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Some baseball stories are exciting even to non-fans, and in theory, “Undrafted” should be one of them. Over 30 years ago, writer (and fantasy baseball pioneer) Daniel Okrent used a 1982 regular season Milwaukee Brewers/Baltimore Orioles game as the basis for “Nine Innings.” From the perspective of an outsider, the book offered one of the purest glimpses at the details that make the sport a rewarding watch. What Okrent did in 288 pages, writer-director Joe Mazzello tries unsuccessfully to do in 105 minutes with his new film “Undrafted.” From a inspired-by-a-true-story premise, “Undrafted” takes that one-game premise inside the dugout, watching a team of hapless amateurs stare down a crucial league playoff matchup in the wake of learning that their best player was overlooked at the Mlb Draft.

“Team” is a loose term here, as the dozen players and their accompanying, overriding personalities never really seem like a cohesive group. There are the standouts: Philip Winchester as Fotch,...

Think about how different it is to process a professional football game in frame-by-frame replay and razor, high-definitION clarity, with how we process a baseball game on the radio. 

The advent of high-definitION TV has not only changed the way that we watch sports on television, it is in the midst of changing sports themselves, as our games retrofit themselves to fit the package by which we consume them.

With incredibly sharp pictures broadcast onto the incredibly large televisions, sports fans have never been closer to the games. The intimate access we now have as fans is leading us to demand more from the games arbitors and decision makers, and to change the way we value our sports.

Televisions began entering American homes in the 1940s and 50s. In 1972, sales of color TVs finally eclipsed black-and-white sets. But it was the 1980s that began bringing sports fans closer and closer to their games.

Latchkeys #4, “The Bootleg War”, is now available for Kindle and Nook. Author Paul Kupperberg talks about the writing experience.

By Paul Kupperberg

For writers, ideas are like stacked up airplanes circling the fogged in airport. We want desperately to have all of them land safely, but some are going to have to stay up in the air a little longer than others until the weather clears or a runway opens up. As a result, we’ve all got lots of ideas circling our brains but no opportunity to bring them in for a landing on paper as quickly as we would like.

A few years back, Steven Savile, on a writers email list to which we both belong, suggested that a bunch of us join forces to take some of those high-flying ideas, throw them into a hat, and pick a few on which a dozen or so of us could work together.

Details are sketchy at this point, but I just received the very sad news that Robert Sklar, film historian, author, and long-time professor of cinema studies at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts passed away over the weekend in Spain, apparently of injuries suffered in a cycling accident. Professor Sklar -- Bob to his friends, but always Prof. Sklar to me -- was my faculty adviser for my two years at Nyu and one of the best teachers I ever had, on the subject of film or anything else.

Though you may not recognize his name, Sklar had an enormous impact on the world of film and film studies. His books, including the indispensable "Movie-Made America,", have become required reading for thousands of cinema studies students. Educated at Princeton and Harvard, Sklar worked as a professor of history at the University of Michigan before moving to Nyu's burgeoning...