Glove Story

from Boston Baseball, May 2013

 

In Vermont we have mudrooms because in the spring, which is just now arriving, you need a place to take your boots off, and to put them back on, before tracking the remnants of winter inside the house. So the mudroom also becomes a place where other outdoor things get left behind – hockey sticks and bike helmets, dog leashes and birdseed, carburetor cleaner and ski poles.

High on a shelf, in a basket filled with assorted camping gear and swim shoes, sits my baseball glove. It has taunted me every day of this long winter, and even much of last fall.  It’s now been ten years since I last played regularly , and another five since I coached, and the kids across the road have quit playing, and my daughter is seventeen and doesn’t care.  The dog still likes to play, at least the retrieving part, most of the time, but doesn’t have an arm worth a damn. So the only games of catch I have anymore go one direction, out and not very far, either, not since I hurt my elbow putting on the snowplow, and never back.

It’s a nice glove, too, the best I ever had, black, a Rawlings I bought thru the mail probably 15 or 16 years ago, when she was still a baby and I still had the arm and energy to play in two leagues, one in Boston and the other in Worcester County. I paid about $150 dollars, money I probably did not have. Now the model number is worn away and the inside palm, cracked and hard, shows islands of leather pulled apart by sweat. It’s a “fastback,” with the finger slot in back to protect the hand, and the place my finger sat is worn smooth and brown.

It still has that smell, though. Worn grass and Gloveoleum, baseball diamond dirt and tobacco, muscle rub and grass, and it still fits. That’s the things about a glove – you may change but it never does. Once you reach high school, that’s it. Your hair gets thinner and shorter, your shoes wider, and your waist expands, but your glove still fits, the last remembrances of summers past.

When I put my hand inside it’s tight and cold at first – there was frost last night – but the longer I  wear it my hand starts to warm and leather loosens and turns supple again. If I look real close at the rectangular red label on the back I can still see the letters of my last name, carefully inked, and now faded from the sun. I was always cautious, even as a kid, to make the letters careful and square.

Old habits die hard and there’s still a ball inside.  When I last put it up on the shelf – last June? July?  - I still stuck a ball in there to protect the pocket. It has its own smell, too, and a feel, the seams raised and the leather too tight, a ball that once got left out in the rain. Yet they both still fit the hand like nothing else ever has, or ever will, one shape that says “throw it,” the other that  asks to catch.

Inside my glove there might have been a player’s signature inside once, embossed in gold ink, but it’s gone now, worn off by grinding the ball in the pocket with too many men on base, and I can’t remember who it was. Funny. But I remember the names that have been there before, in other gloves, starting when I was a kid, names that track me from the backyard through t-ball, Little League, Pony League, high school and beyond; Don Mossi (a Nokona, all stubby fingered and short), Ed Kranepool (a gift on my sixth birthday that I wore during my great-grandmother’s funeral later that day), Norm Cash (an “E-Z Catch” Spalding first baseman’s glove), a Johnny Bench catcher’s mitt, a Bobby Murcer (another Spalding), a Reggie Jackson (the one I tied back together with my girlfriends’ green hair ribbon when the leather between the fingers broke), a Don Sutton (one I bought for my sister then stole back for my daughter, then stole back from her), a Ken Griffey leatherette piece of crap I threw away and this one, no name now at all but mine.

Now the sun is coming through the window and the frost has melted into dew, and if the forecast is right it might hit 70 degrees today. I should put the glove away – the mudroom isn’t the best place for leather – rub it with some oil, work the ball back into the pocket and tie it with a shoelace, but I won’t.

Deeper in the basket on that shelf is another glove, that Don Sutton model, and I place my glove back on top. I might need them one day.  Who knows, later this summer, perhaps some Saturday afternoon after the grass has been cut and before the game comes on, maybe someone will ask to play game of catch.

 

Glenn Stout is the author of Fenway 1912, series editor for The Best American Sports Writing and a Contributing Editor for SBNation.com/longform.  Follow Glenn on Twitter @GlennStout

 

 

Chin Music: Viva la Revolution!

 

One of the advantages of being a King, or a Dictator, or what is known in baseball circles as a “Magnate,” is that for one, you get to write the history. For another, you get to take credit for things that should rightfully be credited to others. Those, like the young girls who would never give you a glance if you were poor, are some of the privileges that come with power and money. That’s how guys like Kim Jung–Il get to be called “Supreme Leader” and procreate - it ain’t the size of the brain or anything else; it’s the wallet and the power that comes with it.

I was reminded of this while reading John Henry’s recent e-mail interview with Steve Buckley in the Boston Herald. In the interview, Messer. Henry (Messer. is fancier way of saying magnate, or “stuffed shirt,”) offered that his Footman, Larry Lucchino (Footman is a fancier way of saying “lackey,” as in serf, not the grumpy pitcher) “revolutionized the game with Camden Yards… He did every baseball fan in America a great service…When he retires someday, his body of work will require an election to the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown.” (emphasis mine)

Well, be still my heart. I guess I’ll go ahead any make my reservation at the Otseaga Hotel right now. You know, ever since these guy bought the team I always thought I was seeing a bunch of Hall of Famers around the Fenway Park, guys like Pedro (before the bad shoulder) Manny (well, before the PEDs), and maybe Ortiz, (before the PEDs), or Varitek (before the divorce), Francona (before the book) and Schilling, (before, as Jimmy Stewart so aptly put it to Uncle Billy in the movie It’s a Wonderful Life,  “It means bankruptcy and scandal and prison! That’s what it means!”)  It’s just that of all the candidates for Cooperstown walking around here I never pictured that well-known revolutionary, Larry Lucchino, having his own plaque and accompanying postcard sold in the gift shop.  At best, I had him somewhere below Bob Stanley but above Mark Bellhorn. Now, since he’s done me such a great service, I guess I’ll have to get our little Che Guevara a gift.

Well, as they used to say, at prices like these, you could feed it to your horses and spread it on your garden. Because that, my friend, is a load.

If there is anyone who deserves to honored and inducted to the National Baseball Hall of Fame for “revolutionizing the game” in regard to ballparks, it’s probably a guy named Phil Bess, an architecture professor at Notre Dame. Years before Henry or Lucchino knew how many stitches there were on a baseball (108, by the way) Bess was making the common sense argument that baseball was meant to be played in ballparks, not stadiums. He even wrote a few books and designed a few fabulous models himself to make his point. Thousands of followers thought his ideas and his plans made a lot of sense. He changed the whole conversation about the way people thought about the future of the ballpark.

You see, the average baseball fan felt the same way about ballparks that he did – that they should fit into the fabric of a city, at the same scale. That’s why Fenway Park and Wrigley Field continued to grow in popularity even as the teams that called them home were stumbling into mediocrity.  

All people like Lucchino and Jeanne Marie Smith did was recognize what Bess made obvious and talk others into investing in the common sense ideas created by others. They only thing revolutionary about it was cutting the real revolutionaries, guys like Phil Bess, out of the narrative and taking all the credit. That, and the unspoken downside of Lucchino’s revolution; the laser-like focus on seats for the wealthy at the expense of all others.  The result has been some pretty parks, but also the out of control escalation of ticket prices, the reason that for most families a day at the ballpark is now a once a year proposition. Some revolution.

That is, however, the power that comes the throne; the ability to control the narrative – or at least to think you do. If John Henry is telling Steve Buckley that Lucchino belongs in the Hall of Fame, you can bet he’s already been saying the same thing to a lot of other people who can help make that happen down the road, and probably seeding the way with some well-placed, advance donations. That’s how Tom Yawkey, that lovable old coot, got into the Hall of Fame in 1980, 33 years before the Yankees Jacob Ruppert.

All I know is that if Lucchino ever makes the Hall of Fame, you won’t have to look very hard for his plaque; you’ll be able to smell it long before you get to Cooperstown.

 

from the April 2013 issues of Boston Baseball

 

What to Look Forward to this Fall in New England: A Guide for Red Sox Fans

A lot of chores just got green lighted. And it’s all Josh Beckett’s fault. Beckett and A-Gone’s. And Crawford’s.

The past two seasons the Red Sox failure to make the playoffs came too late to do any lasting harm. Once it became obvious that the Sox were staying home in October, so were you, the space in the easy chair already reserved for the season. It was almost winter, for crying out loud, far too late to add a whole extra months of chores to the schedule. You told her you can’t paint this late in the year – it violates the laws of physics or something like that – it was on Mythbusters - and it’s just gonna have to wait ‘til the spring. And even though she didn’t believe you would do it then, either, from the look on your face she realized you were in mourning and let you get away with it. It was then possible to transition directly into football, basketball and hockey without putting down either the remote or the beer. Life was good.

Not this year. All over New England the projects of seasons’ past, the one’s you’ve talked about doing but never got around to because it’s a pennant race for criss sakes and I hafta watch the game, are about to be dredged up and placed before you. All the garages that haven’t been painted and the decks that have been rotting away, the toilet she wants you to fix and the closet she wants you to clean, and – well get out the shovels and the brooms and the brushes, brother, because this year your excuses are all gone. Boston’s loss is Home Depot’s gain.

And don’t think just one or two chores will be the end of it either, because they won’t be. There’s still plenty of time for family activities, you know, the “fun” ones you hate. Those drives to see the fall colors you’ve were always able to ditch because the radio reception is terrible outside I-495? It doesn’t matter now. Gas up the car, because this year you’re going. Remember how she’s always wanted to go antiquing, starting early some Saturday morning and driving to New Hampshire and then having an overpriced lunch at some kind of Ye Olde Inn on the way back? I hope you’re in the mood for acorn squash soup and remember how to strip varnish.

Do you like maple syrup? Well you’re gonna love it this year because you’re taking her to Vermont and buying a couple gallons at $50 each and then she’s gonna go gluten free. And while you’re up there you’re going to have to stay in a Bed and Breakfast without TV and chat with people from Pennsylvania while sitting on doilies because this fall Jerry and Don are chattering to the crickets. She doesn’t even care about “Pedey” anymore. Now that the Sox are losers, cute got old real quick.

That still leaves… apple picking! You’ll have to drive out to some godforsaken town in Worcester County, and get lost coming and going, to pick the same goddamn apples they got at Price Chopper. Then when you get home you’ll have to sit there and core and peel the little buggers for hours while she turns them into apple sauce that will sit in the basement for years before bursting out of the jars, oozing onto the floor and giving you another job to do..

Those leaves in the yard, the one’s you’ve always looked at and said “God will rake ‘em up?” , and then depended on the mat of detritus to kill the grass so there won’t be as much to cut next summer? This year God is you and you’re gonna be out there raking every waking moment of the weekend you’re not painting or driving or pretending to smile , cursing Beckett and Gonzalez and Crawford with every breath.

Come Monday morning you’ll be a little sore. It didn’t used to be like this, did it? Noooo. That’s because the last time you had this much time in the fall Tim Wakefield was a kid, Johnny Pesky was still hitting fungoes and you could still bend over and tie your shoes. Those days are gone. So get ready, and get out the Icy Hot. It’s gonna be a long and painful autumn.

Thanks a lot, Red Sox. Home Depot appreciates the business. Meanwhile my aching back has a few choice words for that little twit Theo for getting us into this mess.



Glenn Stout is an author, a contributing editor to SB Nation and series editor of The Best American Sports Writing. The 2012 edition, guest edited by Michael Wilbon, and Fenway 1912 will both be available in paperback in October. This article is from the September edition of Boston Baseball.

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