HOW I BECAME A WRITER: A TRUE STORY

In the spring of 1985 I was twenty-seven years old, four years out of college with a degree in Creative Writing and working at the Boston Public Library, mostly moving books. A few months earlier, an attempt to go to grad school for a Master’s degree had fallen apart. The school I really wanted to attend rejected me and another, although I was accepted, would not offer any financial aid. Already saddled with $10,000 in student loan debt, I withdrew.


I was working at the library because that was where the books were, and because there were also some people there who liked books and writing, which was important to me. I was involved in the local poetry scene, held a weekly beerfest and poetry salon in my apartment, but at age twenty-seven I had essentially published nothing.



I was, however, doing quite a bit of reading, and one day I read a few paragraphs about the suicide of Boston Red Sox manager Chick Stahl in the spring of 1907. One sentence stood out. It claimed he had killed himself because of “the pressures of managing.”



Even though I wasn’t a Red Sox fan my bullshit detector went off. If the pressure of managing the Red Sox had killed Chick Stahl then why hadn’t Darrell Johnson or Don Zimmer done the same? There should have been a whole graveyard full of former Boston managers.



I was intrigued and wanted to find out why he really killed himself, so I started poking around. Books on baseball history told me very little beyond the fact that most books on baseball history were pretty bad, so I went to the newspapers. The library has an amazing collection of Massachusetts newspapers on microfilm and I started in on one of the eight or nine Boston dailies that existed at the time, using my lunch hour and break times to scroll through film.



Over a few weeks I began to figure out what happened, printing out page after page and taking notes to keep track of what I was learning. I kept going in deeper and deeper. When I told my girlfriend what I was learning and she didn’t fall asleep I began to realize that other people, even strangers, might also be interested. I started to think about turning it into a story.



Unfortunately, I didn’t have a clue about how to sell it, much less write it. I had been editor of my high school newspaper and won a number of state and local awards at the time, but apart from writing academic papers in college, I had had only written poetry and had abandoned prose entirely.



So what to do? Well, I was working in a library, after all. Perhaps there was a book that would tell me what to do.



There was. It was called “How to Be a Freelance Writer” and included a chapter about how to pitch a story to an editor, what information to include in the cover letter, and other practical tips, including sample pitch letters.



Over the course of the next few days I pored over the book and did exactly what it told me to do. I identified two local publications that I thought might be interested in the story, The Boston Globe Sunday Magazine and Boston Magazine, and I found out the name of each editor. Then I formulated a cover letter and a three paragraph pitch that said what the story was, who would be interested in reading it, why I was the only person who could write it, how long it would be and when I could deliver it, meticulously typing out two copies of each on my little portable electric typewriter using the same few fingers I still use today. Then I sent the pitches out by mail and waited.



Three or four days later an envelope arrived with the return address of the Boston Globe. I opened it and discovered a mimeographed letter thanking me for my submission and informing me that the Globe really wasn’t interested.



It wasn’t even signed. I felt stupid and naïve. I was certain that a similar letter from Boston Magazine would soon follow.



Then I got a phone call. I can’t remember precisely who called – I think it was an editorial assistant or secretary - but Boston Magazine editor Ken Hartnett wanted to see me the next day at 11:00 a.m..



Panic.



My hair hung down to my ass and not only didn’t I have a suit, I didn’t have a tie. I figured a pony tail would take care of the hair but I still needed clothes. A T-ride to the Salvation Army store in Brighton and fifteen dollars solved the problem.



I called in sick to work the next day, drank too much coffee, cleaned up and walked into Editor Ken Hartnett’s office, hair combed and tied back, smelling faintly of mothballs, an aspiring writer.



Hartnett was old school, banty rooster Irish with big bushy eyebrows, a voice that sounded like it had been dipped in an ashtray, his tie loose and his shirtsleeves rolled up, a tough kid from Jersey City who had fallen in love with newspapers and seemed perpetually amused by the fact that now he was editing a fancy magazine. He ignored both the odor of my suit and the length of my hair and told me he loved my pitch, the way I teased the story and framed it, how I identified my audience for the story and all sorts of other good things. He told me it was the kind of story that really worked for a magazine like his because he needed two months lead time for every story, and that made sports stories difficult, but ones like this worked. Then he said “Do you have any clips?”



Now, having read “How To Be a Freelance Writer” I knew he wasn’t talking about grass, but examples of my work. I gulped and told him the truth.



"I don't have any. I haven't written a story before, but I was editor for the paper in high school."



High school. I really said that.



He could have, and probably should have, sent me away. Boston Magazine was a big deal then, one of the first successful city magazines. The economic “Massachusetts Miracle” was beginning to kick in,. The magazine was fat with ads and had just moved into gleaming new office space in a renovated historic building. Most of the bylines were big name writers that even a poet could recognize.



It was not a place for beginners, and that’s all I was, no matter how closely I had read that book.



But he didn’t send me away. He started asking questions and changed my life.



For the next hour we talked about the story - what it was about, how I was researching it, how I planned to write it, and about me - who I read, where I went to school and a thousand other things. I was out there without a net and he undoubtedly knew it, but he was walking me out there anyway, giving me a chance to talk my way into a story, seeing if I’d slip before I did.



Then it was lunchtime. He had to go.



“Here’s what I’m going to do he said. I’ll take the story on spec.”



Blank look from me. Spec? I hadn’t read the book that closely.



“That means I’m asking you to write it and if I like it I’ll pay you three hundred bucks. If I don’t, you don’t get paid. Alright?”



I was taking home $115 a week. Thirty dollars was a lot of money. Three hundred dollars was a fortune.



I nodded, then he ushered me to door.



“I need it in two weeks,” he added, shaking my hand. I turned to leave and then he spoke again.



“Wait a minute,” he said, squinting at me over his reading glasses, scrutinizing me one more time. “You can write, can’t you?”



I looked him in the eye and lied. “I don’t think it will be a problem.”



I floated home and got to work. For the next week I woke up every day at 5:00 a.m., went into the library early and did research before it opened, then came home and wrote until I fell asleep. In those pre-computer days that meant I wrote the story out in longhand, over and over and over again, scratching out words, circling paragraphs, drawing arrows, filling the wastebasket with draft after draft trying to write a story I wanted to read. I lost ten pounds - two belt loops - before I did.



I asked my boss at the library if I could come in early and use the IBM Selectric typewriter in the office, the one that made corrections so cleanly they were almost invisible. Given my typing skills, this was not unimportant. He said yes but it still took another two long mornings for me to type it.



When I was done I put the story in a brand new manila envelope and hand delivered it to Hartnett’s office on my lunch break, several days ahead of deadline. The book said that would impress an editor.



The next day I got a call.



“Glenn, Ken Hartnett. I’m buying your story. What do you want to write about next?”



I blurted out something off the top of my head, a subject I knew nothing at all about except for the fact that I had never read anything about it, and that told me there was probably a story there. I was learning fast.



“This time I’ll give you a contract,” he said, “and pay you $500.”



I was a writer.

Glenn Stout is currently acquiring stories for SBNation and\thinks there is a lesson or two in here for aspiring writers.  For more information see the post entitled "Help Wanted"

Shades of Gray (and Red Sox)

Each loss makes the game so clear.

For both the players and the fan defeat is the great test of this game. Every player from Little League onward must become accustomed to that fact that in almost every instance failure is the norm. In baseball success is not measured by never failing, but by the ability to ignore failure, to integrate and mitigate its’ lessons in the next attempt.

So, too, for fans. When it’s summertime and the winning is easy, everyone is a front runner and climbs aboard that raucous, drunken jalopy that gloriously teeters and tumbles toward the finish drenched in champagne. The occasional defeat, while inevitable, seems almost artistic in its regularity, the missed stitch in the Persian rug put there on purpose to reveal better the perfection elsewhere.

For more than a decade Sox fans have been riding that bus, more or less, without cessation. Of course they have not won every year, but they have come close. The last season they seemed truly overmatched was 2001 (82-79 and finishing the season with Joe Kerrigan trying to find out who stole the strawberries). The last season they finished below .500 was 1997 (78-84, a fourth place team in every way imaginable, Sele, Suppan and Steve Avery in the rotation). And the last time they were truly horrible, terribly awful, a season long time fans once considered a peculiar badge of pride in the curious accounting that once marked the tribe, was 1992, (73-89 , seventh out of seven in the old two-division system, the future apparently Scott Cooper and Phil Plantier).

Pretty nice run, isn’t it?

Then there is this year. A team best described as a collection of consonants (Ciriaco and Kalish, Lillibridge and Nava, Posednik and Punto) and disabilities (the Gods Achilles, Ibuprofen, and Cruciate), that lurches and lurks around .500, winning games it shouldn’t and then losing games it should, running up a mud soaked hill in flat soled sneakers, slipping and sliding and staying more or less in the same place and looking up at almost everybody else.

The decision is yours, and it tells you who you are. Game time each night is a gut check on your relationship. Are you in, or are you out? Is your hat pink and perfect and pristine, pre-distressed and perfectly faded to look battle weary, or truly stained with sweat and stain and tears that come from years of use? Are you a fan of only winning, an addict to the morphine pump of highlights and high fives, or is there something else, deeper and more profound, that brings you back?

There is, because the farther away you get from winning the closer you get to what baseball really is; hundreds and thousands of small events and occurrences. To end in victory each must follow a convoluted line over the course of an at bat, an inning, a game, a series and a season, mixing the improbable and the implausible with the accidental and the intended, innumerable adjustments encountered and made on the way. There is the call not made, the twin killing not turned, the wind that blows it fair when it should drift foul and foul when it should stay fair, the mess of statistics that no matter what are rarely much better than a coin toss. The best teams win six of ten and the worst teams win only four. All that effort and time and money is expended to change the line score of the two games in the middle, the ones that mean either championship or disaster.

That is why losing seasons have something that the winning years do not – nuance and tone and ambiguity. You cannot watch and yet you cannot turn away. The box scores may still be black and white, the results irrefutable, but the game is all shades of gray. “Almost” and “nearly” and “what if” are torturously bound together. She is bad for you but you cannot help it.

Losing seasons force you to decide, to confront why you are here and why you submit to the game each day, taking the pain because, if you have lived long enough you know it makes the pleasure more intense, and there is nothing, ever, any better than that, than when the ball drops in and the bunt stays fair and short hop in the hole finds the glove and the catcher holds onto the ball and you rise from your seat and roar together as one.

At least that’s what you tell yourself as you grit your teeth and prepare for another flogging.



Glenn Stout is a Contributing Editor for SBNation.com, author of Fenway 1912.  This column appears in the August edition of Boston Baseball. 

THANKS FOR BEING A WRITER

Yesterday I had a brief but memorable exchange with a writer. Over the past few weeks I’ve been recruiting stories for the Cool But As Yet Unnamed Project for SBNation. I’ve spent nearly every day talking writing, writing about writing, batting ideas back and forth, sharing ideas and all that stuff that we, as writers, do when we get together. Talking craft to each other is one way many of us prepare to enter the mines of our work, taking the last deep breaths at the surface before going down. The experience has been exhilarating.




In this instance, almost without thinking I ended my exchange “Thanks for being a writer.” I meant it, because writing is my life and has shaped my world, utterly and entirely. As someone who decided to become a writer nearly forty years ago and has done that exclusively for two decades, I understand what being a writer entails. People who do not write don’t.



Most writers I know realize that although many people imagine they would like to write, few have any idea what that reality of that is like, that 99% of writing is ambiguous and often done alone even when surrounded by others. I am talking about all the repeat trips down to the metaphorical basement, closing the door and spending hours listening to your own words in the dark, trying to find the ones that matter and make a difference, the few that let you look yourself in the mirror when you are done and know you’ve gotten to something that somehow didn’t exist before. Only those of us who really do it know what that requires, and I’m not even going to get into the real life issues of trying to write for a living. Just ask our friends and families about that.



Now there are many difficult jobs in this world - some of which I’ve done - and not to overstate the fact, but even when it looks as if it is, writing is not easy. That is why there are so many more people who “want to write” than those that do.



I think this explains why I was so affected when the writer responded to my expression of gratitude by writing, “That’s the nicest thing anyone has ever emailed me,” which was about the nicest thing anyone has ever e-mailed me. We might be praised us for a particular story or a book or a line or a phrase or a poem, or criticized for the same - or, worst of all, ignored – but rarely are we extended an appreciation for the vocation itself, for simply devotion to the craft we cannot do without.



So thanks for being a writer.

[Writers: for more about the SB Nation project see my previous blog post "Help Wanted," or "About the SB Nation Project" page on my website, http://www.glennstout.net]/

The Mess of History

When writing history – even of baseball - the challenge is to stay true and authentic. That means refusing to place into the historical record anything known to be false or inauthentic, for any reason. Every writer of history must find in their research enough information to recreate the experience, and then present that information in a way that engages the reader.


The guidelines for this are pretty clear; don’t make stuff up or intentionally misrepresent the facts. While it is not always possible to uncover every piece of information that might be pertinent and the veracity of each piece of information may never be completely known, the research process demands that one makes a concerted effort to do so anyway and never succumb to the temptation to fill in the blanks with fiction. While historians may differ in their conclusions historical disagreement is far different from making things up to account for gaps of research or to make a re-telling more colorful and lively.


Unfortunately in recent years the clear line between was is acceptable and what is not has become blurred, and many of book titles that have most egregiously blurred that line have been commercial and critical successes. Increasingly, I read historical accounts of baseball and other sports history that I view with the same suspicions I do the achievements of a hitter on steroids. Too often I encounter books that create dialogue that did not exist and invent entire scenes that never took place. Readers, unfortunately, are usually oblivious to the use of these methods. Over time they learn to expect a certain level of detail that, even though it is false, makes work that adheres to a higher standard somehow seem lacking.


This kind of historical abuse is becoming more and more and more commonplace. I am aware of one current title’s success that is due in part to the author’s ability to put thoughts and words into the minds and mouths of his subjects, something I only know because my own research has covered the same ground. I wish this experience was uncommon, or confined to the genre of sports. Unfortunately it is not. Many of the most successful books of history recently published – including some best sellers now considered classics – make use of these same techniques.


The damage done by this approach is profound. Not only does the true historical record become murky as subsequent accounts repeat spurious information, but the commercial success of such titles places ever more pressure on the writer of history to indulge in these same practices.


I know this is true from my own experience. Several years ago, while writing about a non-sports topic, an editor strongly suggested I include scenes and impressions and dialogue the editor knew did not exist. The clear implication was if did so my work would be more successful and make more money. When I refused the editor was shocked and made it clear other writers had not resisted similar requests.


Real history does not often unfold like scenes from a movie script, all crisp dialogue and clarity. It is more often a mess, a mass of often confusing and apparently contradictory evidence. The task for the writer of history is to guide the reader through the unkempt rooms of the past, finding order and logic and truth in chaos, anticipating questions and providing answers before they are even formed, so at the end of the experience the reader sees clearly what was previously obscure.


As I have embarked on historical projects like the history of a team, a biography of an athlete, or even the story of a ballpark, I try to keep this in mind, believing that the truth always tells the best story, and that if I do my job well and completely it needs no embellishment or added drama. Fortunately, so far my experiences like the one I described above have been the exception, and readers have generally responded with a generosity I find refreshing.


That was why it was particularly gratifying earlier this spring when Fenway 1912 was awarded the Seymour Medal, named after Harold and Dorothy Seymour, baseball’s pre-eminent historians, by the Society of American Baseball Research as the best book of biography or history for 2011. That experience was repeated again last week when SABR also awarded Fenway 1912 the Larry Ritter Award, named after the author of the seminal oral history The Glory of Their Times, as the best book of the Deadball Era, making Fenway 1912 the only title ever to win both such awards.


It’s nice to know someone is still paying attention.




The column originally appears in Boston Baseball July 2012. For more information see Glenn’s website at www.glennstout.net

Insurance

My mother used to say that when I was born I didn’t cry; I coughed.




And I am alive today only because the company my father worked for provided health insurance.



She was overstating things only a little, because when I was born the umbilical cord was knotted around my neck so tightly I was actually not breathing at all. Had she waited to go to the hospital or had me at home because she was uninsured, I might not have survived. And because she wasn’t forced prematurely from the hospital with a newborn, and they soon discovered I had an enlarged heart.



That cough that finally did come and didn’t go away a few months later? The doctor came to our house, listened to my lungs and admitted me to the hospital with pneumonia.



At nine months, when she noticed something wrong with my eye, she didn’t have to wait to bring me to the doctor. A cyst was discovered and removed before causing permanent harm. I gave her a black eye when I hit her with the splints on my arms as I recovered.



For the first two years of my life, perhaps because of an immune system already weakened by birth trauma, I contracted every basic childhood illness, one after the other and sometimes simultaneously; chicken pox, measles, mumps, whooping cough, tonsillitis, bronchitis, and God knows what else. Unknown viruses swept through my body like wildfires. I would go to bed healthy and in the middle of the night my mother would check on me and body would feel so hot she would be afraid to take my temperature. My earliest memories (plural) are all of being bundled in blankets and being carried to the car by my father and then all of us, my parents and my older brother, racing to the hospital in the middle of the night or leaving early after overnight trips to my grandmother’s and stopping not at home first, but the hospital or the doctor’s office. I spent weeks swathed in mentholated oil and breathing humidified air, was fed ice chips like most kids get oatmeal, and my mother lost track of the times doctor’s told her “If the fever doesn’t break soon …”



But because I had health insurance, because they didn’t stop often to think if they could afford it, I always got to the doctor or the emergency room on time, always received the shot of antibiotics, the prescriptions, the around-the-clock care. It didn’t help that I was reckless and accident prone – falling through glass doors, down stairs, getting caught on barbed wire, nearly cutting off my thumb with a butcher knife, driving the staff of a small Fourth of July flag through the roof of my mouth, knocking out my front teeth on the dashboard when my father’s car was rear-ended while parked. When I stepped on a nail, received a tetanus shot and seemed to fall asleep on the ride home, my father didn’t hesitate. He shook me out of habit and when I didn’t awake he turned around and carried me into the emergency room. I was in a coma due to an allergic reaction, making all subsequent encounters with sharp objects (of which there were many, including more nails) problematic. Often the entire wound would have to be excised, cored like an apple to prevent infection.



Between the coughs, the pneumonia, the unexplained fevers that kept coming, the allergy to milk that waxed and waned, the bone disease, an arm broken and healed that we only discovered when we thought I had broken the other one, the weird hives I got after being immersed in cold water, what I remember most about school is leaving; field trips cut short leaving other students seething, visits to the nurse, vomiting in the hallway, searing headaches that made me cover my head and scream. Teachers became as adept as my mother at spotting my rapidly emerging maladies, banishing me from class and sequestering me on a cot in the office before I could infect the others as my fevers formed and began to rage, friends peeking around the door at me as if I were some alien, uncertain if I was contagious. What I remember most from my report cards are the absences; 23 days, 29 days, 18.5 days, 32. In sixth grade, after bouts with both pneumonia (which I eventually had six times that I am certain of), and mononucleosis, I peaked with a high of 47 or 48, something that gave me a curious sense of pride; I wasn’t just a sick kid; I was the sickest. All told, of my twelve years in primary and secondary school, I probably missed class about 15% of the time, something that I blame to this day for certain lapses of knowledge, like how electricity works.



Yet when I was not ill I was robust, all appetite and action, which must have made my periods of illness all the more frightening. Each hospitalization was ever more exotic. I was a course in pediatrics all by myself and younger doctors were often paraded in to examine my chart and poke and probe as if I were some new species. Old drugs stopped working and I was always being given new ones.



I should have been dead a dozen times, maybe more, and even with insurance I remember some nights seeing my mother with a stack of bills and my father sitting at a table and the worry over payment, for even insurance did not pay everything. We were not wealthy by any stretch, or even close; one car, one 600 or square foot house on a half acre plot in the cornfields, and once a year vacation – maybe - to see relatives, at least one of which I recall involving a trip to the hospital.



Yet I survived, and somehow, so did our family. Without insurance I doubt that either would have. I’d have died and my parents likely would have lost the house, filed for bankruptcy and fallen apart. But by high school the rate and severity of my illnesses and accidents began to wane, and as an adult – knock on wood – persistent health has replaced chronic infirmity. The baby born coughing has gone on to write and publish several million words and many books, jog a distant equivalent to the circumference of the earth, play a wide variety of sports as both a teenager and an adult and outlive both parents. A recent physical confirms I am more robust than most people my age. Apart from a brief time in my early twenties, when I was fortunate enough to remain well, I have had insurance, either through my own work or that of my wife, and have not often needed it. My own daughter, now sixteen, has enjoyed the good health I did not. But even she, at age seven, was seriously ill with a bout of necrotic pneumonia that ended up requiring nearly two weeks of hospitalization in two facilities, an ambulance transfer during a blizzard, and several surgical procedures.



Even then, insurance paid every cent of her treatment, which included the stint in the hospital that, had I been responsible would have left me bankrupt. More important, had we not had insurance and had to factor caution and cost over concern and waited perhaps one more day for her to get care, it would certainly have killed her.



I knew then how my parents must have felt, and how some parents might feel today.

Glenn Stout is the author and editor of more than eighty books.  For more information see http://www.glennstout.net/.

Last Pitch

[Note: This column first appeared in Boston Baseball and was also reprinted here in June of 2010]


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 twelve or fourteen 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 sixteen 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. That July he and my stepmother loaded up the RV and he came out for his final visit.



I had a ballgame, last 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 Soldier’s Field 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 line drive single. 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 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 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 after working fourteen hours. 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. 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 for the last time 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 around third 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.

The Other Side of the Wall

The list of those who have played left field for the Red Sox and won respect for their ability to play balls hit off the left field wall begins with Duffy Lewis and includes other luminaries such as Ted Williams, Carl Yastrzemski, and Jim Rice. Even lesser fielding lights such as Mike Greenwell and Manny Ramirez, otherwise unheralded for their defensive prowess, were surprisingly adept at playing balls off the wall.

There are, however, two sides to the left field wall. The list of those who have played the outside of the wall, the one that faces Lansdowne Street, is much, much smaller.

I think I’m the only one on it.

For nine years running, from 1983 thru 1991, I celebrated Opening Day at Fenway Park by donning an old baseball uniform, consuming a copious amount of “Baseball Marys” and, standing outside the leftfield wall with a Pignose amplifier and a microphone, I recited baseball inspired poetry to mystified early arrivals. When I began I was just a few years out of college looking for a way to combine my two favorite pastimes, baseball and poetry. When I stopped nine years later I was a published author.

In my recent book, Fenway 1912, I contend that Fenway Park is a place that can change your life. That’s not hyperbole, but because in my case, it was true. Playing the outside of the left field wall had a lot to do with how I made the change from “wanting to write” to becoming a writer.

Part of why it was true was the people I met out there – Bill Littlefield, George Kimball, Rick Dunfey, and others – all of whom later played some role in my transition. More importantly, however,standing outside that wall and speaking poetry to the face of baseball made me whole and complete. For the first time the two most important aspects of my life were able to co-exist. Not always easily, mind you. Some people laughed and some threatened to punch me in the face, but a handful dropped coins at my feet and a surprising number stopped and listened, and made me want to come back.

For a few short hours, mixing words and baseball, I was right where I was supposed to be. In these pages each month, and those of Fenway 1912, I still am.

[This essay first appeared in the June 2012 edition of Boston Baseball.  Glenn Stout is the author of Fenway 1912, the only book to ever be awarded both the Seymour Medal and the Larry Ritter Award by the Society for American Baseball Research.]