Good writing from a baseball insider

• When is the last time you called a major league baseball player a good writer?

Lots of talented authors have written superbly about baseball. Among all our national games, baseball is a game that lends itself easily to good wordsmiths. But rare among those smithies is an author who has played the game at the highest level. Now we have one.

Doug Glanville played major league baseball for nine years for the Chicago Cubs, Philadelphia Phillies and Texas Rangers. He is bringing all that experience to bear in a series of occasional pieces for the New York Times.

He is also bringing an easy, readable style that is all the more remarkable when you find out that he has an engineering degree from the University of Pennsylvania.

His latest offering, It Gets Lake Early Out There, is now on the New York Times web site. You can find links to his two previous pieces there, too.

Good column, good game, good stuff.