ly those Apple Cinnamon Cheerios. The sentence would have

ly those Apple Cinnamon Cheerios. The sentence would have lost its punch if Wilstein had written simply of “the cereal he loves in the morning.” Specific details always are better than easy generalities. '

Robin Finn of The New York Times is the most readable reporter in the world of tennis. Last summer Finn was at Wimbledon on the day Stefan Edberg, Jim Courier and Michael Chang all lost their second-round matches:

“For one, the defeat could be traced to a case of lost magic . .. For another, it was a case of lost meanness; like a mower with a blunt blade, he lacked the proper cutting edge to leave his mark on the grass. For the third, it was a case where height meant might.”

Columnist George F. Will, who regularly bats over .400 in the pundits’ league, is a baseball nut. Two years ago he wrote a memorable piece on firstbaseman John Olerud. “In the cacophony of the Toronto Blue Jays’ clubhouse, Olerud is a fjord of Norwegian calm.” You could work all night, Esmeralda, and not find a smoother metaphor.

The best known of all baseball writers, of course, is Roger Angell of The New Yorker. He began an autobiographical sketch by recalling that he became an addicted reader at an early age: “Peeling back the leaves of memory, 1 discover a peculiar mulch of names . . . Mel Ott’s stumpy, cowtail swing is still before me, and so are Gehrig’s thick calves and Ruth’s debutante ankles.” And you could hammer all day, Horatio, and not forge a more descriptive sentence.

The Good Stuff comes from all kinds of sports. Dawn Pradat wrote a fine vignette for Southern Living about rock climbing. She worked in the first person, present tense, and gained all the tension of a taut rope. "The rock, smooth as marble in some places and cat’s tongue coarse in others, feels cool beneath my fingers.” Late in the after