Michael Sokolove is the author of the recent nonfiction book, The Ticket Out: Darryl Strawberry and the Boys of Crenshaw
Michael Sokolove: Well, I just played all the time. I was a pretty good baseball player. I was a high school baseball player, I was a high school basketball player. And, you know, I was of the generation -- I’m forty-eight -- so I was watching Wide World of Sports, and we didn’t have ESPN, and I just watched all the sports there were to watch. And that’s pretty much until I realized that I wasn’t going to be a pro athlete, which there was never any remote chance of, in fact, I wasn’t that good. But, you know, until I got pretty far along, that’s all I thought about, until I was in my mid teens. I read about it, I read the sports pages, when I wasn’t playing sports, I was thinking about it all the time, and it just... I was obsessed by sports in the way that lots and lots of kids are.
BTB: Was baseball any more or less loved than these other sports?
MS: Well, when I was a kid, I loved baseball more than I do now, I must admit, because it was still the preeminent sport in my mind, and in a lot of people’s minds. And I think it was a better sport, it was played in real stadiums, not retro stadiums. I grew up going to Connie Mack Stadium in Philadelphia. It just had a grit and an authenticity to it that I loved. My own pet peeve about baseball right now is that the games used to take two hours and fifteen minutes, two hours and thirty minutes. Now as an adult, now they take three and a half hours, sometimes for a 3-2 game, and I don’t have three and a half hours. Maybe I did when I was a kid, I don’t now. And I’m the kind of person who sees a game, each game, whether it’s baseball or any game, as like a narrative, a story with a beginning, middle, and an end, so I’m not really very satisfied watching a couple of innings. Watching a couple of innings or part of game is never very interesting for me, so therefore I have to have three and a half hours, and I don’t much anymore.
BTB: That’s been a criticism of baseball in the playoffs especially, that the game slows down even more than it is in the regular season. Do you feel like you’re more likely to watch a game in the playoffs, even with that length of time?
MS: Well, I’m a little more likely, but the time is an issue. Because, yes, they do take longer, and they go so late at night, and I honestly don’t know who can watch a game until past midnight. Now of course, you guys on the west coast are lucky, they don’t go that late. On the east coast, who the hell can watch a game that late? A lot of people blame the commercials, I blame the players. It’s mostly, you know, wristband adjusting, crotch adjusting, all the twitching and mannerisms takes longer than the damn commercials. And all the throwing to first base, and all the trips to the mound, and all the double switches. I feel like the game has lost the flow that it had. It’s always said that baseball’s played without a clock... but you can’t take advantage of it. (Laughing) But this is just my pet peeve.
BTB: I can see that.
MS: Yeah, no kidding.
BTB: So also in that introduction you were writing about, and you mentioned earlier, a love for reading stories in the sports section. Do you think that’s what led you to your eventual career?
MS: Yes, I do. Because I read some beautiful writers. I was really lucky to have grown up in Philadelphia. So, I read the Philadelphia Daily News, which was a great sports section, I read the Philadelphia Bulletin, which had a writer named Sandy Grady, who moved on to political writing, who was an unbelievable writer. And these were people who all had some vision and knowledge of not only sports but how sports fit into a larger context. And when I was young, Dick Allen, who we called Richie Allen in Philadelphia, was just coming up in Philadelphia, and there was a great racial and social drama watching Richie Allen’s career. He was mistreated by Philadelphia fans, who displayed quite a lot of bigotry, and Philadelphia fans were the ones who were hardest on Jackie Robinson, it’s a tough town. And I was incensed by that, and I think at that point I made some equation between sports and racial and social justice -- that drama is often played out in sports, in sort of subtle or not so subtle ways.
BTB: You also mentioned that you spent a year as a beat writer in the National League. I was wondering, which team were you covering, and when was that, and what was that whole experience like?
MS: That was the 1987 Cincinnati Reds that I covered, one year, and it was for complicated career reasons, which I won’t want to bore you with. I wanted to go from the Philadelphia Daily News to the Philadelphia Inquirer, and for some very complicated and boring reasons, I had to go somewhere for a year, and I decided, hey, I’ll cover baseball for a year, so I did. And you know, I loved the baseball. I have to admit there were lots of parts of the experience I didn’t love. I didn’t love the clique of baseball writers. I had friends among those baseball writers, I found them as a mass of people, you know, in a group, as sort of not the most pleasant group to hang out with. They sort of replicated the cliques of the clubhouse. You were sort of in or you were out, and it wasn’t that much fun.
BTB: I actually teach middle school.
MS: Oh, really? What do you teach?
BTB: I teach English and reading, and my wife does as well, at the same school, and we talk often about how what we see in our students, and their middle school type behavior, is really replicated in almost every phase of life. And what you were saying about the writers’ being very cliquish kind of reminded me of that.
MS: Well you are a brave man to teach middle school.
BTB: You know, that’s what people say, but it’s really so much fun. Every day is just an awful lot of fun... In your time as a beat writer, I would think that an experience like that, being so close to the game, maybe even too close to the game, could really influence your opinion of baseball. Do you think that that did one way or another?
MS: I still loved the game, it was the year that Eric Davis had this magical year where he really did look like he was the next Willie Mays...
BTB: Right, he had seventy stolen bases, right? Something like that?
MS: Yeah, he was wonderful, he was magical, and I enjoyed going out to the park every day and seeing Eric Davis play. I did get a close-up view at the narrow-mindedness and backwardness of baseball, and it is socially in so many ways the most backward sport. Now some of that is really charming, you know, it’s what makes baseball quaint. But when you get beyond the quaintness, you see some real bigotry, and it was a surprise to me how much of it remained. You know, sort of, closed to new thinking, whether the thinking is about baseball or anything. I mean, I have to admit, I didn’t love all the baseball folks, whether it was the players, or the coaches, or the managers. They’re in a bad mood all the time. There’s no two ways about it. (Laughing.)
BTB: I’m curious where your interest first came in Darryl Strawberry, specifically, and also this ‘79 Crenshaw team.
MS: Well, I was asked by my editors at the New York Times Magazine to write a profile of Strawberry, and that profile appeared in the Spring of 2001. Quite frankly, it was a great career thing for me. I had just left the Philadelphia Inquirer, and I was writing for a new publication, and it was a cover story. Sometimes as a writer you sort of hit it on the fat part of the bat, and that only happens every once in a while, and this, I did feel like was a good story. And I had offers from book publishers to write a profile of Darryl Strawberry, and I said, you know, actually no. I just wrote this 7500-word profile of Darryl Strawberry, and I don’t see where I would like to expand that into a 100,000-word biography. But then, sort of collaboratively with the publisher Simon&Schuster, we came up with the idea of going back and not doing Darryl, but doing Darryl as just one character in this larger book that would center around this great high school baseball team at Crenshaw. So it was sort of collaborative, and that was much more attractive to me, because it was something new. It was something new, I knew a little bit about it, and I think a lot of us who do journalism are attracted by the new. You know, you keep on moving on, and I hate to go back over old ground. So this was new ground, and it became much more interesting.
BTB: So Strawberry, of course, is the name that everyone knows, but his performance on the field during that year, 1979, and I guess the subsequent year, didn’t completely overshadow his teammates, as someone might think, did they?
MS: No, and it’s an interesting lesson in sports. He wasn’t the best player on that team. Chris Brown was undoubtedly the best player on that team. It’s possible that Reggie Dymally was a better high school player, it’s possible that Cordie Dillard was a better high school player. But people in pro sports, as small-minded as they may be, they are not stupid about what they do, and they recognized correctly that whatever Darryl was in high school, in relation to the other great players on his team, at six foot five, and not even having gotten close to growing into that frame, and with all the strength that he would gain, he was the great pro prospect. You know, he had the physical package, and they were absolutely right about that. But as a high school player, he was just one among many. So the pro guys were right about his potential. What they didn’t know was what his high school teammates knew. They couldn’t have put words onto it at the time, but they knew that Darryl was sort of chipped up emotionally, that he didn’t really have the right stuff. And they knew that as any teammates would know of their teammates. You get a sense of someone’s competitive nature, and they knew that Darryl’s was flawed.
BTB: One thing that was mentioned in your book was yes, Chris Brown was a better player. I almost got a feeling that there was, and tell if I’m wrong please, something in between resentment and jealousy of Strawberry, not necessarily in the mistakes that he’s made since leaving Crenshaw, but even at the time. Was there anything like that?
MS: No, you’re not wrong at all. You know, Darryl and Chris recognized themselves as the two big dogs, and Darryl’s personality wasn’t such that he’d have a lot of envy over that. Darryl had other problems -- it probably wasn’t any big deal to Darryl. But Chris sniffed this out right away. He felt always very competitive with Darryl, and even to this day won’t really quite give it up, you know? He’s still pissed off about some stuff. When they retired Darryl’s number, he was like, “Why didn’t you retire my damn number?” And on and on and on, I mean, like two brothers.
BTB: So how many players, roughly, from that ‘79 team were drafted?
MS: When all was said and done, I’m gonna try and remember, when all was said and done, I believe it was a dozen. That includes guys like Marvin McWhorter, who got drafted after a couple years of college or junior college ball. It includes Lee Mays, who was a pitcher and wasn’t really in the book because he was the one guy who wouldn’t talk to me, for reasons I never have understood. But twelve, when all was said and done.
BTB: That’s pretty amazing.
MS: Yeah, that really is.
BTB: One other thing about Strawberry. I actually watched him a lot during his various tours of duty with the Yankees, and it was always amazing to me how impressive he still was. The fact that this broken down, 34-, 35-, 36-year-old guy could still have such an incredibly quick bat, could still influence a game while he’s sitting on the bench. What could Darryl have been, and besides the obvious, why didn’t he get there?
MS: I mean he could’ve had, I’m gonna say 600 home runs. Because in his era, it wasn’t possible for...
BTB: People weren’t hitting fifty, sixty home runs.
MS: They weren’t hitting home runs, for whatever reason, the size of the ballparks, the ball, the pitching. But I’m gonna say somewhere between 500 and 600 easily, and plus all the drama that he brought. He could’ve been everything that people had hoped for, there’s no doubt. He didn’t lack a damn thing physically. And what happened? I don’t know. He was distinctly not suited to compete at that level. He had almost like a product flaw, and that product flaw was that that sort of inner core that you need, that sort of selfish core that pushes everything else away so that you can do your work as an athlete. On a scale of one to ten, the guy who’s got the ten on that is Michael Jordan, but there are variations. You don’t have to be Michael Jordan. But Darryl had like a zero. That thing that makes you selfish in the best way in sports, Darryl didn’t have it at all. It’s like he came without it, so that he right from the start let everything in that distracted him. And it wasn’t just drugs, or drinking. It was everything.
BTB: You mentioned Michael Jordan, and I’ve always kind of felt that these individuals like Michael Jordan, like Tiger Woods, who are the most talented at what they do and also are working harder than everyone else, I guess when you put that along side Darryl’s story, it’s almost easier for me to see people ending up like Strawberry than working. I mean, if you’re the most talented kid you’ve ever seen, I guess it’s easy for me to see how you could develop some lazy habits and be satisfied with that.
MS: I guess, and there are areas in between. There’s a part, not a part -- there’s a large part -- of Jordan and Tiger Woods that are just really pricks, that aren’t very nice people, that aren’t very giving people. And Darryl, when he was at his worst, could be that person. He could be a prick. But I don’t know anybody who would generally describe that as Darryl. You know, I mean he wasn’t that mostly. He was just like a confused, you know, puppy dog is more like it.
BTB: In your time spent with Darryl, what was your prevailing attitude, I guess? Did you feel sorry for him, did you condemn him for his choices, were you wistful for what could have been?
MS: All of the above. You know mostly, I don’t condemn him. The part that makes me angriest about Darryl is when starts mouthing the platitudes that he’s heard in drug rehab or church, and that’s probably a bad thing for me to say, but... Darryl’s of average intelligence, but hasn’t really made the most out of the intelligence that he has, so Darryl is attuned to any language that he hears that takes any sort of responsibility away from himself. So if somebody in church says “it’s all in God’s hands,” Darryl takes that to an extreme that even many people of faith would find inappropriate. When Darryl says “it’s all in God’s hands,” Darryl is saying that you know, “I’m not really responsible for my own actions,” and he hasn’t been, basically. And I hope now, at forty-whatever he is, that maybe things are gonna go okay for him for a while. But that’s been Darryl’s problem. “Not my fault,” in various ways. And I do get angry at that.
BTB: This Crenshaw team was unique, not just because of it’s talent. They were also that rare inner-city black team to stand out in a region dominated for twenty-five years by predominantly white teams from the Valley. I was wondering, were the players aware of this at the time? Obviously they saw the clean uniforms, the well-manicured fields, and the white faces, but did they see a bigger picture?
Michael Sokolove: Most of them, a lot of them did, to an extent that surprised me. As a journalist, you’re never sure if you’re getting the real memories of somebody when they were fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, or something that to some extent has been informed by their adult experience. But I could tell, that absolutely, they were aware even then, and that it drove them. Especially some of the really astute guys, like Reggie Dymally and George Cook and Chris Brown. Kids in general, and you know this from teaching, kids in general are pretty attuned to social things...
BTB: Especially injustice.
MS: Yeah, injustice and elements of inequality. And they knew, they absolutely knew, that baseball, the sport they loved, was viewed as a white suburban game, and they got a big kick out of showing that, “Hey, wait a minute, we’re still playing this game in our neighborhood.”
BTB: In your research for the book did you come across any kind of reason, or did you form an opinion about what some of the reasons are for this decline, for this switch to baseball being a white suburban game?
MS: Yeah, I get asked about this all the time. I was on Outside the Lines with ESPN, and this is a big subject. I guess the first thing I would say is you can’t make somebody play a sport. We all played the sports we played because we loved those sports. So the RBI program, which is baseball’s program to reintroduce baseball into the inner city, you know, it’s behind the eight ball to begin with if it’s sort of spoon fed like bad medicine, I’m not saying that it is. It’s not the hip thing. Its cultural moment has passed in the inner city, and I would say partly that’s role models. There’s no Michael Jordan equivalent in baseball. I think an under appreciated aspect of all of this is Ken Griffey’s decline. There was a time when people in the inner city were walking around with Griffey jerseys, but his career because of injuries just really went south. Nobody in the ‘hood is walking around with a Barry Bonds jersey.
BTB: I don’t think many of my students know who Barry Bonds is.
MS: Wow. Well you know as well or better than I do. So there’s no buzz to baseball in the inner city. And then there are economic reasons, you know. The bats. An aluminum bat is an incredibly expensive thing. There are issues of the men in the city to organize these things, you know, you can go on and on and on. But I think it’s mostly cultural. It’s buzz has passed. So I would say number one, cultural, number two, economic. It’s not a cheap game to play.
BTB: I also read someplace recently, you know this subject obviously has been talked into the ground, I read someplace recently that someone was theorizing that baseball has always been a game that has been passed from father to son, playing catch in the backyard, sitting in the bleachers, watching a game on the couch. Unfortunately, in a lot of these areas, there are not a whole lot of father-son conversations. Did you, in talking with the Crenshaw boys, did you feel like, I mean I know a lot of them had issues with their fathers, or didn’t have fathers, did you think that that was a factor?
MS: I completely agree with you. I completely agree with you. Baseball has to be passed from father to son because there’s a whole body of knowledge that goes with it. Baseball’s an ongoing conversation, and it’s a complicated game. It’s an ongoing conversation that has to be passed on in some way, and if there’s nobody to pass it on, then it can die. The Crenshaw guys, as you know from reading the book, some of them who had very spare relationships with their fathers, who had troubled relationships, you know the one thing they did share was baseball. But what you have in the inner city now is, in too many cases, fathers who are not present at all. And at Crenshaw High School, and I would guess maybe where you are too, you’ve got kids who don’t have a mother or a father, who are in the foster care system or being raised by relatives, and you’ve put it better than I have. Baseball demands some form of a social structure where a male is present, or it seems to, that’s been its tradition. And I guess that is a big part of it, that’s really awful. And it’s awful for more reasons than...
BTB: Right, more than just baseball.
MS: Right, but it is really awful.
BTB: I recently read Pat Conroy’s memoir, My Losing Season, and one of the points that he brings up in this book, and the reason that he chose to write about an unsuccessful season, is that he feels we learn an awful lot more from losing than we do from winning. Do you feel like the Crenshaw team learned from their loss in that championship game?
MS: I don’t know, that’s a really hard question. I just don’t know the answer to that... I don’t think so. I think it was such a devastating loss. I don’t think that particular loss was something those kids needed. I mean, I agree with you overall, and I once heard someone say the best season is 6-4 or 4-6 or 5-5. You hear this in various ways. It’s not good to win all the time, it’s not good to lose all the time. I generally agree with that. This loss was devastating. It was devastating to Fernando Becker, who made the errors. I think it was an echo, I think they were counting on beating the white team from the Valley, and I think it was such a shock that they hadn’t, that it rocked some of them a bit. It was a little too devastating to be a good lesson.
BTB: Probably one of the more intriguing characters in the book is Carl Jones. Could you tell me a little bit about him, your experience with him? It seems that you also have gotten closer to him than the other players that you spoke with.
MS: Actually right now on my computer screen in front of me is an op/ed piece I’m writing for the Los Angeles Times on three strikes which they asked me to write, which of course is gonna be a lot about Carl Jones. You know I didn’t realize it, did you know that there’s a ballot initiative that would soften three strikes?
BTB: You know what, I’m embarrassed to say that I don’t.
MS: That’s okay, I just found out myself. It’s pretty much under the radar. A lot of Californians don’t. So talk it up. I’ll e-mail you and let you know when my op/ed piece will appear.
BTB: I’d appreciate it. The whole three strikes, it was interesting to me how during that part of the book you really were railing against this law. I think it was appropriate, I think the three strikes rule is ridiculous. It was passed during this time, after Polly Klaas -- we’re gonna get tough on everything -- and unfortunately there were too many stories like Carl Jones.
MS: You’ll appreciate this as an English teacher. My father, who had a traditional and a good high school education, said, “Well, Michael,” and he said this so gently because he didn’t want to sound critical, “when I was going to Central High in Philadelphia, they said that an essay should have a unifying theme, and it shouldn’t veer too much from it, and that seemed like a little bit of a departure.” And I said, “Well, it was.” And I don’t think my father reads a whole lot of nonfiction. Well, he does, but he doesn’t. And there’s a lot of nonfiction that takes huge detours, and many detours, and I figured that I was allowed one detour because I really care about this, and I’m really incensed. But I did get close to Carl, and I hate that law, and I hate what was done to him. My kids were very incensed about it, and he calls here on the phone, and he sometimes talks to my twelve-year-old, who’s really easily agitated to begin with and has this highly tuned sense of justice except when it comes to himself. So he’s mad about Carl, he’s mad about three strikes, he’s mad about George Bush. So we’re all, you know it’s just ridiculous. I don’t know what was gonna happen to Carl, or what kind of life Carl was gonna lead, but everybody, I don’t want to say everybody... It’s the worst part of this country, people are comfortable with the large number of people in jail, the large number of black guys in jail, basically, because some of them might not belong there, but the more of them you put away, the less chance there is that one of them’s gonna break into my house, is about what it amounts to.
BTB: I was reading a story at some point in the last few years with my class, and I don’t even remember the story but there was some character who was going to jail, or had been in jail, and I asked the class, “How many of you know someone, someone in your family, someone close to you, who has been in jail?” Every single hand went up. And even though I’d been teaching these kids for thirteen years, I was still stunned. Thinking back to when I grew up, if a teacher had asked that question, I can’t imagine a single hand would’ve gone up.
MS: Where did you grow up?
BTB: I grew up in pretty much the opposite of these places. I was born in Michigan, lived in Chicago for a couple of years, but I was essentially raised in California, for four years in Irvine, which is the heart of Orange County, and then we moved to Palos Verdes, which is, you know, forget about it.
MS: And you’re in what’s called a poverty school now?
BTB: Yeah, it’s not like what’s described at Crenshaw, but certainly, for instance, I will never ask a child about his father, because most of the time there isn’t one. But there’s a lot of poverty.
MS: Is it black and Hispanic?
BTB: It’s fairly evenly split, I think we have a little bit more Latino than black, plus some Asian, with a handful of white kids, you know, fifteen or twenty, maybe. And so they’ve all had these experiences that I certainly never did growing up, and so when I asked that question, I know that if any of my teachers had asked that, probably there would’ve been people who had some connection to someone in jail, but no one ever would’ve raised a hand. And the fact that it’s just such a common experience for these kids is really disheartening.
MS: It is disheartening, and the numbers are staggering, you know the pure numbers, the five billion dollar prison budget, and on and on and on. But yeah, you have to be in a neighborhood like you’re teaching in to see the actual human impact. That’s amazing.
BTB: And several of my kids, their fathers are in jail, and have been in jail since, essentially their entire lives, and so when you see that side of it, it really changes your opinion.
MS: Of course, what people care about, what’s gonna change things, is that California and some of these places are so strapped for cash. So it won’t be the moral abomination of it, it’ll be the money part of it, but either way, things are gonna change a little bit. And then somebody’ll get out of jail, and there’ll be some horrible crime committed, and, you know.
BTB: Exactly. The pendulum will swing. I have one more question about the book. There are a lot of sad stories in the book. What are some of the happy endings that you really enjoyed coming across?
MS: Well, I think that the preponderance of the book is relatively happy endings. I mean, there are some working men with families and productive lives. Reggie Dymally, who is a beautiful man, is doing what he loves, which is cooking. George Cook, who’s a really bright man, and I think could be more than a parking enforcement officer, and I think he knows he could be more than that. But on the other hand, he’s got a great wife, and a great family, and a beautiful house in Inglewood. Nelson Whiting has constructed this sort of spare life for himself that works, as a Navy man, and he’s still involved in music. Chris Brown -- and you know, I don’t know if we’ve talked about this -- did you know that Chris Brown is in Iraq?
BTB: Yeah, driving a truck for Halliburton. I saw there was this spot on him in Sports Illustrated, and also I think I read somewhere you were doing an interview and you mentioned it.
MS: On ESPN, probably. Chris Brown, you know what a complicated person he was from the get go, and he and Brooks Hurst still have a sort of fractious relationship, it’s better than it was. But Chris, as opposed to Darryl, Chris has found faith in way that truly does have a relationship to the life that he leads and has led. But I think that Chris Brown is very much a success story, and I hope he’ll be all right in Iraq. Fernando Becker has had some hard times, but is doing well in San Diego right now. I always go around the horn when I do this. Cordie Dillard is just the guy he always was, the Original Varsity Player, he’s on his third or fourth wife or something. I don’t know how you categorize that. But I guess people read the book as sad. I see it as more poignant. It’s life as people lead life, and it’s full of plenty of pain and disappointment, but I think these guys have done okay. I mean, and it depends what eyes you look at it through. I think sometimes people want to read these books, and they want to find the guy who went to Harvard and became a doctor, and there are none of them. And I will say that I think that there could’ve been some of them, if there were other things shown to these guys, if their community was not so culturally deprived. It’s the first project I’ve ever done like this, whether it was a magazine story or a book, that I just feel like I made friends, and met these really beautiful people, and I really mean that. I see their lives in large degree as successes, but ones that were filled with struggle.
BTB: Yeah, I think that maybe there’s kind of a feeling of what could have been, and like you said, sometimes we measure people against their seventeen-year-old dreams. Obviously they all wanted to be major leaguers, and it only worked out for a couple of them, but you’re right, a lot of them are living good lives.
MS: Yeah, I think so.
BTB: I couldn’t let you go without asking you about Pete Rose.
MS: (Laughing.) He’s not one of the friends I’ve made in journalism.
BTB: I have to just ask you the big question.
MS: Sure.
BTB: Do you think that he should be in the Hall of Fame or not?
MS: Yes, I felt he should be from the beginning. I have virtually nothing good to say about Pete Rose’s character. Pete is a scoundrel, he’s a liar, but he didn’t cheat for the hits. He didn’t buy the hits, he got all those hits. And baseball’s gone about this really stupidly. It should have put him in the Hall of Fame and barred him from baseball.
BTB: I agree with you completely. I think that that’s the solution.
MS: Keeping the two linked was a big mistake. I don’t think he’s gonna get in the Hall of Fame now, because his book and his appearances were public relations debacles.
BTB: And he has a clock ticking as well.
MS: He does. I can’t even remember, what is it? He’s got one more year left?
BTB: I think he has... 2005 I think is his last shot.
MS: Yeah, then it’s gotta go to the Veteran’s Committee, and these guys are the dinosaurs, they don’t want him in.
BTB: Throughout this whole process, “I didn’t bet on baseball, I did bet on baseball,” has your opinion ever changed about the Hall of Fame, or has it been pretty much constant?
MS: No. I must say it’s been constant. In fact, in the paperback version of my book I think there’s a new forward, which only came out a year after the hardback. But it came out after -- and you know Fay Vincent, whom I like, denies that he had anything to do with this, and I’ll have to believe him -- it came out after the Hall of Fame changed its rules, so that if you were on baseball’s ineligible list, then you were ineligible for the Hall of Fame. That was the Pete Rose Rule. And I wrote in the forward then that baseball was giving itself a problem. It linked these two things, and it was going to have to live with the Pete Rose problem forever, and it has. Pete is an undeserved martyr. Baseball made a martyr out of Pete Rose, and that’s stupid.
BTB: Why do think that it’s such a big deal to people whether he’s in the Hall of Fame or not? I don’t think that in other sports there would be quite the topic that it is with Pete Rose.
MS: You know, I don’t know. Because the baseball Hall of Fame is a big deal. You know I’m a sports fan, I really like the games, I like the competition, I like the intricacy, no matter what the game is. I’ve never been a person who’s very interested in autographs, I like the Hall of Fame, but it’s not that big a deal to me, but clearly it’s a huge deal to baseball fans, it’s a huge deal to the baseball establishment. And whether or not Pete’s in it, I think that to Pete’s partisans, of which there are fewer and fewer than there used to be, Pete became a symbol of baseball when baseball was good. And somewhat undeserved, because Pete was the original money-hungry athlete. But in fairness, he also gave a dollar ten effort for a dollar of pay every time he was on the field. That’s the best part of Pete. I think the reason it’s a big deal to people because the baseball Hall of Fame, for whatever reason, is a bigger deal than Canton, Ohio, or Springfield, Mass, which sort of nobody cares about.
BTB: I could continue this conversation forever.
MS: You’ve gotta go teach, though!
BTB: You’re right, I’ve gotta head out the door here in about fifteen minutes, but I just wanted to ask you one more thing. You mentioned that you have the op/ed piece on three strikes that’s coming up. Do you have any other projects in the works, whether books or articles?
MS: Not yet. I’m a contributing writer to the New York Times Magazine, so I just had a cover piece on Michael Phelps two weeks ago, and I write on sports and non-sports topics for them. By the way, I’ve generally not been a sportswriter through my career. So I’ll write more articles for the New York Times, because that’s my sort of day job, and I love it. And I’m looking for another book to write. I hope in the next couple of months I’ll have settled on an idea and sold it. But all ideas are welcome!
BTB: Okay, I’ll think of some for you.
Comments