By all accounts, I should have been not just a big fan, but a huge fan of this book. I have read and enjoyed Joe Posnanski’s writing for years, including his Baseball 100 and Why We Love Baseball projects. I’ve also been a big fan of Michael Schur’s TV writing, with Parks and Rec in particular being one of my favorite shows ever. Before I knew who Michael Schur was, I enjoyed his baseball blog, Fire Joe Morgan. I have even been a listener to the Poscast, co-hosted by Posnanski and Schur, for many years. I was excited when they announced that they were writing a book together, and the topic seemed right up their alley: exploring what it means to be a fan by crossing the globe and finding out what fans get for all they put into their obsessions.
So it was a real surprise to me how little I enjoyed Big Fan: Two Friends, 82,490 Miles, and the Wild, Wonderful Sports We Love. For one thing, I was disappointed that so little of the trip in question was taken together. Perhaps I’m being naive, but the subtitle and the cover certainly suggest two friends going to events together and having experiences. Instead, by and large, the book is separated into Schur chapters and Posnanski chapters, making this more like a shared collection of personal essays. Another issue is that the already broad concept of fandom is stretched quite thin by both authors. The word “sports” is pretty prominently featured in the title, so why is there a chapter about how good one of Schur’s writer friends is at crossword puzzles? Why is one chapter an interview with a different writer about how much he likes Steely Dan? Or one written by Schur and Posnanski’s daughters experiences as Taylor Swift fans? (I question I ask despite being quite a big of the artist myself.) As uninteresting as these chapters are, they might be more relevant to readers’ interest than Posnanski playing pickleball for the first time or Schur going to Wrestlemania.
I listened to this as an audiobook, reasoning that I would enjoy since I was such a fan of their podcast, but both Schur and Posnanski take on a sort of authorial voice when reading their work that was honestly pretty unpleasant, and made their corny dad-style humor even harder to take. And oh my god, the footnotes. The audiobook has a little “ding” noise to signify a footnote and another, slightly different “ding” to signify that footnote’s end. Let me tell you, that’s an excellent way to get your reader to hate how many footnotes you’re using.
All in all, for a collaboration between two writers I like, Big Fan is shockingly unfocused and really light on the kind of amusing anecdotes and human interest stories I’ve come to expect. This is a swing and a miss.
