Joe Posnanski and Michael Schur travel the world for sports fandom stories

Joe Posnanski and Michael Schur turned a shared love of sports into a globe-spanning search for what fandom means now. Their book, Big Fan: Two Friends, 82,490 Miles, and the Wild, Wonderful Sports We Love, treats cheering not as trivia but as a living social force, one that still cuts across geography, class, and political identity.

A book about fans, not just games

Published by Penguin Random House on May 19, 2026, Big Fan runs 448 pages and arrives as both a travelogue and a cultural field guide. The publisher describes it as a celebration of fans and the things they love, ranging from baseball, basketball, chess, darts, football, futbol, Indigenous North American stickball, pickleball, and WWE to Taylor Swift and Star Wars. That sweep matters: the project argues that fandom is bigger than a scoreboard, and that the rituals around love, loyalty, and belonging can be as revealing as the contests themselves.

The book also includes a foreword by Tom Hanks, which signals the scale of the idea at its center. Penguin Random House lists the title as a USA Today bestseller and an NPR’s Book of the Day selection, underscoring that the project has resonated far beyond the niche audience that usually follows sports-writing.

Why Posnanski and Schur make sense together

Posnanski brings decades of sports journalism authority to the project. He is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of seven books, including The Baseball 100, Paterno, and The Secret of Golf, and he has been named National Sportswriter of the Year by five different organizations. That background gives the book its reporting muscle and its eye for detail, especially when the subject is not athletic performance but the culture built around it.

Schur adds a different kind of institutional memory. He is an Emmy Award-winning American television producer and writer who co-created Parks and Recreation, Brooklyn Nine-Nine, and The Good Place, and he also worked on Saturday Night Live and The Office. His career has been built on observing how people form communities, joke together, and define themselves through shared language. In Big Fan, that sensibility helps turn sports fandom into a broader story about ritual, identity, and social connection.

82,490 miles in search of belonging

The book’s subtitle makes clear that this was not a desk-bound exercise. Posnanski and Schur traveled 82,490 miles to collect stories of fandom, moving from place to place in search of what people protect, pass down, and perform when they care deeply about a team, a match, or even a cultural touchstone that feels like a team. The result is less a celebrity conversation than a portrait of how people build communities around common devotion.

That approach is especially important in a moment when national life can feel fragmented by politics, algorithms, and status lines. Sports fandom remains one of the few mass experiences that can still pull strangers into the same emotional arc at the same time. A bar crowd, a neighborhood league, a packed arena, and a living room can all produce the same surge of recognition: we are in this together, even if we disagree on almost everything else.

What the range of fandom reveals

The breadth of subjects in Big Fan is part of its argument. Baseball and football sit alongside chess and darts, while futbol and Indigenous North American stickball widen the lens beyond the usual American sports hierarchy. Pickleball and WWE show how newer or less traditional forms of fandom also create identity, while Taylor Swift and Star Wars make clear that the habits of devotion extend well past athletics.

• Sports fandom is not just about winning. It is about repetition, memory, inherited language, and the comfort of shared routines.

• The most powerful fan cultures often cross class and geography because they offer belonging before they offer expertise.

• The rituals around cheering, collecting, debating, and remembering can be as meaningful as the event itself.

Seen this way, fandom becomes a civic habit. It teaches people how to gather, how to disagree without dissolving, and how to attach personal meaning to something larger than themselves.

Why the CBS Saturday Morning segment matters

CBS News’ CBS Saturday Morning describes its coverage as original reporting and profiles, and the related video is titled Two friends tell stories of sports fandom. That framing fits the book’s deeper purpose. Rather than leaning on banter alone, the segment positions Posnanski and Schur as observers of a social world that many people participate in but rarely study closely.

CBS Saturday Morning itself says it delivers original reporting, breaking news, and profiles of leading figures in culture and the arts. That makes it a fitting home for a conversation about fandom as culture, not just entertainment. The story reaches beyond sports pages and into the space where media, identity, and everyday belonging overlap.

The deeper social value of fandom

The appeal of Big Fan is that it treats sports devotion as a serious subject without stripping away its joy. Fans do not just consume culture; they make it, through chants, rituals, local traditions, inherited loyalties, and improbable emotional investments. That matters in a divided country, where many institutions struggle to generate trust, but fan communities still produce durable forms of connection.

Posnanski and Schur’s project suggests that fandom is one of the last widely shared languages. It can be loud, irrational, tribal, funny, and deeply local, yet it also creates a kind of democratic common ground. Whether the object is a baseball team, a wrestling spectacle, a card game, or a pop icon, the underlying need is the same: to feel part of something with memory, meaning, and a crowd to witness it.