Hold It Right There

Earlier today a friend asked me a question about writing and restraint, which was inspired by a post by Chris Jones on his blog http://sonofboldventure.blogspot.com/2011/01/words-that-arent-there.html.

I’ve always thought it important to note that “In the beginning was the word…” not “In the beginning was the words…” Now I know that's not the biblical interpretation but it has always seemed to me that, as far a writing goes, that truth and wisdom are best delivered in brevity, and that sometimes, the more words we use, the farther away we move from wisdom. Thumbnail version: Know when to stop.

That’s one of the reasons I think that writers of any stripe should read poetry – it not only provides tangible lessons like economy, sound and rhythm, but it also teaches that the negative space in writing – what’s not there, and the heartbeat of recognition that takes place over the empty space at the end of a line or a phrase - is as important as what is on the page. The way we connect with a piece of writing is how our brain fills in the blanks.

It’s like backing away from a painting rather than standing too close.

OCTOBER'S SAD LEXICON

After Franklin P. Adams' Baseball's Sad Lexicon, I give you a version for recent Octobers:


These are the saddest of possible words,

“Rivera now pitching the ninth.”

A flurry of fastballs thrown straight that then swerve,

“Rivera now pitching the ninth.”

Ruthlessly turning a comeback to rubble,

With control that is epic and makes the mind boggle,

A pitch that is heavy and nothing but trouble,

“Rivera now pitching the ninth.”

[with apologies to the Twins]

HISTORICALLY BAD

He’s just not that good. Not anymore.

As I write this Rex Sox pitcher Josh Beckett, arguably the staff ace entering the 2010 season, has started fourteen games and accrued an earned run average of 6.67.
Those startling numbers sent me on a search. And here is what I discovered: In the one hundred and ten year history of this franchise, of all the hundreds and hundreds of Red Sox pitchers that have taken the mound in a given season, guess how many have started as many as fourteen games and ended the season with an ERA higher than Josh Beckett’s 6.67?

Uh…. One – and just barely (more on him later).

Josh Beckett has not just been bad in 2010, he has been historically bad. Unbelievably bad. Mind-bogglingly bad. Hall of Shame bad. Horribly, awfully, painfully, even proctologically bad. I don’t think any pitcher in the history of baseball has ever pitched so much, so poorly, at such a high salary as Josh Beckett has in 2010. For all the wrong reasons it’s a season for the ages.

On the day he was drafted, a reporter for a Florida newspaper asked Beckett about fellow pitchers and Texas natives Nolan Ryan, Roger Clemens, and Kerry Wood. Responded Beckett “Yeah, I’m gonna be better than those guys.” At times that seemed possible, even likely.

But that was then. Forget 2003, and the way he beat the Yankees in the World’s Series while pitching for the Marlins, and 2007 when he won twenty and pitched the Red Sox to a championship.

We’re talking NOW, or more accurately, ever since the Red Sox broke their own rule about negotiating a contract during the season. In April Theo Epstein signed Beckett to a contract extension covering 2011 thru 2014 worth $68-million, a deal made before his previous contract, which ran thru this season, had even expired. Think they would like to re-visit that?

Since that time he has been so bad there are, really, no words in the dictionary to describe it. But there are in the Baseball Encyclopedia and on BaseballReference.com.

How bad has Josh Beckett been? Using ERA and a minimum of fourteen starts as a measure, every other pitcher in Red Sox history - with one notable exception - has been NABAB - Not As Bad As Beckett. Matt Young in 1991? Sixteen Starts and a 5.18 ERA, but Not As Bad As Beckett. Danny Darwin in 1994? Thirteen starts and 6.30 - NABAB. Frank Castillo in 2002? NABAB. Ramon Martinez in 2000, Jerry Casale in 1960, Gordon Rhodes in 1935, Frank Heimach in 1926? You can look ‘em up, NABABs all. Even the immortal Joe Harris, who went 2-21 for the 1906 Red Sox, was NABAB – his ERA was a sparkling 3.52, a number Josh Beckett and Theo Epstein would both kill for. And the list goes on and on and on and on.

Somehow this historic achievement has gone unnoticed. In a season best defined by the disabled list it has been easy to overlook Beckett’s expressionless appearances on the mound. Then again, they’ve often been so brief he’s been easy to miss. The fact is even with all the injuries, if Josh Beckett was pitching like an average starting pitcher, rather than a historically bad one, the Red Sox would be making plans for October.

That’s not even the worst part. Because the Sox signed Beckett to an extension before his current contract had expired after putting up one of the worst seasons in Red Sox history, Josh Beckett will rewarded over the next four seasons by becoming the the highest paid pitcher in team history. Which genius thought that was a good idea? The Red Sox can only hope is that Beckett is hurt and his contract is somehow insured, because the only thing worse than a pitcher performing the way Beckett has thus far is a contract that guarantees he’ll be around for another four years no matter how poorly he pitches.

Yet there is still a faint glimmer of hope. Remember, there has been one Red Sox pitcher even worse than Josh Beckett. Like Beckett, he too enjoyed some early success that had everyone whispering “Hall of Fame.” Then one year he went 2-9 in fifteen starts with an ERA of 6.75.

The Sox sent him back to the minor leagues. And two years later he was pitching the way everyone thought Josh Beckett would be pitching this year.

You might remember him, because that guy who was the worst starting pitcher in Red Sox history, 2-9 with a 6.75 ERA in 2008, is now 14-5 with an ERA of 2.36.

His name is Clay Bucholz.


This column appears in the September edition of Boston baseball. Glenn Stout’s Fenway 1912, will appear in 2011. Baseball Heroes, the first title in his juvenile series “Good Sports,” will be available this fall.

Great, But Not Perfect

This October the late John Updike’s classic New Yorker profile of Ted Williams, “Hub Bids Kid Adieu,” turns fifty years old. Recently reissued in book form Updike’s essay is something of a Gilgamesh of literary baseball writing, right up there with Ernest L. Thayer’s Casey at the Bat and Ring Lardner’s epistolary You Know Me, Al.

Recently, while working on my upcoming book Fenway 1912, I had occasion to take close look Updike’s story. Despite its legitimate and deserving place in baseball’s verbal Hall of Fame, it is not flawless. There are, in fact, several factual issues that a neutral scorekeeper might note as errors in their scorebook, or at last send back to the author for some clarification.

I mention them here not to disparage Updike but to underscore how difficult it is to be one hundred percent accurate, to gauge the veracity of another’s reporting - even a reporter as elegant and thorough as Updike - or to render any scene with absolute precision. History, after all, is not black and white but more often flesh and blood and shades of gray.

In the first paragraph Updike writes that “I, and 10,453 others, had shown up primarily because this was the Red Sox's last home game of the season and therefore the last time in all eternity that their regular left fielder… would play in Boston.” True enough, for Ted did retire afterward and did not accompany the team on its final road trip to New York.

But on the morning of September 28, 1960 these facts were not all that widely known. Ted had said he was going to retire, and on September 26 the Sox had released a statement to that effect, but Ted had “retired” before only to change his mind. Many Sox fans and media members wondered if this retirement was genuine, which might explain the sparse crowd. During the 1954 season Williams said he would retire at the end of the year and did so. But once his divorce was finalized on May 11, 1955, Ted abruptly “unretired, signed a lucrative contract beyond the reach of his settlement, and returned the lineup May 23. That act of selfishness may well have cost the Sox a pennant, for without him the Sox were a pedestrian 15-21 in 1955. Yet after Williams returned the Sox went 65-35 in the next hundred games to draw to within three games of first place as late as September 7 before falling back.

The point is that when most fans went to the park on September 28, 1960, Williams’ retirement was hardly certain, and there is little evidence that those other 10,453 fans - almost 5,000 less than the average that year - attended primarily because of Ted. Otherwise meaningless late season games had drawn similar crowds.

Personally I have always wondered what would have happened had Ted popped up in that last at bat. Would his ego have allowed him to end his career so commonly? Or would he, have gone to New York in search of an exclamation point? Would Updike ‘s chronicle of the pop-up been published, or would he have followed Williams to New York hoping for a better ending? Or if Williams had chosen to play in New York anyway after hitting the home run, (Updike notes he learned of Williams’ decision not to go to New York from the radio on his car ride home) would Updike’s story have such lasting resonance? We will never know. It is a small point, but nevertheless Updike’s statement leaves an impression that is less than complete.

And then there is Updike on Fenway Park. He writes that Fenway’s “right field is one of the deepest in the American League, while its left field is the shortest; the high left-field wall, three hundred and fifteen feet from home plate along the foul line, virtually thrusts its surface at right-handed hitters.” Today we know that the distance down the left field line was never 315, but somewhat less, but one can hardly fault Updike for believing number painted on the wall. Yet there is some ambiguity in the claim that “its left field is the shortest,” because that was not true down the line, where Yankee Stadium, at 301 feet in 1960, was considerably shorter, as was Memorial Stadium in Baltimore at 309 feet, although the outfield area in both of those ballparks was considerably larger than that of Fenway Park. Somewhat curiously, Updike does not mention height of the wall, but in 1960 there was not the fetish about what we now call “the Green Monster” as there is now. Updike may not have known precisely how high the wall was.

Apart from the alliterative phrase “lyric little bandbox of a ballpark,” I have never much cared for the way Updike describes the rest of Fenway Park, finding it not only forced and arch but imprecise and in some ways misleading. I have no idea what he means by “the inside of an old-fashioned peeping-type Easter egg,” particularly on a day that was dank, dark and dreary, and I suspect few others do either. I have spent hours looking up images on Google in search of a picture that suggests his intent without success. But if Fenway Park reminded Updike of an Easter egg on that gray September day, that’s fine. When I first saw Fenway Park it reminded me of an abandoned warehouse.

I do, however, take issue with his notion that Fenway Park was “a compromise between Man's Euclidean determinations and Nature's beguiling irregularities.” Most subsequent readers, I think, take that as Updike’s way of saying that’s what happens when you try to fit a ball field onto a patch of land whose boundaries were determined by Nature – presumably herds of cows or sheep - whose pathways later evolved into Boston’ streets.

This common interpretation, is, unfortunately, thoroughly incorrect. The plot of land upon which Fenway Park sits was completely undeveloped before the ballpark was built. The parcel was shaped – as it is now – somewhat like a trapezoid, not due to any irregularities of nature, but because some surveyor planned it that way. Before the ballpark was built the weedy, undeveloped lot between Lansdowne, Jersey and Ipswich streets, as empty as the parking lot of the Burlington Mall at four in the morning, was supposed to be cut into five rectangular blocks. A new street - eventually named Van Ness – was laid out to give these proposed new streets right-angled corners.

Neither Nature nor any wandering cow conspired to create Fenway’s celebrated nooks and crannies. They are the result of “Man’s Euclidean determinations” intersecting with Man’s greed and beguiling desire to cram as many seats as possible into the space, and nothing else.

That may not be as elegantly put as Updike’s fifty-year old lyric little bandbox of a box score, but it is, nevertheless, more accurate.


[Note: Several years ago Globe columnist Alex Beam noticed another potential error in the essay, the probable misidentification of Pumpsie Greene as Willie Tasby.]

Fenway 1912 will appear next year, and the twentieth annual edition Glenn Stout’s The Best American Sports Writing, guest edited by Peter Gammons, will appear this fall. This column first appeared in Boston Baseball, August 2010, as "Great, But Not Perfect. Copyright Glenn Stout, 2010.

Last Pitch

I can still remember the last pitch.

My father was a fan, but not a big fan. No one in my family was, but baseball grabbed me when I was only three or four and never let go. If it was too dark to play ball when my father got home from work I would have a fit, so he installed floodlights in the backyard. Then, no matter how tired he was from working a 12 or 14 hour day in construction, we could still play ball.

Most of my memories of my father are somehow wrapped around a baseball - playing catch, him taking me to games or watching me pitch. It was the one way we really connected. But in high school I tore my rotator cuff and had to stop playing. We didn’t have as much to talk about after that.

Almost twenty years later my shoulder healed and I joined an adult league, one in Boston and later, another in Worcester County, where I then lived. For three or four years I was in both leagues and played forty, fifty games each summer, usually pitching and playing first or third.

I’d call home every week and for the first time since I was a kid my conversations with my father were wrapped around baseball again. I sent him the ball after I won my first game since I was 16- years old, and a T-shirt I got for making the league all-star team. I was as proud of each as of any book I’ve ever written, and so was he.

In April of 1996, the week my daughter was born, Pop was diagnosed with prostate cancer. He had ignored the symptoms for too long and his doctor told him he had a year to live, give or take a week, and to enjoy the time he had. My mother had died a few years before and my father re-married an old family friend, the widow of a man my father had pulled from a burning plane when he was on the crash crew in the Navy. That July he and my stepmother loaded up the RV and he drove out for his final visit.

I had a ballgame, the last one of the year. I was new to my team and we were not very good and I had not been much help. We were playing a team that had already beaten us once and needed only to beat us again to make the playoffs.

Half our team didn’t even show up, but it was a beautiful summer Saturday morning and old Soldier’s Field in Douglas, Massachusetts sparkled like a postcard, dew on the grass glinting in the sun. My dad and stepmother, my wife and baby daughter, my brother, and our neighbors and their kids all sat together in the bleachers, half the crowd.

Before the game our manager muttered “We’re gonna get killed today.” For the first few innings it appeared as if he were right. We played like we did not want to be there and were trailing,5 - 0 in the fourth when I led off with a single, a soft line drive. From the bleachers I could hear his voice again. “Alright!”

That’s the only thing my father ever said at a game - “Alright!” I was happy to get a hit in front of him and some sloppy baseball netted us a couple runs to make it respectable. But when our pitcher put a few guys on in the bottom of the inning it looked hopeless. My manager waved me over from third and even though I had pitched in Boston two days before and my arm was still sore and my legs were shot, I took the ball anyway, just like my father had gone into the backyard all those evenings after working 14 hour days. I was his son. A pop-up, a strikeout and a groundball wrapped around a walk got us out of the inning.

Something happened. We started making impossible plays and improbable hits, rallying against one of the best pitchers in the league. I wiggled through the fifth and sixth, and in the bottom of the inning, down by one with runners on second and third, I bounced a single through the middle and now we led by a run and I needed only three outs for the win. “Alright!”

I had nothing but somehow got two outs and then, with runners on first and second, the batter hit a ground ball down the first base line. I sprinted over to field the ball and end the game.

It felt like someone hit the back of my leg with a ball peen hammer. I went down hard.  My first baseman picked up the ball. The batter raced to first on an infield hit, loading the bases, as my hamstring started to hemorrhage.

I tried to stand and fell. I couldn’t throw another pitch.

I saw him sitting in the stands and I pulled myself up.

Limping to the rubber, using all arm and one leg, I somehow got the count to 3-2. With two outs, a one-run lead, the bases loaded and all the runners moving, I threw the last pitch my father would ever see me throw, a fastball down and away.

Another grounder to my left. I reacted, but I was too late. My first baseman ranged into the hole to make the play.

I lurched toward first, muscle fibers popping with each stride. He flipped the ball ahead of me. I could hear the baserunner coming down the line as the winning run tore toward home.

The throw was wide. I stretched out toward first base and reached out with my bare hand. My hamstring exploded and I snatched the throw from the air. My foot, then the runner’s, hit the base and I fell, holding the ball tight in my fist.

“Alright!”

*

That afternoon I sat on my front porch with my father, drinking beer, a bag of ice under my thigh, talking about the game. He told me he was not surprised I had stayed in and that we had won, that I still played the game the way I always had, hard, just like he had taught me.

He meant it. After this one small miracle I wanted to think there would be another, but I knew better. The following spring, one week before my daughter’s first birthday, only a few days before opening day, Pop was gone.


From June 11 thru June 16 - Father’s Day - Major League Baseball will support the Prostate Cancer Foundation’s Home Run Challenge. For more information about prostate cancer visit www.pcf.org and talk with your health professional about prostate cancer testing. 
 
This column first appeared in slightly different form in Boston Baseball, June 2010. I re-post it every Father's Day.

How To Write Two Million Words…or so

Several months ago, in his farewell column in ESPN The Magazine, Rick Reilly noted that “My math says this column puts me over one million published words. And that doesn't count books (No. 11 coming up in May), screenplays (two), sonnets, ransom notes and quilts. This is one million too many for many citizens, but the fact remains.”

When I was younger this kind of statement that would send me into deep depression. When one wants to be a writer there is nothing more depressing than having someone quantify what you have not done. I recall being particularly dismayed when I learned that Jack Kerouac had written a million words by the age of thirty. When one has not written anything of merit - or at least published it – one million words seems like, well, one million words, a task so daunting as to be unachievable, like running around the world. One imagines that the writer of a million words must have the discipline of a monk, the typing skills of a graduate of Katie Gibbs, the supple imagination of a jazz musician, the stamina of a marathoner… and either a vow of poverty or a trust fund, because how would it ever be possible to both work and write?

I looked at myself and saw none of those qualities. I liked to have too much fun, laughing and hanging out in bars, and a small nerve problem in my hands made it impossible for me to touch type. The only thing I did every day – beyond the physical necessities - was wake up and read, probably so I would not have to confront the fact that I was not writing very much.

Despite this, in 1986 when I was in my late twenties, after writing in camera for years - mostly poetry - through some kind of dumb luck I finally started writing and publishing non-fiction. In an instant I went from “wanting to be a writer” to “being a writer” and a certain floodgate fell open.

It was not too many years later – I had just turned thirty, hence the accounting - when I sat down and discovered that, rather incredibly, almost accidentally, even I had written a million words. Now this was not a million published words, mind you – there were probably only about 100,000 of those at the time - but if I started in college and counted all the papers I had written and the notebooks I had filled up and scratched over, despite what I saw as my utter lack of discipline, a common imagination, questionable stamina, lack of a trust fund and a regular job that kept me nominally above the poverty line, even I had written a million words.

The realization was liberating beyond measure. Writers were not mysteries, and the act of writing was not some kind of secret sect to which I had no access. It did not entail following a schedule carved in stone, a muse, the ability to work until one fell asleep at the typewriter (a quaint thought…) or the proper pedigree.

No, I realized that most of writing entailed putting my ass in a chair, hitting deadlines and, most important of all, not being intimidated by the process. If I had written a million words by age thirty – and felt that I was just getting started at that – well, writing couldn’t be that hard.* This was something I could do.

I had also started running, and at about this time also realized that running around the world was also achievable as long as I did it in increments and did not let the goal overwhelm the process. For about ten years or so I probably averaged about forty miles a week, which totaled about 20,000 miles and put me on the brink of the running around the world total. And although I no longer run as far or as often, I have still kept it up for more than thirty years and at this point am probably closing in on my second global circumnavigation.

I only bring this up to underscore the point that even while writing a million words one need not stop doing everything else. In fact, I think it helps to do other things, to help turn the act of writing from something so precious that you freeze with anticipation in front of the keyboard into something as normal as brushing your teeth, a part of the daily fabric, not subject to any excuses. At the same time I continued to work full-time until 1993, helped raise my daughter from infancy (and with minimal daycare before school while my wife worked), played nearly 400 games of amateur baseball over nine seasons, learned to skate, ski, and kayak, cut my own wood, built my office, held public office, etc., etc., etc. This does not even include the vast amount of reading I have to do as part of my duties as Series Editor of The Best American Sports Writing. And I won’t even get into the amount of time I’ve spent watching baseball or sitting in bars. I still feel completely undisciplined and think I should be much more productive than I am, but now, after nearly twenty-five years as a professional writer, including the last seventeen on a full time basis, when I add up my published output since 1986, I am closing in one two and a half million words. And that doesn't even include all those poems in the bottom of a drawer somewhere.

When I write that, it does not seem possible, yet there it is. And I hope at least one young writer might find some solace in the fact that if a stiff like me could write a couple million words, well, so can you.

So sit down and get cracking. As long as you start now, there is plenty of time.

Meanwhile, I think I'll take a nap.

P.S. And I still cannot touch type. I only use my thumbs, index fingers and, occasionally, middle fingers on each hand. But I do type at the speed I think.



Word Count:

Illustrated Biographies

Ted Williams: 40,000
Joe DiMaggio: 50,000
Jackie Robinson: 40,000


Red Sox Century: 200,000
Yankees Century: 225,000
The Dodgers: 225,000
The Cubs: 225,000

Nine Months at Ground Zero: 110,000

Young Woman and the Sea: 125,000

Fenway 1912: 140,000


Matt Christopher titles (39): 720,000

Good Sports titles (2): 36,000

BASW Forewords (21): 40,000

Misc work for hire books: 100,000

Articles: 100,000

Boston Baseball Columns: 80,000

TOTAL: 2,456,000


*Understand, I am not equating quantity with quality here. Rick Reilly is not Jack Kerouac and neither am I. All we have of Sappho are a few scant fragments, a few thousand words at most, and I would gladly trade my millions for her few. Believe me, I get that. But there was a time when Sappho was probably intimidated by the act of writing as well.

I THINK WE MIGHT KNOW NOW

I wrote this Chin Music column before the start of the season for Boston Baseball. After dropping three to the Orioles... I think we know now. Read on...

This year we’ll finally know.

Although the Henry group purchased the team in 2002, this will be the first year their efforts can truly be assessed on their own, the first time we’ll be able to tell if Theo is truly talented or just a fortunate son, if John Henry is a genius or just rode the wave that lifted all boats for more than two decades, if Larry Lucchino is Geppetto, pulling all the right strings like a master, or Pinochio, or whether Terry Francona is more Bill Carrigan or Butch Hobson.

This year, for the first time, they have a clean slate, and the responsibility for success or failure is theirs alone. For the first few years after they purchased the team, the lineup was still dominated by stars either drafted or acquired by former general manager Dan Duquette, without which this team never would have never won anything. Like every other team in baseball during the era, the roster was enhanced by players either directly tainted by the games’ PED scandal*, such as Manny Ramirez or David Ortiz, or by others as still unnamed but who are nevertheless under suspicion, guys who did nothing either before or after their time with the Red Sox, but who, remarkably, came to Boston, put together one or two years that were completely out of character and then dropped from sight, either never to return or vastly diminished as soon as drug testing was instituted.

Those are two sizable shadows across the recent history of this franchise, so despite two world championships*, some fine draft picks (Papelbon, Pedroia, Lester, Bard, etc.) and savvy acquisitions such as Curt Schilling, there have been, to be honest, an equal number of question marks – those two world championships*, mishandled draft picks or failures like Craig Hansen, and questionable acquisitions like Daisuke Matsusaka, who the Red Sox believed was one of the “best pitchers in the world,” but who recently has not even been the best pitcher in Fort Myers. What is unarguable is that since the Red Sox have been purchased by John Henry they have been able to buy and sell their way out of mistakes (Julio Lugo, Edgar Renteria etc.) just as the Yankees have.

That is what makes this year so intriguing. The Duquette guys are, for the most part, gone, and the few that remain, such as Jason Varitek and Tim Wakefield, are relatively insignificant to the fortunes of the 2010 Red Sox – the less we see of each in 2010, the better. And the PED guys are, also, presumably either gone or drug tested into sobriety and relative insignificance – as I write this David Ortiz is hitting .216 in the spring, with an OBP of .293, a slugging percentage of .378 and the most strikeouts on the team – Tug Hulett has more total bases, and might see more at bats. And although we here in Boston seem to be convinced that the Red Sox farm system is without peer, more objective analysts such as Baseball America view the system as distinctly middle of the pack, particularly after the horrible misfortune to befall prospect Ryan Westmoreland.

The Red Sox themselves seem to realize that this year is different, and have responded with a different approach, eschewing the higher priced free agents for lesser luminaries who are supposed better values, preferring defense and pitching over offense, and an overall emphasis on doing more with less. The approach will, of course, be best assessed by win and losses, but as the season grows long and the shadows short, what Theo/John/Larry and Terry et al say about that performance may be even more telling.

When you are winning, you really don’t have to say much of anything, but there are always a million euphemisms for “we suck.” In that respect the words and phrases to look out for are “competing,” “maximum effort” “tip your cap to him,” “marketplace” “the economy” and “evil empire.” If the aforementioned four start using these phrases, particularly in combination, such as “In this economy the marketplace favors the evil empire” or “You’ve got to tip your cap to him, because we’re out there competing and giving maximum effort,” there will be no need either to check the standings or to check the standing of Theo, John Henry, Larry Lucchino or Terry Francona.

Because now we’ll know.