"The Old Timer's Game" is a piece of literature that reflects greatly the inner struggles of Ty Cobb, who is arguably one of the best baseball players in history. This article is known as a great example of fine writing that was published on August 27, 1997 in The New Yorker by Terrence Rafferty, a notorious American writer and journalist. The elements that I found most interesting about his writing style are the adjectives, the dialogue with the reader and the sentence variation. This article is enjoyable to read because Rafferty doesn't follow the strict writing rules that we have all been taught during school; he is very conversational and writes as he would speak to the reader, the reader on the other hand, feels comfortable and relaxed. The natural approach makes this paper a perfect example of "fine writing." The first thing that caught my eye in Rafferty's " The Old Timer's Game" is his plethora of adjectives. Rafferty shows this when he describes Cobb as "-the meanest, the dirtiest, the most arrogant, and the most unscrupulous ballplayer of any era." (130) This sentence is a perfect example of Rafferty's fine ability to instill clear images in the reader's mind. I think that this is the quality that impressed me the most in this text. .
By using fresh words and alternating the writing's tone, the author finds a perfect balance between formality and informality; allowing the reader to feel comfortable like he was speaking with a friend. This conversational tone shows when Rafferty says: "reviewing his accomplishments, you can't help lapsing into the breathless superlatives of sports biographies aimed at juvenile fans" (130). Here is another example of Rafferty's superior use of adjectives. In this sentence he effectively describes different objects with few words, in the words of Donald Hall "Less is more, in prose as in architecture" (Trimble).