A Tale of Two Prospects

Unless you were there, it didn’t matter.

The closest I ever came to earning a check in baseball was in the summer of 1981, the strike year, selling minor league baseball tickets over the phone for the International League, Triple- A Columbus (Ohio) Clippers. I was a boiler-room pitchman, reading from a script, cold-calling hundreds of businesses a day for some stupid, spurious “Business Night” promotion. Most weeks I made less than $100, a dispirited take that soon precipitated my move to Boston.

There was just one perk – free tickets.  No matter how many tickets I didn’t sell, I could still get two free box seats for every game, right behind the plate, where the scouts and player’s families, wives and girlfriends sat.  I managed to catch about 30 games  and due to the strike, the IL had a fair number of prospects as big league clubs stashed talent there that in any other year might have been playing in the big leagues – guys like Cal Ripken, Von Hayes, Brett Butler, and from Pawtucket, Marty Barrett, Wade Boggs (who won the batting title by less than a point), Rich Gedman, Bruce Hurst and Bobby Ojeda (they still finished sixth, 67-73).

Although the Clippers had a few prospects on the roster – most notably slugging Brockton native Steve “Boom Boom” Balboni (“Bye Bye” when he struck out), SS Andre Robertson (who broke his neck in a car wreck and was never the same) and 20-year old pitcher Gene Nelsen, (later a valuable head –hunting reliever for Oakland) -- most of the roster was a bunch of “4-A” re-treads that couldn’t quite make it at the next level – Marshall Brant, “Uptown” Bobby Brown, Dave Stegman. For them, Columbus was more a destination than a stepping stone. The irony of the enormous graveyard just beyond Cooper Stadium’s right field fence wasn’t lost on anyone who played there.

The two guys I most remember were two of the oldest guys on the team, both of whom started out in the Red Sox organization. Wayne Harer, 29, was a slender, switch-hitting, walk machine of an outfielder with little power. In 1977, his first year at Pawtucket, he hit .350 with an OBP of. 451, leading the league in both categories, yet wasn’t called up to Boston. A year later, he hit just .247 and his career stopped one rung shy of the Baseball Encyclopedia. In 1981 for Columbus, he was just another .270 hitter with no pop, one year away from retirement.

The other guy was outfielder-DH Dave Coleman, 30, an 18^th round pick by Boston in 1969. He had some right-handed power, an almost prospect who had the misfortune to reach Triple-A at the same time as Fred Lynn and Jim Rice.  With Yaz and Dewey already in place, he got  lost in the shuffle, the fifth or sixth best outfielder in an organization there the top four all had a shot at Cooperstown.  Nevertheless, he managed to make the team in 1977 and debuted on April 13, pinch-hitting for Denny Doyle and popping up to shortstop.  It didn’t get any better from there, and he was sent down after only nine games another 12 plate appearances, one walk, one run and one strikeout on his career line. Even though he twice hit more than 20 home runs in Triple-A, he never got another chance. He made the book, and saw Fenway up close, but his MLB batting average is forever .000.   

Columbus won the regular season and played Rochester in the first round of the “Governor’s Cup,” playoffs. The Clippers dropped the first two games of the best-of-five series to the Ripken-less Red Wings, then the series returned to Columbus and the Clippers evened it up. The game five would play winner would play  Richmond for the Cup. The loser would go home, and if that was Columbus, that meant Dave Coleman’s career would end.

Now, memory being what it is, what happened next gets a little murky – you can’t find everything on the Internet-- but I remember most of it. I do know game five went 10 innings, and because school was back in session, there were only a few hundred fans in the stands. I’m pretty sure Gene Nelsen pitched the whole game for Columbus. And with the Clippers batting in the bottom of the 10^th, I think there were two runners on base, and one of them may have been Harer. The score was either tied 1-1 or the Clippers were down 1-0.  Then ready-to-retire Dave Coleman, he of the non-existent career major league batting average, came to the plate in what was conceivably the last at bat of his career, his Ted Williams moment.

I can see it still, a hard line drive soaring high over the shortstop’s head.

Then it all gets blurry. Did it split the outfielders, hit the wall, go over the fence?  Damned if I know.  I do remember runners racing toward home, players running from the dugout, all tumult and shouting… and then a celebration, guys who were never going to make the majors hugging guys who were going to, and somewhere in the middle – Dave Coleman, the hero of the moment, being pummeled and praised and lifted up. And then I saw Wayne Harer, another guy going nowhere, heading toward the stands, a bottle of cheap champagne in his hand, shaking it and spraying it over our heads, then taking a big swig, and passing it into the stands, erasing the line, celebrating that this season, and Coleman’s career, would last – what?  A few more days?  Just to play another game no one would ever remember, before a few hundred fans, for a trophy no one cared about?  

Yeah.  Exactly that.

 

from Boston Baseball July 2013

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 a game for the first time 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, the widow of a man who my father pulled from a burning plane when he was in the Navy, an old family friend. 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. Now 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 too late. 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 and reached out with my bare hand. My hamstring exploded as 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.

Requiem for Fenway

Fenway Center. Sounds like a dirge.

Sometimes, when the end is near, you can just tell. And when I first heard the words “Fenway Center” I heard a death knell to Fenway Park, two virulent cells that when paired together marked the start of a massive metastasizing cancer. Over the next decade or two it will slowly eat away at the ballpark until Fenway Park reaches its final stage, a tombstone masquerading as a hotel or some similar other monstrosity.

First the details: Fenway Center is a $500 million dollar (which probably means $1 billion with cost over-runs) multi-use development (AKA “buildings for the wealthy”) of parking garages (wherefore art thou, Frank McCourt?), retail space (more Au Bon Pains!) and over 500 apartments (10% of which will be “affordable,” which means you’ll never see the inside of the other 90%, presumably the “unaffordable”), in five buildings, some of which will be built atop the Mass Pike. According to developer John Rosenthal, “This project is going to transform ugly, underutilized lots and windswept bridges into a vibrant new neighborhood. “ In other words, it’s gonna make a lot of people rich and inconvenience almost everyone else. 

Me? I’ve always kind of liked ugly, underutilized lots and windswept bridges, particularly those around Fenway Park. It meant that more of Fenway was visible. As ballparks go, Fenway is squat, but from certain vantage points it was still possible to see almost the entire park. And I’ve always loved the way it fit the decaying old quasi-commercial area of laundries and garages and cheesy nightclubs. But no more. They’ve already made the park itself a playground for the wealthy; now they’re running down the rest of the neighborhood. Fenway Park is just a prop for profit.

Even the name is wrong. Future Bostonians erroneously will come to think of “Fenway Center” as, you know, the “center” of the Fenway even though Fenway Center is, technically, not even in what has traditionally been considered “the Fenway” at all. No matter—nothing stops progress. Besides, I admit that “Ugly Center,” “Windswept Center” and “Underutilized Center” just don’t sound right, although personally, I am kind of partial to the accuracy of “Ugly Underutilized Windswept Center.” That’s the kind of neighborhood I always used to look for, because that was the kind of neighborhood I could afford to live in. Hell, when I first moved to Boston, that pretty much described the whole city, which, along with a gloriously rundown Fenway Park, is why I came here in the first place.

However, the most insidious impact of “Fenway Center” will be invisible—at least for a while. The development will make the rest of the land around Fenway Park, heretofore known as “properties,” worth even more, and you know what that means: enough is never enough. Much of this land is owned by the Red Sox and the temptation to exploit it will be impossible to resist. After all, by then, it will be the last ugly, underutilized windswept center in the area. In another decade or so I suspect that Fenway Park will begin to look like the courtyard at the Boston Public Library, a little tiny oasis full of pigeons, surrounded by granite and sullen workers. The team will celebrate the day actual sunlight reaches the field each season like the summer solstice at Stonehenge, complete with (yet another) surprise appearance by Neil Diamond. 

And someday soon, someone–perhaps a particularly well-connected real estate developer– will wake up one morning, look around, bat her eyelashes and say “Honey, why don’t we …” The next thing he knows the breakfast silver will be on the floors and he’ll be looking at a big fat roll of architectural drawings for “Historical Fenway Park Heritage Memorial Field of Dreams Center Plaza.” 

Oh, they won’t tear the historic little bandbox down. The Green Monster will form the backdrop to another Au Bon Pain, the Pesky Pole will be used as a flagpole on the roof, the historic trough urinals will be taken out of storage and used as planters, and they’ll offer you the opportunity to buy back your commemorative brick, but you get the idea. There will be a 30-story megamulticomplex rising above the footprint and a commemorative Whiffle Ball field on the roof available for corporate rentals and photo-ops with poor kids. And they’ll build another ballpark—somewhere. After all, there’s only one Fenway and you only get this kind of opportunity once.

Glomming on, it’s the new American pastime.

 (This column first appeared in Boston Baseball June 2013)

Glenn Stout really did move to Boston because of Fenway Park and the abundance of slum housing. He is the author of many books, including the award-winning best-seller Fenway 1912, and edits the award winning SBNation Longform page. For more see www.glennstout.net @GlennStout

 

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"