just as much this week for his equally memorable magazine work.

Richard Ben Cramer, a Pulitzer Prize winner who was 62 when he died Monday from lung cancer, was especially hailed by fellow authors and journalists for his 1986 Esquire magazine article, “What Do You Think of Ted Williams Now?”

It was like so much of Cramer’s best work: unflinching, drawing out the visceral, honest truth about a man. Williams’ career drew to a close in 1960 — marked by the last home run he hit in his last at-bat that John Updike famously wrote about for The New Yorker — and Cramer describes the aftermath:

And what was Ted left with? Well, there was pride. He’d done, he felt, the hardest thing in sport: by God, he hit the ball. And there was pride in his new life: he had his name on more rods and reels, hunting guns, tackle boxes, jackets, boots, and bats than any man in the world. He studied fishing like no other man, and lent to it his fame and grace, his discerning eye. He had his tournament wins and trophies, a fishing book and fishing movies, and he got his thousand of the Big Three. Jimmy Albright says to this day: “Best all around, the best is Ted.” But soon there were scores of boats on the bay, and not so many fish. And even the Miramichi had no pools with salmon wall to wall. And Ted walked away from the tournaments. There wasn’t the feeling of sport in them, or respect for the fish anymore. Somehow it had changed. Or maybe it was Ted.

Tom Junod called this “the greatest magazine profile ever written,” and recalled the impression it made on him before his own journalism career was underway:

It didn’t sound like anything I’d ever heard, before or since, and in that sound was freedom… freedom to sound like yourself, freedom to sound like your subject, freedom to do what it takes to make both a subject’s experience and the experience of a subject come alive. Sure, there were plenty of sound effects and exclamation points, but it wasn’t Wolfean — it was Bellovian, the work of a first-class noticer who knows that writing “like an angel,” or however it is that writers are supposed to write, is a small thing next to writing, well, like a mensch.

Alex Belth uses the same word in his homage, calling Cramer “a mensch of the highest order, a good man, as well as a wonderful storyteller,” and linking to plenty more, including an acclaimed profile of Jerry Lee Lewis. Here’s another Esquire sports piece from 1987, “Fore Play,” that Belth posted Friday, and he has another remembrance from David Hirshey, Cramer’s editor at the magazine, on what happened when the Williams piece he submitted was far too long.

Joe Posnanski cites Cramer’s 1995 story for Sports Illustrated on Cal Ripken Jr. surpassing Lou Gehrig as his discovery point for a writer who later became a friend:

After I read that piece about Cal Ripken — which includes the magical word “fotobooger” and ends with a seemingly simple story of Ripken signing autographs that gets to the heart of why he mattered so much to people — I had to read everything Richard had ever written. It was only then that I read the Esquire Ted Williams story, which I had heard about and copied but had never really read. Of course, the story was more than great. It was life altering.

ESPN The Magazine writer Ryan McGee recalls how Cramer had done his homework — on him — before their collaboration on a NASCAR-produced documentary about Dale Earnhardt Jr.:

“Now, Ryan McGee, there’s something you need to know about me that you can’t learn by reading the inside of that book jacket. And it’s the one thing you don’t want to hear.”

“What’s that?”

“I don’t know a damn thing about NASCAR, and I surely do not know a damn thing about Dale Earnhardt.”

Cramer’s 2001 biography, “Joe DiMaggio: The Hero’s Life,” was more than 500 pages in length, and it received mixed reviews. While many of Cramer’s friends and admirers praised it, others were taken aback by the author’s searing investigation of another lionized, but flawed, baseball legend, especially DiMaggio’s shortcomings as a father and ill treatment of others.

As Ian Jackman wrote for the London Review of Books:

Cramer isn’t someone you’d want picking through the debris of your life . . . He tells these stories straight and unsanctimoniously. He does not catalogue DiMaggio’s misdeeds just to run up the score against him.

Gawker’s “50 Least Important Writers of 2012″ is beyond savage, and even beyond snark, which is refreshing. Some usual suspects abound from the world of sports, but I won’t spoil the fun here. Click the link, admire the editors for poking fun at themselves, and revel in this blustery takedown of a certain Grantland contributor who:

“. . . is the embodiment of writer-as-character, and, worse, of the idea that mixing exaggerated intellectualism with shitty pop culture subjects will produce something brilliant. It won’t. It will produce a waste of time.”

I gave myself a little birthday present last month by downloading the electronic version of “Everything They Had: Sports Writing from David Halberstam.”

Published in 2009, two years after the author’s tragic death in an automobile accident, “Everything They Had” is a collection of Halberstam’s non-book sportswriting for newspapers, magazines and online publications, including ESPN.com’s discontinued Page 2 feature.

In the introduction, editor Glenn Stout — who’s behind the SB Nation Longform feature I’ve blogged about here before — explained how Halberstam:

“. . . recognized that sports are important because sports matter to people, and that sports, and how we relate to sports, say something of value about ourselves, our society, and our history and culture, one of the rare places where citizens of differing creeds, classes and races come together.”

Influenced by the work of sportswriting giants W.C. Heinz, Red Smith and Jimmy Cannon, as well as New Journalism pioneers Gay Talese, Jimmy Breslin, Murray Kempton and Tom Wolfe, Halberstam made the break from daily journalism to focus on book writing in the mid-1960s.

The pieces in this collection span nearly six decades, and reveal the astonishing range and deeply humane touch Halberstam demonstrated in so much of his work, sports and otherwise. They include “Horse Racing in Warsaw” for The New York Times in 1965, as he was preparing to leave the newspaper business, “Why Men Love Baseball,” from Parade in 1989, “How I Fell in Love with the NFL,” from ESPN.com in 2001 and “Ice Breakers,” about female hockey players in Condé Nast Sports for Women in 1998.

Stout was working at the Boston Public Library when he met Halberstam, who was researching “The Summer of ‘49,” and it became an acquaintanceship that led to other collaborations. This collection’s title stems from a project they talked about, a compendium of sportswriting about women athletes they tentatively called “Everything She Had.”

That idea never came to fruition, but Stout immediately adapted the title for this volume, which received the endorsement of Halberstam’s widow.

While I’ve found collections ideal for e-reading, a book of this magnitude can’t be absorbed properly only in the digital realm. With my level of interest in the subject, as well as the author, my Christmas present to myself will have to be the print edition.

In a new introduction to the 1992 update of “The Best and the Brightest,” his Pulitzer Prize-winning account of American foreign and military policy in Vietnam, Halberstam wrote that while he wasn’t sentimental about the newspaper world, it was a challenge to do without a regular byline:

“The byline is a replacement for many other things, not the least of them money. If someone ever does a great psychological profile of journalism as a profession, what will be apparent will be the need for gratification — if not instant, then certainly relatively immediately. Reporters take sustenance from their bylines; they are a reflection of who you are, what you do, and why, to an uncommon degree, you exist.”

He explained in the same paragraph that “I had replaced the need for immediacy with something far more powerful, an obsession” and that his book projects were “many universities I entered.”

But he clearly longed to inhabit that vast creative space between the daily journalist he no longer was and the author he had become. The work in “Everything They Had” demonstrates the renewed sustenance Halberstam found between books. Readers will be rewarded with the additional gifts of his immense talent that have been expertly brought together in one volume.

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.