BrokenCowboy: Sports Views with a West Coast Bias

An Interview with Richard Bradley

It is certainly the most famous game from the most famous rivalry in baseball history. Any sports fan can tell you that Bucky Dent earned a "special" middle name when he launched an improbable home run on a crisp October afternoon in Boston, and most would also tell you that the story ended with more sorrow for the Red Sox and another World Series championship for the Yankees. Richard Bradley's recent book, The Greatest Game: The Yankees, the Red Sox, and the Playoff of '78, not only tells the story we know but also digs beneath the service to give us what we don't. (Click here for an excerpt.) Bradley interviewed dozens of players, coaches, and other personnel connected with both teams in order to give a complete picture of the game and all that led up to it.

He reminds us that although the Yankees made an historic comeback, the Red Sox (who won ninety-nine games, afterall) didn't collapse. We meet Bob Lemon, the mild baseball lifer who replaced Billy Martin, the volatile alcoholic who nearly piloted a championship team into the ground. And, of course, we're reintroduced to George Steinbrenner when he was at the peak of his manipulative powers, nothing like the mild patriarch (relatively speaking, at least) that he's become today.

Perhaps most interesting, though, are the players. Bradley intertwines two separate narratives throughout the length of the book, one following the season from spring training to its eventual conclusion, the other detailing each at bat of the playoff game. As he tells these two stories, Bradley includes brief biographical sketches of the key players on both sides. We read about Reggie Jackson's struggles with Martin's caustic, dictatorial style, and Carl Yastrzemski's desperate search for a championship. Jim Rice's MVP season is balanced nicely against Ron Guidry's Cy Young campaign. Most compellingly, Carlton Fisk's polished athleticism stands as a stark contrast against Thurman Munson's scruffy competitiveness.

The Red Sox and the Yankees, it seems, could not have been more different in 1978, and so it makes perfect sense that these two opposites would have come together to produce one of the most memorable games of the past half century. Bradley's book captures the rivalry, the season, and the game perfectly. It appeals to fans of both teams, as well as baseball fans in general, and whether they were born after the game was played or were sitting in the stands that afternoon, readers will revel in the details Bradley uncovers.

Recently Bradley was generous enough to spend part of his morning talking with me about his book. Check it out...

BrokenCowboy:
Previously you had written about JFK, Jr., and Harvard University. Whatever led you to write about something as mundane as a baseball game?

Richard Bradley
(Laughing) Well, I guess first of all, I didn’t consider it mundane – it’d be tough to write a book about something that you felt that way about because books are so hard, even when you love your subject. But what I found when I was writing about John Kennedy and the importance of the Kennedy mythology in the American culture and also about Harvard University was that really what I was writing about turned out to be American icons. Institutions, people, that are sort of a central part of the collection of ideals and myths that we think of when we think of America, and baseball is obviously very much a part of that. So while in some ways the subjects seemed very different, I thought that in another way it’s really just a different angle of looking at the things that we think define the United States.

BC:
You mentioned how difficult it is to write a book, and I was interested in your process for this one. When did you begin your research and what was that experience like?

RB:
Well, I guess I began with the idea for the book in early 2006. I had just come off this book Harvard Rules, about the last president of Harvard University, and as I said baseball seemed a natural progression. I also wanted to write about something that would be timely and something that I felt was a central part of the sport’s iconography: a famous game, a famous homerun, a remarkable era, a great rivalry. This Yankees-Red Sox game, which really capped a very intense period in the rivalry between the two teams in the 1970s, absolutely fit that description. So I wrote a proposal for the book, sold it, which is a pretty standard thing that writers have to do, and I began reaching out to the clubs, the Red Sox and Yankees. I found that the Red Sox were terrific, and quite easy to work with. The Yankees were a little more difficult because their attitude towards the media, I think, since Mr. Steinbrenner took over has been a little… How can I put it?

BC:
Suspicious?

RB:
Less pro-active. And also at the time, of course, and currently, George Steinbrenner has been ill. So I got the feeling that a number of things were moving slowly in the organization because there was a little bit of a leadership vacuum. So to get to the Yankees players, I wound up really going through their agents. And then I spoke with the players, as many of them as I could. I couldn’t get all of them, but I got most of them. And after that I tried to speak to as many of the people surrounding the game as possible: umpires, observers, people in the organizations, baseball historians, that sort of thing. Then in early 2007 I started to write, and I finished the manuscript in the fall of 2007.

BC:
Talking a little bit about the game, I was about a month shy of my ninth birthday when this game was played. Even though I remember watching it very clearly, I certainly had no idea of its historical significance. What was your experience? Did you understand what was happening? Do you remember what was going on?

RB:
Well, my experience was sort of different in that at the time I didn’t actually get to see the game. I was stuck in school. I was at a school where we really didn’t get out until 4:30, we didn’t get home until a little bit after five. So I missed it, pretty much, and I’d never seen it until a couple of years ago when I made a point of looking it up, which isn’t easy to do actually. Tapes of games from that era are harder to find than you would think. And when I watched the game I realized that although of course it’s justly famous for Bucky Dent’s unexpected homerun that really turned the momentum of the game, there were so many subplots and dramas in every inning of that game that people had forgotten a little bit about. So I grew more and more curious about it.

BC:
You mentioned that you spoke to a lot of players and people connected with the game. Even though we’re talking about a game that was played thirty years ago, I’m guessing that the people you spoke with didn’t have any trouble recalling its details. Were you surprised by how vivid some of the memories were?

RB:
Actually I was surprised at how faulty some of the memories were. I think this is something that happens with iconic events. At some point, say, a faulty memory might get introduced into the conversation, people misremember things just a little bit, and then they repeat it over and over again until it becomes established fact, at least in their own minds. I’ll give you an example. I went down to Florida to meet with Bucky Dent, and I was talking to him about his home run which he hit on a 1-1 count. Remember, this is one of the most famous home runs in the history of the game, far and away the most famous thing that Bucky Dent ever did on the playing field, and Bucky thought – and was adamant – that he had hit that home run with two strikes on him. He said that, and my ears kind of perked up, and I interjected and said, “Actually, no, there weren’t two strikes.” And he said, “Oh, yeah there were.” And I felt kinda bad, because…

BC:
Because you had seen the tape.

RB:
Who am I to say to Bucky Dent what the count was? But in fact, I’d always wondered because the first pitch of that at bat was arguably a strike and a check swing by Dent. And I’ve always wondered if on some level in his memory he didn’t sort of think that maybe that had been a strike, and maybe he remembered it that way.

BC:
That’s interesting. I interviewed Jonathan Eig a year ago or so, off of his Jackie Robinson book, and he mentioned some of the things. He was dealing with a season that was fifty years ago, but still he mentioned that there were certain stories that have just become a part of folklore, almost. The famous image of Pee Wee Reese putting his arm around Jackie Robinson to support him the face of an abusive Cincinnati crowd, and he couldn’t find any record of that actually happening. Just as you said, stories have been told, and they’ve become fact.

RB:
And what happens, I think, when you try to convince people otherwise, is that oftentimes they don’t believe you, and sometimes they actually can get irritated at you because the memory is something that’s become important to them, emotionally significant to them. So for you to come in and say actually it didn’t happen that way, people aren’t always happy to hear it. So what you have to do, I think, is try to check with as many other sources, whether documentary or through interviewing people, and eventually it’s kind of like filling in a puzzle. Eventually you start to get a sense of what may have really happened.

BC:
Right.

RB:
I’ll give you another example. After the second pitch of Dent’s at bat, Dent swung and fouled a ball off his instep and fell to the ground. He had to be treated by trainer Gene Moniyhan. Mike Torrez and a number of folks thought that the time in between when Dent hit his ankle and stepped in for the next pitch was really long, something like five minutes. Torrez said to me, “One of my great regrets is that I didn’t take any warm-up pitches during those five minutes.” Don Zimmer said the same thing. I timed that interval, over and over again. It was about a minute and twenty seconds, but they were all convinced that it was four times as long. It may have seemed like four times as long, but it wasn’t.

BC:
I assume at point in an important game, time kind of slows down. You probably lose reference a little bit.

RB:
Exactly.

BC:
I loved how you chose to construct your narrative by weaving your game description into a review of the entire season, but I think my favorite parts of the book were the short player profiles that were scattered throughout. Were there any particular players that stood out for you as you were researching and writing?

RB:
Well, the Yankees were a team full of characters, but the guy who I found the most fascinating is unfortunately a guy that I wasn’t able to speak with. Thurman Munson. Even when I was a kid – and in my personal life I’m a Yankee fan; the book is pretty neutral, I think – I thought Munson was sort of a fascinating character because he was such a curmudgeon with the press. But when you spoke to his teammates a very different side of him became clear. A guy who was warm and funny and surprisingly vulnerable.

BC:
And writing poetry! I couldn’t believe he was writing poetry!

RB:
(Laughing) Thurman Munson writing poetry – you just don’t see it! And he was a guy who, for very complicated reasons, I think, and some of them having to do with a father who was really a jerk, Munson felt that he had to have this very thick skin. Bucky Dent told me that one of his favorite images of Munson is of Munson wearing what was apparently his favorite t-shirt, which was a Yosemite Sam t-shirt showing him with guns blazing and the caption, “Ise Hates Baseball!” Of course Munson didn’t hate baseball at all. He loved baseball. It was all he ever did, but he wasn’t gonna say that. So on the Yankees, I think, Thurman Munson. Catfish Hunter was a fascinating guy. I wish I’d have been able to talk with him as well. Unfortunately he died of ALS about twenty years ago. He was a veteran player who had a really great wit and great insight into the team. Lou Piniella I did get to talk with a little bit, also a very thoughtful guy who hides it a little bit behind a sharp edge…

BC:
He hides it pretty well, I think.

RB:
Yeah, but you can tell that there’s a real intelligence there. On the Red Sox there were several complicated personalities. Jim Rice, an African-American player with a lot of pride who felt, and I think justifiably, that race was a real issue for him, particularly as a guy was sort of slotted to be the next in the Ted Williams-Carl Yastrzemski line. A very tough position to be in, especially for an African-American man from South Carolina.

BC:
In Boston.

RB:
In Boston, exactly. And also, I think, Carl Yastremski, whom I did get to speak with after quite a lot of work. He very rarely gives interviews. Yaz is someone who went through different phases with the Red Sox in his twenty-three year career with them. He was not always beloved by the fans, and was not a simple team leader. Playing that long for one team, he went through phases of different roles that he played with the team. He was not a rah-rah kind of guy by any means, but he was passionate and intense and incredibly committed to what happened on the field. I spoke with Yaz about that game where he hit a home run and drove in two runs, but also made the last out in a situation where he had the opportunity to win the game for the Red Sox. There was no question that this still bothered him. He felt at the time that this was really his last best chance to get into and win a World Series, that the Red Sox team probably wouldn’t be able to hold together in the following years. For a guy who spent that long in baseball, this was pretty deep stuff. So I think Yaz is a fascinating character as well.

BC:
I wanted to ask you about what the rivalry was like back then. Nowadays you often hear that the rivalry means a lot more to the fans than the players on the field. In fact, there was a big controversy when Joba Chamberlain sent a good luck text to Clay Buchholz before a game not too long ago. Would something like that have happened in 1978?

RB:
Unthinkable back then. For different reasons. Free agency and the way that players were moving around had not totally sunk in. So for somebody like Mike Torrez to go from the Yankees to the Red Sox was really, really a big deal. And for Torrez to do as he did in the off-season, to make remarks degrading the quality of the Yankees and suggesting that they wouldn’t be as good in ’78 as they had been in ’77 was something that really pissed off the Yankees. I think the rivalry was more personal, it was definitely more physical than it has become. I think in the current rivalry the fact that the Red Sox have been so successful in the past few years has sort of taken some of the anger out of it. Even back, I can’t remember what year it was, when Don Zimmer got flipped by…

BC:
2003, by Pedro.

RB:
Those emotions were pretty high at that point. But that seems to have leveled off in terms of the relationships between the players. Back then these two teams really didn’t like each other. In particular, I think, the great personal rivalry was between Thurman Munson and Carlton Fisk, who were in some ways very similar, and in some ways very different. Very similar in their approach to the game, their complete devotion to it. Very different in the sense that Munson had a tough self-image. Very hyper-critical, kind of an odd-looking guy, didn’t look like a natural athlete. Brian Doyle, from the Yankees, told me that Thurman Munson, when you saw him in the locker room and you would never have thought that this guy was an amazing athlete. And Munson was pretty self-conscious about that, whereas Fisk was this good-looking guy, tall, kind of rugged-looking, square-jawed. And the Yankees thought that Fisk was a little taken with himself. Marty Appel, who had been the Yankees P.R. guy for a while during that period said to me that when Fisk hit that home run in the 1975 Series where he waved it fair and jumped up and down the line, the Yankee players didn’t actually like that. They thought that was a little bit of showboating, a little sort of self-love. And part of the reason they felt that way, I think, was they just didn’t like Fisk.

BC:
I guess you can’t really discuss that game without looking at the season that led up to it. First of all, how crazy was Billy Martin, and how much of an impact did the switch to Bob Lemon have on the Yankees?

RB:
Well, every one of the Yankees I spoke with I asked about the importance of that switch, and every single one of them said, “We would never have made it to that playoff game against Boston if Billy Martin had still been the manager.” Martin had a trajectory that he followed with pretty much every team he managed, which was great success over the first couple of years followed by increasing volatility in his relations with players and management. A cycle of self-destructive behavior. With the Yankees, 1978 was the downside of that cycle for Martin. It was not helped by the fact that Martin’s drinking was really out of control. Billy Martin was an alcoholic. There’s no way that if he were managing today that he would not be packed off to a rehab clinic to dry up. At the time, people didn’t do that kind of thing. But Martin drank so much that it fueled irrational and volatile behavior. And also, to be fair, he was in a very delicate situation. George Steinbrenner has never been an easy man to work for, but back then he was really at the height of his mind games with the manager and his players. Steinbrenner was a guy who wasn’t averse to manipulating Martin and trying to suggest lots of little ways in which Martin might lose his job. And of course, the job of being Yankees manager meant more to Billy Martin than anything else in his life. He had been a Yankee player, of course, and he’d been traded after some alleged misbehavior after a night on the town with Mickey Mantle. That trade had devastated Martin and effectively brought an end to his playing career, although he kicked around the majors for a few years after that. Coming back to the Yankees was salvation for him. Unfortunately his personality and his drinking combined to cost him that salvation, at least for that year. He would come back of course, but it was never quite the same.

BC:
And what about Ron Guidry? I was so caught up in his season that even living outside of Chicago at that time as an eight-year-old, I actually dressed up as Ron Guidry for Halloween that year. Just how dominant was he?

RB:
Ridiculously dominant. Out of control dominant. Ron Guidry went 25-3 on the season, and in fact, a couple of his losses were games that he probably should have won, except that a ball was misplayed or something fluky happened. His ERA was 1.74. He won his first 13 games of the season. He won games after… something like nine or ten of his games came after consecutive Yankee losses, so essentially the Yankees could not go into any three-game losing streak when Ron Guidry was in the order. There’s just no question that without Guidry this was a team that would never have gone as far as it did.

BC:
So even though the focus now is on the Yankee comeback and eventual win, people sometimes forget how good that Red Sox team was. Isn’t that right?

RB:
Oh, I think they do, and the worst culprits tend to be Red Sox fans themselves, because they focus so much on the loss and that October playoff game and on Bucky Dent’s home run that they forget that this was a team that won 99 games and that was astonishingly good, really a great team. If a couple of things had gone differently on that October day, the Red Sox would have been the team to win that game, and all the players on both teams were convinced that the Yankees and the Red Sox were the best teams in baseball, and that whoever won that playoff game would go on to win the World Series, which turned out to be true when the Yankees beat the Dodgers. But they were equally certain that if the Red Sox had won that game, that they would have gone on to win the World Series as well, and I think that’s probably true.

BC:
Well, all of this leads us to Bucky Dent. I loved your three-page description of his home run, something that probably took about thirty seconds in real time. Can you talk about that a little bit and some of the peripheral things that were going on?

RB:
What I tried to do in describing Dent’s home run was to show what that looked like…

BC:
From every point of view.

RB:
Every point of view that I could, really, at least in terms of the players. Because I think when you watch a game like this on TV, what do you see? You see, at that time, really one camera following the ball. The production values of that game were substantially lower than they would be for a game of similar import played today. So you got to see, back in 1978, Dent’s swing, and you sort of saw the ball as it headed out, and you couldn’t even completely see the ball as it barely skimmed the top of the Green Monster. What I wanted to do is sort of present that even in a way that you wouldn’t get to see it even if you were in the stands that day. Because when you’re watching a ball that may be a home run, you’re following the flight of the ball. So I talked to a lot of the other players about what they were looking at, to see what players judge when they’re in a situation like that. And one of the things that quite a few of them said, was that they were actually watching Yastrzemski. Yaz, for them, was the best measure of whether or not that ball was going to go out. Because after all, nobody played the Green Monster better than Carl Yastrzemski, ever. So for, I don’t know, half a second, three-quarters of a second, something like that, as Yaz was running, he looked confident. He looked he was either going to catch the ball, or that it was going to bounce off the Green Monster and he’d do what he usually did, which was hold a ball like that for a single. Instead, there’s a moment where Yaz, his knees just sort of bend and his body just kind of crumples. You see it. It’s shock. It’s like he’s been punched in the stomach. Player after player said they saw that, and they knew that Bucky Dent had hit a home run.

BC:
And I think that image of Yaz buckling like you said, is as iconic as Fisk waving his home run.

RB:
Yeah.

BC:
Because as you’re describing it, I can see it vividly in my mind.

RB:
It was a remarkable, tangible expression of disbelief. Yastrzemski said to me, in fact I think that’s the word he used, he said, “I just couldn’t believe that Bucky Dent had hit a home run.” And in that sense, I think what he felt was what hundreds of thousands of people across New England felt.

BC:
It seems like their recent championships have softened the hearts of the Red Sox and their fans, as evidenced by their recent love-in with Bill Buckner. Is there any chance that they might also forgive Dent, or will he always just be Bucky Fucking Dent?

RB:
(Laughing) I think he’s always going to be Bucky Effing Dent for them. The people who were really affected by that, it took them twenty-five years, right? At least Bill Buckner was one of their own, and look, the Red Sox still had a seventh game, right? So it wasn’t completely Buckner’s fault. With Bucky Dent, they were mad at Bucky Dent for twenty-five years or so until the Red Sox won a World Series, so the people who were there at the time, I don’t think they can really turn around and say all is forgiven. And for people who weren’t there at the time and didn’t really feel it so strongly, it doesn’t really matter as much. The truth is it’s kind of fun now to get mad at Bucky Dent. But it wasn’t at the time. And of course, you know, the great story about how he got that nickname is that after the game Don Zimmer was driving home, still in a state of shock. Thinking about the game, he got so overwhelmed that he pulled off to the side of the world and just kept muttering to himself… Am I allowed to say this?

BC:
You’re allowed to say it.

RB:
Zimmer just kept shaking his head and saying, “Bucky Fucking Dent. Bucky Fucking Dent.”

An Interview with Pat Jordan

Recently a friend of mine introduced me to the writing of Pat Jordan. As a sports fan and avid reader of Sports Illustrated, I'm sure I had read his stuff before without being aware, as I wrote at SI for years in the seventies and early eighties. But after diving into a newly published collection of some of his best work, The Best Sports Writing of Pat Jordan, I couldn't imagine it had taken me so long to find him. Jordan's style is reminiscent of an older generation of journalism. Most journalists today seem intent on using their writing to set bonfires which will further illuminate their own pseudo celebrity. Jordan, however, steers clear of the easy targets and the pieces which fall from the sky already written. Instead, he delves deep into his subjects and produces profiles which, to paraphrase him, give a better picture of his subject that the reader will ever get anywhere else. He succeeds.

Recently Pat was kind enough to spend part of his morning talking to me about a host of subjects including his failed baseball career, an early interview with Roger Clemens, his experience with Ricky Williams, the controversial running back, and lots of other stuff. It's a long and winding road -- enjoy!

BrokenCowboy
I wanted to start by asking you about some of your earliest baseball memories. Mine are crystal clear. I was obsessed with baseball from a young age, so when my parents took me to Tiger Stadium when I was seven years old to see Mark Fidrych pitch, it was about the coolest thing in the world.

Pat Jordan:
The Bird! He was one of the coolest guys.

BC:
A month later when we were on a family vacation to New York City my parents asked me what I wanted to do one day, and I chose Yankee Stadium. I remember everything about that game – Catfish started, Chambliss hit a homerun to beat the Royals, and Sparky closed it out. More than thirty years later, I’m still a die-hard Yankee fan because of that day at the Stadium.

PJ:
You gotta go to Yankee Stadium, you gotta go to Fenway Park, and you gotta go to Wrigley Field. Those are the three stadiums that you have to see if you’re a baseball fan.

BC:
I’ve been two of those three. I still need to make it to Fenway.

PJ:
Oh, Fenway’s great. It’s like going to a little cubby-hole, you know? The press box is up this rickety old stairway. I’ve got a fear of heights, and you’ve gotta climb up these rickety stairs, and there’s no railing, and you’re looking out over the right hand side all the way down to the street. The last time I was there it was like a Quonset hut with a little tin roof.

BC:
And they keep building those stands that stick farther and farther out.

PJ:
I know. They’ll be across the street pretty soon.

BC:
So what was your first game like?

PJ:
I was about seven or eight. My brother was going to Georgetown Law in Washington, DC. It was in the early fifties. It was a Yankees-Senators game, and after the game they allowed the people to walk onto the field to try to get autographs. The Yankees were just running off the field, and I had a torn piece of paper or something, but I was too embarrassed to ask one of the Yankees. But my brother, who was a very big guy, he was like 6’5”, grabs Phil Rizzuto and sticks the paper under his nose and says, “Will you sign it for the kid, Phil?” Phil gave him a big smile and signed a piece of paper that I never saw again. That was my first remembrance. I was always a Yankee fan. In Connecticut, if you’re south of Hartford, you’re a Yankee fan. If you’re Hartford or east or north, you’re a Red Sox fan. So we were always Yankee fans. Plus, the Yankees had all Italians in the fifties. You had DiMaggio, Crosetti, Lazzeri, Raschi, Berra… As Italian immigrants – even my grandmother, who could barely speak English, knew the great DiMaggio. They were a sign that our immigrants were making it in an American game.

BC:
That reminds me of something that came up in Jonathan Eig’s recent book on Jackie Robinson. One thing that he mentioned that I wasn’t aware of growing up in my era, was the strong ethnic identities, like you mentioned, that different teams would have.

PJ:
Oh, very big. The Red Sox were Irish, the Yankees were Italian, the Midwest teams were German and Polish, and then when Jackie came along the Dodgers were always identified with black fans because he was their first hero, you know. And after Jackie they weren’t reticent about signing Joe Black, Don Newcombe, Roy Campanella… I’ll tell you a funny story about Campanella. When I was a kid, my parents and my uncles would watch the Yankees-Dodgers World Series. My two uncles were arguing about who was a better catcher, Campanella or Berra. And so my father intercepted and said, “What difference does it make, they’re both Italians!” But then when Campanella struck out, then he wasn’t Italian anymore, he was black. But when he hit a home run he was a paisan. So they got it both ways with Campanella. But that’s how ethnic it was when I grew up. Today Campanella is noted as one of the early black ballplayers, but in my family, no, no. He was Italian.

BC:
That’s funny. As far as that strong ethnic identity, you mentioned that you followed the Yankees in large part because they were Italian like you, not just because of where you lived. How much of that went on, where people said, “I’m Irish so I like the Red Sox.”?

PJ:
Oh, that was very common. The Red Sox had Williams, McDermott… Boston was an Irish city ruled by Irish politicians. Italians, and people don’t know this, this is going back into a history that you wouldn’t be aware of. Italians were not prejudiced. My mother and father, when I was a kid, they never questioned any girls I brought home. It was always a Polish girl, a black girl, anything. Except – I could never bring home the hated Irish. The Italians and the Irish hated each other. It was all social because the Irish came first and the Italians came after them. And plus the Italians didn’t look American, number one, and number two, they didn’t speak the language. So they were wops – without papers. The ethnic resentment went back to the simple fact that during Prohibition my grandmother had a variety store and she sold bootleg wine out of the back room, and the Irish cop on the beat made her give him five dollars a week in tributes to keep the bootleg wine operation going. So that’s why they hated the Irish, because the Irish held ‘em up for five bucks a week to sell their wine. But that was the only prejudice I ever grew up with in my Italian house. Our ancestry goes back to Italy, where the original name was DiMenna, which in English is diamond. My Uncle Ben was Benjamin Diamond, and there’s Jewish history in our family, and I’m sure black history. As my mother said, when Hannibal came over the Alps he dallied with the Italian girls. So I never grew up with any form of prejudice except the hated Irish. So when I married my second wife whose last name is Ryan, my mother – who’s about eighty – she calls up and says, “What kind of name is Ryan for an Italian wife?” And comes flying down to Florida to check my wife out! Those were interesting times. I was talking with a friend the other day about how ethnic my generation was. We always referred to each other by ethnic names: I was the guinea, Richie Belzer was the Jew, Richie O’Connor was the Mick. We used those terms. Today to be politically correct you can’t, but I still do.

BC:
My love of baseball, a lot of it came from reading about these old players, especially old Yankees. And you can’t imagine, like DiMaggio being called the Big Dago, you can’t imagine a player in the press being referred to like that now.

PJ:
Oh, of course not. But you know when my father grew up in the twenties he couldn’t get a job because the signs on the doors said “Help Wanted – No Italians Need Apply.” So in their own way they were the blacks of the twenties in terms of immigrants. And people sometimes think that I’m Irish because of my name, Patrick Michael Jordan, but it’s Pascuali Michaeli Jordano. That was my father’s name, but he changed it on the day I was born. He had it legally changed so that I would be born an American, he said. He didn’t want me to have the stigma of being Italian. Today I wouldn’t mind being Patty Jordano. That’s a nice name.

BC:
So you obviously played the game early on. How important was playing as you were growing up?

PJ:
It was the focal point of our neighborhood. I was born in an Italian ghetto, but I moved when I was five to a little suburb in Fairfield, and everybody met at the park. Now the park had a swing set, a tennis court, and two baseball diamonds. One was a little league, and one was a major league – major league dimensions. Basically every kid woke up, had breakfast, got on his bike, and went up there. The non-athletic kids hung out at the swing set – the shooty shoots and all that. And the kids who were into baseball, we played pick-up games. So that’s where my friendships were made. One of my friends who died when he was forty-six, he was the oldest kid, the first kid I ever met up at the park, his name was Doug Holmquist. He played with the Houston Astros, and he eventually became a coach under Billy Martin for the Yankees. Doug and I, the first time we went up there we were just five years old and we had a catch together. And that was my oldest friend until he died. We had to pick up sides, and I was always lousy so they always put me in right field. One day when I was about eight years old a station wagon pulls up. A guy gets out and he starts pulling out these big canvas bags with bats and balls, and everyone goes running, except for me. I didn’t know what was up. And one of the kids yells out, “It’s the Little League coach, stupid!” I didn’t know what Little League was. So he goes to the mound and he says, “I’m the Little League coach and I wanna see who wants to try out.” Naturally everybody raises their hands. “We’re gonna try out by position. So if you want to play a position, raise your hand.” The first position he calls is pitcher, and I was so excited that I raised my hand.

BC:
And how old were you then?

PJ:
Eight. At that time Little League was eight to twelve. There was no minor league, just all major league Little League. So I raised my hand at eight, I had never pitched before, they put me on the mound, aimed me toward the plate, I threw a couple of pitches, and everybody’s eyes bugged out. I had been playing right field all this time, and I didn’t know I had an arm. So eventually I made the Little League. I was the first guy in the history of Little League to make the major leagues at the age of eight years old. I never pitched, but I was playing with twelve-year-old kids, you know. So I got a uniform and there was a little publicity about “eight year old makes major league Little League” and all.

BC:
Do you still remember that first uniform?

PJ:
Oh, yeah. You know why? Because we had a Memorial Day parade. Memorial Day opened the Little League season, and we all had our uniforms and marched in a parade down through the center of town. It was Smirnoff’s Market. Smirnoff’s Market Little League. Plus the idea that you’re a member of a team. That was something. You were part of something. That was fun. And by the time I was ten I was really good. When I was ten I was pitching shutouts.

BC:
I played Little League baseball growing up, and I have a lot of those same memories. I remember getting my first jersey. It was number eight, and immediately I thought of Joe Morgan, one of my favorite players, so that was a pretty cool thing.

PJ:
Oh, Joe. I like Joe.

BC:
But the sad thing is that I was not a talent. I’ll never forget what it was like being cut from my high school teams in the ninth and tenth grades. Up until then, foolishly, I always assumed that I’d be a major league baseball player.

PJ:
We all did.

BC:
Your playing career lasted a lot longer than that, but it still ended earlier than you would’ve liked. What was the end like for you?

PJ:
Oh, it was very traumatic.

BC:
Did you have any regrets then or now?

PJ:
I did then, but not now. Someone asked me what I would’ve been. I said I would’ve continued on the road to becoming an asshole that not even José Canseco could approach. I was so single-focused about baseball all my life that I was not a very social kid. All I cared about was pitching. I didn’t care about friendships anymore once I became a star, it was just pitching a baseball. And since I had unlimited success very early, when it was cut off at the age of twenty-one I was stunned. What do I do? I had gone to college one semester a year before I went to spring training just to placate my parents, but I had no interest in anything but baseball. It was very traumatic. I couldn’t even look at a box score for about five or six years, partly because most of the guys I played with were going to the big leagues and becoming stars: Joe Torre, Phil Niekro, Ron Hunt, Tony Cloninger. All these guys were in the big leagues, and I couldn’t even look at a box score. It was rough, but it was the best thing. It was like a traumatic amputation, you know? Sometimes it’s the only way to make somebody get well. I think if I had lingered on into the minor leagues until twenty-eight, say, as a triple A player and not quite get called up or maybe get called up for a cup of coffee and spend a month or two and then get sent back down again… I think it would’ve been a thousand times worse. I was forced at twenty-one to say, okay, what are you gonna do now? It wasn’t too late. At twenty-eight it would’ve been late.

BC:
So how did you go from pitching to writing? If someone had told you at age fifteen that you’d grow up to be a writer, how shocked would you have been?

PJ:
I had no idea. I had never read a book. What happened was when I came back from baseball I worked all these menial jobs. I was a construction worker. I worked for a Lithuanian mason. I carried mortar and bricks up a scaffold while he built a chimney, stuff like that. I wanted to go to college, so I wanted to get a night job. I was playing semi-pro basketball at night for this guy who was a sports editor of the local newspaper. I was getting paid fifty bucks a game. I had a wife and a baby. So I was complaining to him one night, I said, geez, I need a night job so I can go to school. Because when I went to school they didn’t even have night courses, you had to go full time. So he says, “I’ll give you a job at the sports section of the newspaper.” I told him I didn’t know anything about writing, but he said, “Well, you know sports.” So I got the job for sixty-five dollars a week, I worked from six to two in the morning, then went to school from eight-thirty to three. He would let me do my homework from midnight to two because the paper was put to bed at midnight but we had to wait until the paper came up and I had to go down to the linetype room and read the paper to make sure there were no mistakes. So between midnight and two I did my homework. In those days all the guys had a bottle of bourbon on their desk, they smoked cigars – both things that I do to this day. And my only job the first couple of weeks was to read the race results to the local bookie, Clyde. And that’s all I did. Then after a while I would write the headlines for the local high school games: “Tigers Rip Rams, Smith Hits 20”. Two lines, and I had to make sure they fit in a certain number of characters. And that’s all I did. And I’d sit there at the typewriter and I would write it out longhand on a piece of paper, and then type it with one finger. Tiger. Hunt around… T. Hunt around… I. So you couldn’t have started at a lower level than I did. You know what I mean? Guys go to journalism school and all that, but you couldn’t start any lower than I did. Little by little then I’d write the high school results, then I wrote a couple profiles and somebody mentioned one of them: “You know, that was a terrific story.” And that was the first time I’d gotten any ego feedback since I left baseball. I liked the ego gratification when somebody’d recognize me downtown and say he’d read my story. So I went to see this old guy, an old sportswriter who was a real drunk. He was always whacked by eight o’clock at night. I said, “Johnny, you know I’m thinking I might like to be a writer.” He looks at me with bleary eyes, with a cigarette hanging from his lips, and he says, “Pat, I owe everything I am in my life to this business.” And I got so depressed that I quit that week. This is my future? And so I quit and became a school teacher, high school English at an all girls high school.

BC:
I teach 8th grade English.

PJ:
Oh, you do? Okay. That was the second-best job I ever had. I loved teaching. I just like writing more.

BC:
I’m wondering how your playing experience affected your writing. You mentioned how bitter the end was for you; how do you think that affected your perception of the game? For instance, if I were covering a game it would be hard for me. As difficult as this is to admit, even at thirty-eight years old, it would be hard for me to talk to Derek Jeter, for instance.

PJ:
Not me. I pitched against Hank Aaron. Fuck Derek Jeter.

BC:
Right, that’s what I’m saying. So how do you think your experience affects your point of view? Are you able to be more objective?

PJ:
I never romanticize them. A friend of mine said he was shocked that I’m not a fan. I sent him a story I wrote once about Tom Seaver. It was about the first World Series that they won, and I put a TK in there. I wrote, “When the Mets won the World Series in 19TK…” And my buddy called up and said, “Every fan knows when the Mets won the World Series.” I said, I don’t. I never approached it as, oh, I’m in a major league locker room. I was in a major league locker room when I was seventeen years old in Yankee Stadium with Mickey Mantle when I was trying out for the Yankees. I took one look at Mantle and you know what my first though was? I’m bigger than he is. They said he was six feet, but he was like five-ten, and I towered over him. I was six-one or something. I thought I should’ve been up there. Not that I put these guys down, but I never romanticized the idea that I’m talking to, say, Derek Jeter or Mariano Rivera. Like if I were talking to Mariano Rivera, the first thing I’d talk about would be his cut fastball and I’d show him how I used to hold my slider. And then I’d say, “Well how do you hold it differently? Because a slider breaks more than your cut fastball.” You know what I mean? I’d be interested in his talent, but it would never be like, oh my god, I’m talking to a major league ball player. Friends will say to me today, I’ve got tickets to the Marlins game, they’re playing the Mets, you want to go? I say why? They say, it’s a major league game, I got a friend who can get us into the locker room. What do I want to go into a locker room for? I was in a locker room with Hank Aaron and Warren Spahn. I ran wind sprints with Spahnnie and Burdette in 1959. I pitched against Hank Aaron in spring training in 1960. So I never had that kind of rosey-eyed view of professional athletes, but I always admired guys for their talent.

BC:
So do you think that objectivity has made you a better writer?

PJ:
Oh, absolutely. I carry it over into everything I write about. It’s not cynical, I always think it’s realistic. Like I’ve done Hollywood actors – Tom Selleck, and all these different actors. I’m always interested in their professions and their personalities, but I don’t think they’re better than anybody. George Plimpton used to think… George always did the stars, and I always did the failures. George was never an athlete, he always romanticized…

BC:
He always wanted to be an athlete.

PJ:
Yeah, he wanted to be. That’s why he did all those imitation roles: how I almost pitched, how I almost boxed, how I almost played golf. He always thought there was some kind of mystical grace about them, you know. They were blessed like we weren’t. One day Roger Angell saw two pitchers talking. He said to me, “Look at that Pat. You and I will never know what mystical thing they’re talking about in terms of baseball.” I said, “I know what they’re talking about, Roger. They’re talking about a steak and a piece of ass they had last night.” That’s what they’re talking about because that’s what they talk about. And George used to think that Hank Aaron had this mystical grace that made him this great hitter. I said, no he didn’t. Hank has unbelievable quick wrists. He can wait on a pitch longer than anybody else, so he could wait on a curve ball until it broke and then rip it over third. That was his mystical grace. Without those wrists he’d be a .240 hitter. Ted Williams had fantastic eyes. That was his mystical grace. God blessed him with, what, 20/10 vision or something? He could pick up the spin on a curve ball the minute it left the pitcher’s hand and the rest of the batters couldn’t. So I tend to see them more realistically. I think.

BC:
Well, it definitely comes across in your writing. I’ve been reading through your recent collection, the one that Alex Belth edited for you, and I’ve been loving it. What strikes me the most is how different your stuff is from what’s typically out there now. There are two things that I love – first, the depth and length of your profiles. Obviously, if you pick up Sports Illustrated you’ll never see anything like that.

PJ:
No, and I wrote for Sports Illustrated in the seventies and I used to write 8,000 words.

BC:
The other thing is the fact that you insert yourself into each piece. You’re definitely a part of what you write, something you never see in most journalism today.

PJ:
I’ll do it when it pops up, where it’s important. I try not to do it too much, but there will be times, like with Tom Seaver obviously. But that was really a dual piece about me being a failure and Seaver being a success. But yeah, a lot of times I’ll do it when I know something about the sport, like I know pitching. Like with the Ankiel piece, Rick Ankiel. Since what happened to him happened to me.

BC:
I thought that was a pretty poignant one.

PJ:
As a matter of fact a guy from the St. Louis Dispatch interviewed me recently about the Ankiel piece. I felt for the kid because I had gone through that. I tried to help him but he never called. I told him I’d work out with him, throw with him, but I don’t think the Cardinals would’ve let him.

BC:
That piece was written during the off-season before he really melted down, is that correct?

PJ:
It was the off-season, but right after he melted down in the playoffs, and he just never got back.

BC:
But I think even at the time, I wasn’t following it that closely, but I felt like, oh, this is a young kid, he had a bad couple of outings, but he’ll probably be fine.

PJ:
No, I knew it. I knew it then. I saw it when I watched him pitch in the playoffs and World Series. I knew exactly what was happening to him. I knew it was a hard thing to get out of, very few guys have ever gotten out of that.

BC:
Were you surprised that Ankiel’s been able to come back?

PJ:
No, he was an athlete. But he hasn’t come back. I mean, he’s a hitter. It’s like me becoming a writer. You say, well, you’re a baseball failure but you came back as a writer. Yeah, but they don’t have anything to do with each other. Hitting the ball is nothing like pitching. Hitting is fairly instinctive. You have to react in one one-hundredth of a second, whereas pitching is deliberate. You’ve gotta think. And that’s what fucks you up. You’re on the mound thinking, and that’s how pitchers get screwed up and batters don’t.

BC:
I suppose this is completely natural, but when you started, you were viewed as a part of the new school of journalists who were breaking all the rules, and now you’re a throwback. I was wondering what your perspective is on the changing face of sports reporting. I mentioned earlier that I’m a Yankee fan. When I want to read about my team, to learn about a trade they’ve made or a player who’s hurt, I don’t go to mainstream sources anymore. I go to Bronx Banter, a blog started by Alex Belth, the guy who edited your collection. It seems that sites like this have changed the way sports – especially baseball – is reported.

PJ:
You know why? Because the bloggers don’t have to get in the clubhouse. The beat reporters are trapped, because if they write too many negative stories they’re persona non grata in the clubhouse. Freelance writers like me, I can go into a clubhouse, write a story about Roger Clemens, leave, and the Yankees ban me from the clubhouse. So what? It’s cost me one story over the years, an assignment I had when they wouldn’t let me in the clubhouse.

BC:
And it seems like you’ve kind of embraced this new trend. I loved your recent piece on José Canseco, for instance, that was featured at Deadspin.com.

PJ:
See now, I’ve always been writing like that. It’s just that the mainstream press ran some of those stories, but rarely. It’s getting rarer and rarer. The kind of pieces I do, which are pretty hard-hitting, they don’t run that many of them anymore. ESPN doesn’t, Sports Illustrated doesn’t. They run all these puff pieces.

BC:
I guess I couldn’t imagine reading that Canseco piece in any magazine.

PJ:
I sent it to every magazine in America. They all rejected it. Every magazine. Sports Illustrated wanted to buy it, but the managing editor wouldn’t buy it. The other magazines wouldn’t buy it because I didn’t talk to Canseco, they wanted quotes from him. Which is such ridiculously inane bullshit because most ballplayers don’t have anything to say. My perceptions are more valuable to a magazine than any sports figure’s quotes, but once again what magazines are looking for are the pull quotes. For example, José Canseco writes Vindicated. There are three pull quotes in there: Alex was after my wife, I shot up Ordóñez with drugs, and Roger Clemens never did take drugs. That’s it. And that’s the basis for the book. The same thing with magazine articles, like the John Rocker story that ran in SI years ago? I read the story. There was no story except for Rocker’s crazy quote.

BC:
The subway quote.

PJ:
Right. I write stories. I’m not looking for pull quotes. If I get a quote that’s really dynamic, I’ll run it. I certainly won’t hide it, but I’m not really looking for it. If I do a story on Derek Jeter, I want you to know Derek Jeter in a way no other writer will ever be able to let you know who Derek Jeter is as a person, that’s my goal. I just did a long piece on Ricky Williams, and it’s gonna be in Playboy probably in the fall. I spent a lot of time with Ricky, and I think I nailed Ricky more than anybody who has ever written a story about him ever has or will.

BC:
That’s interesting, because I think most people see him as a total mystery.

PJ:
He’s not a mystery, he’s easy.

BC:
What’s your perception? When he was in college, aside from this great talent, the biggest image I had of him was that he was this great kid. He won the Doak Walker Award, so he went to meet Doak Walker and started this friendship. It seemed like he was pretty down to earth, and then suddenly he gets overwhelmed by the NFL and the media attention and he turns into something else.

PJ:
He’s alright, he’s a good kid. The best way I can describe Ricky is there was a girl hanging around a bar when I was in my twenties, a college girl. A real attractive girl. Guys would talk to her for a couple minutes and then they’d vanish, they wouldn’t have anything to do with her. Finally I said to my bartender, “You know, she’s a good looking head. How come nobody’s hitting on her?” He says, “She thinks she’s a mystery that the rest of us should unravel, and after talking to her for ten minutes most people figure they don’t wanna waste their time.” That’s the best way I could describe Ricky. He wants the world to think he’s a mystery they should unravel, and he’s really not. His drugs were less about drugs than it was about ego and being a mysterious counter culture guy. He works pretty hard at it. That’s my take on Ricky. I liked him, I liked his girlfriend. You ever meet those guys who are trying to be deeper than they are?

BC:
Yeah.

PJ:
That’s what he’s trying to do.

BC:
Focusing on your book, I wanted to talk about a couple of the pieces that really stayed with me. First has to be Clemens. I gotta say that reading that piece now in light of what’s happened over the past six months, was on the one hand revealing, but also not surprising, if that makes any sense.

PJ:
Yeah. The drug thing didn’t come up then.

BC:
Right, this was written long ago.

PJ:
But I was confused by one thing that I never put in the story. I work out hard. I’m sixty-seven, but I go to the gym every morning and I lift weights and I can bury guys half my age. I do physical stuff. And what I was shocked at was, Clemens wasn’t lifting heavy weights or anything, I was shocked at the amount of time that he worked out throughout a day. He was constantly working out. And as I’ve gotten older I’ve learned it’s not the strength that goes, it’s the energy level. I can do what I did when I was thirty, I just can’t do it as long – that’s what my wife says anyway! So anyway, I was saying, how the hell does he maintain his energy? The thing I thought is he eats a ton of food. So I thought maybe that’s it, because I’m always dieting because I don’t want to get heavy. Maybe all those calories he ingests gives him the energy. But then I did a story for Playboy on HGH. I went to an anti-aging convention in Vegas, did a lot of research on it, talked to doctors and everything. Where most people have missed the boat on HGH and testosterone, they keep talking about steroids and HGH as if they’re interchangeable, but they’re not. Steroids give you strength and muscle; HGH gives you energy. HGH was originally devised to use for people who had aged prematurely and had lost their energy. It also increases your libido, and it does cosmetic stuff too. It’s almost like a fountain of youth drug – it makes you look younger, gets rid of wrinkles, grows hair, all that. But it doesn’t give you increased strength, it gives you increased energy. Now what does a starting pitcher need more than anything?

BC:
Stamina.

PJ:
Right, he needs energy. A relief pitcher doesn’t need it. They had talked to [Eric] Gagné, who has taken testosterone. Well that makes perfect sense. If he’s only gonna pitch an inning or an inning and a half, he needs to be strong. But if he was gonna pitch eight innings in ninety degree heat, then he needs that kind of energy. So the possibility that Clemens was taking HGH, once I did my research on it, became very real to me. I figured, sure, if he’s gonna take any drug it’s gonna be HGH.

BC:
So what do you think of the circus that ensued over these last few months?

PJ:
With Clemens? I followed like everybody else. Clemens does what he knows how to do, which is to be a pit bull and dig in and throw harder. Like Clinton: deny, deny, deny, delay, delay, delay. He’s hoping that sooner or later it’ll evaporate because there’s no concrete proof. It’s him against McNamee. Until they come up with blood on a vial with HGH and steroids in it that’s got Roger’s DNA, it’s gonna be difficult for anybody to convict him.

BC:
You said it was Clemens vs. McNamee, and watching that whole thing I felt like I was watching a high school wannabe who’s kissing up to the homecoming king.

PJ:
That’s exactly what I felt when I wrote the story. McNamee was playing this fatherly figure to Clemens telling him he could eat a potato but he couldn’t put butter on it. And I was like, who the fuck is this guy dictating to Clemens what kind of workout he should do. Clemens was so beholden to him. I cannot imagine Clemens doing anything that McNamee didn’t instigate or help him with.

BC:
I wanted to ask you about one more before I let you go, and that was the piece on Toe Nash. It was actually the first one I read, because I knew about the myth – the little things that Peter Gammons would drop in his columns or on ESPN about this kid who walked out of the sugar cane fields and is hitting five hundred foot home runs, and then he just kind of disappeared and I had no idea what had happened.

PJ:
That’s going back to your question about sports writing today. I investigated it, Gammons never even went to New Orleans, never saw Toe Nash, never talked to anybody except the scout who signed him.

BC:
To be honest with you, I almost wish that I hadn’t read that story, as good as it was. I felt like I needed to take a shower after I finished it.

PJ:
Well, you should have, because he’s a bad kid.

BC:
Well, my question is, what’s your reaction to the Toe Nash saga, and more generally, are you ever surprised by what you find when you scratch beneath the surface like this?

PJ:
Yeah. You have perceptions when you go in to do a story, everybody does. And you’re always surprised: sometimes delighted, sometimes disappointed. I went to do a story on Bo Belinsky, who I thought I was an idiot. I went to do him, I thought he was the best guy I had met. I love Bo. I thought Tom Selleck was a good guy from what I’d read about him, and then I went there and he was a wimpy guy and I was really disappointed. Marilyn Chambers, the porn actress, I thought she was just another dumb bimbo, she was a great girl. We still get Christmas cards from her. So she likes to have sex in front of a camera, so what? She’s still a great girl. Toe Nash, I had no feelings about it one way or another. As a matter of fact it wasn’t even my idea. I had a researcher in Kansas City who’s a friend, the guy I dedicated the book to, Mike Sharpe. He sent me the ESPN story. He says, Pat, you should do a story on this guy. I originally did it for the New York Times, but they didn’t run it. So I got the assignment, I go to the story. I didn’t know anything. I got names of everybody. I wanted to see Toe Nash. I got his scout, who got me Hot Rod Williams, and Hot Rod Williams got me the father, and the father got me into the jail to talk to Toe Nash. Then I got the arresting officer, I got the prosecutor, I got the defense attorney, I got the probation officer. I was going up and down between New Orleans and Baton Rouge for five days, then I went back two other times. So I did a lot of reporting on that, and that’s the picture I got. That’s the picture I got of Nash. And then the final thing is I got the girl that he supposedly raped, and I got medical reports about the girl from the district attorney. Even his defense attorney didn’t like him. The idea that nobody knew about Toe Nash's past when they signed him was ridiculous. Everybody knew about him, every team. The Pittsburgh Pirates passed on him because of his bad reputation. So no, it didn't bother me, that was the story. I don’t care where the story goes. It could’ve been the myth, it could’ve been true. This whole myth of sugar cane, he couldn’t cut Hot Rod’s lawn for more than two days without quitting because he didn’t like the work. The idea that he was cutting sugar cane and that’s how he got his muscles, well I saw the guy and he didn’t have a muscle on his body. He was fat. He was big, but he was fat. I’m sure he might have been a talent, but the idea that he just appeared one day, well he had been playing in that sugar cane league, which was not one of these horseshit leagues, they had a beautiful stadium that Hot Rod Williams built with his own money. Gammons never left his office doing that story. Gammons and the Reynolds brothers were cutting up that pie. They were gonna do a movie, The Myth of Toe Nash.

BC:
And Gammons was involved in that too?

PJ:
Oh, yeah. Gammons and Reynolds were gonna promote this guy to do a movie, a Disney movie, you know. The natural coming out the sugar cane field. A whole lot of people had a lot of things invested in that story. Not after I finished.

BC:
Well, it still might be an interesting movie.

PJ:
It might be now. You can begin with the myth and how everybody blew it up and then go back and track it down. I’m sorry I ruined if for you, Hank!

BC:
That’s alright.

PJ:
See, that’s one of those instances where I wasn’t starry-eyed going in.

BC:
Right. But like I said, I don’t know that I’d thought of him in, I don’t know how long it’s been, five years? And I picked up the book and I’m skimming through the table of contents and I see Toe Nash. I wonder what happened to him? And there you go.

PJ:
Shit, I still keep in touch with the probation officer. He tells me that Toe’s still in and out of jail every week.

BC:
From what I read it doesn’t surprise me. Hey, I’ve got one last question for you. I’m wondering if there’s anybody out there that you’re dying to profile.

PJ:
Martina Navratilova.

BC:
Yeah?

PJ:
My favorite. I would love to do Martina. I admire her, I think she’s great. I interviewed her recently for a nothing story for AARP, just a little workout story you know. She was turning fifty. She was every bit as interesting as I thought she would be, and she’s the one I would love to do. She escaped me. I can’t seem to sell it to anybody.

BC:
I’m sure people would be interested. I’d be interested in reading it.

An Interview with Jayson Stark

You probably know Jayson Stark from his writing at ESPN.com or his frequent appearances on Baseball Tonight. Recently he found time to write a book, The Stark Truth: The Most Overrated and Underrated Players in Baseball History. Stark's book is essentially an organized listing of the conversation which occurs in bleachers and barrooms on a nightly basis: which players aren't really as good as most people think? Which players are secretly much better than advertised? Some of the names aren't too surprizing (everyone knows Juan Pierre is overrated), but others are shocking (how can Babe Ruth be underrated?). Stark hits every position on the field, always maintaining the sense of humor which will be familiar to frequent readers of his work.

Last Friday morning Jayson took the time to talk to me about the book and a few other issues. Enjoy...

BrokenCowboy:
Thanks for taking the time to do this. I know you must be pretty busy since we’re smack in the middle of baseball season.

Jayson Stark:
You know, there’s no time in baseball where you can kick back and say, “I think I’ll go to the beach for about four days,” unless you carve that time out. That’s all I do is juggle. I should join the circus.

BC:
What about during the off-season? How much does it slow down for you then?

JS:
In a typical off-season? Not a whole lot. Right after the World Series, and that week between Christmas and New Year’s, and generally right before Spring Training it’s not too crazy.

BC:
One thing I like to ask, especially of reporters, is that I assume you got into this gig because of a love of baseball?

JS:
Sure.

BC:
So I’m wondering, how has being a journalist, especially since you covered the Phillies for a while real closely, being that close to the game and the players, how does that affect your ability to relax and just be a fan?

JS:
Well, it changes it a little bit. I’m not a fan of any team. My family hates going to games with me. I love being there, but I don’t root for anybody, and that frustrates them.

BC:
Is that something that’s changed as a result of your job?

JS:
Yeah, sure. I think that’s a natural part of being a professional. You can’t root. But I’m a human being, and there are certain people, certain players, certain teams I like being around more than others. But I basically root for the best stories, I don’t root for any team. One thing you learn when you cover baseball is that every game you attend, there’s a winner, there’s a loser, there’s a hero, and there’s probably a goat. So they’re all a big part of the story, so you root for the story. You don’t root for any team. So that part has certainly changed the way I’m a fan, but I also think baseball is one of those games where the more you invest in it, the better it gets. The more you understand, the more you see. The more you put in, the more you get back. There are just so many levels to the game. I think I love the game as much as I ever have, if not more. I’m probably a different kind of fan of baseball than your average fan, but that doesn’t mean I’m not a fan of it. One of the things that I consider to be the greatest compliment that people in the sport give me is when they tell me they can see by the things I write or say on the air how much I care about the sport. And that means a lot to me, because that’s true. I really do come at it with a lot of passion for the sport.

BC:
One reason I ask that is because I would agree that from seeing you on ESPN and reading your work, that love definitely comes across. But there are reporters or on-air personalities where there’s a cynicism that you can taste, and I wonder sometimes if that comes from being too close. It’s easy for me to be a fan of the Yankees, for instance, because I’ve never been in their clubhouse and I may not know everything that goes on. And so I wonder sometimes -- if you’re up close and personal do you lose something?

JS:
That can happen. Everybody’s different. You start with that -- people are different, and everybody’s got a different way of coming at it and a different perspective, which is what makes it great. And I think that depending on where you work, what the reportorial culture is where you work, that can color the way you look at things, too. There’s a much different mentality covering baseball in New York than there is covering baseball in, say, St. Louis, Milwaukee, San Diego, right? And so I think that can have a lot to do with it, too. I know that Philadelphia is one of those cynical kinds of places, too, but what you see and what you read from me, it’s just a reflection of me. Sometimes people ask me if I really do come from Philadelphia. I’m a much more positive personality, I think, than you’ll find walking the streets of this town.

BC:
Now on to this book. When I first heard what you were doing with this book, it intrigued me because I think every fan has had this conversation at some point. When did it start for you? When did you get the idea to turn it into a book, and what was the process? Did this all come off the top of your head, did you speak to other people about it? How did that go?

JS:
I’ve been aspiring to write a book for a long time, but I could never find the right match of idea and publisher. I talked to different agents and different publishers with different ideas, but it never happened. The people at Triumph Books are fans of mine, and they actually approached me with this. I got a call last summer from a guy at Triumph Books who said, “We came up with this idea and think you’d be the perfect person in America to write it.” I didn’t think about it very long before I said, you know, you might be right. I think this is really right up my alley. I would love to do this book. The more we talked it over, the more excited we all got. It came together really quickly, for the most part. I would say I didn’t agree to write the book until some time late last July, and the fact that it’s out this spring is a miracle. I got three chapters done during the season last year, and then when the World Series ended I worked seven days a week until spring training to get it done, because that was the only way to do it. But it was such a fun project that it kept me going. Plus, there wasn’t time for writer’s block... The idea itself, overrated/underrated, is really fun. As you said, it’s one of those classic sports arguments, and we’ve all found ourselves in the middle of it on a talk radio dial or sitting on a barstool. It’s amazing that nobody ever wrote a book on it. Actually after I finished mine, Triumph approached me and said, “How’d you like to write a football version of it?” There’s no way I could possibly do that. So there’s actually a football version of it coming out in a week or two written mostly by Sal Paolantonio of ESPN. We all stumbled onto something here. It’s incredible that nobody ever did it before.

BC:
So were there people that you spoke to about this, or did you have a lot of these rankings already in your head?

JS:
Well, some of ‘em. I always say these selections were nominated by a distinguished committee consisting of me. Because it really did come down to me, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t talk to a million people about all different aspects of this book. Certain chapters, certain passages, certain names came much easier than other names. I really struggled with some of these choices. I spent a lot of time talking to people about some of them. I describe in the book how difficult center field was for me. Center field, I kicked around for weeks. Weeks! I couldn’t find any great center fielder from the past who I considered to be drastically overrated to the point where I could put him number one in the chapter. If we’re calling somebody the most overrated player in history at his position, I didn’t think it was right to put Juan Pierre or Mickey Rivers at a position like center field, so I really spent a lot of time on that chapter. I remember going around the winter meetings asking everybody I ran into about center field. I spent a lot of time actually listening to people talking about Joe DiMaggio. This is a different kind of argument than he’s great, no he stinks. This is really a relative term, overrated/underrated. It’s about perception vs. reality. Myth vs. reality. There were people arguing that there were a lot of myths that evolved around Joe DiMaggio that we know about now that we didn’t know about then. If it was a myth vs. reality book, why not him? But I just couldn’t bring myself to go there. I couldn’t bring myself to call Kirby Puckett the most overrated in history. So it really took me a long time before I settled on Andruw Jones. I tell people all the time that if I were doing this book differently and it was the fifty most overrated players in history, I don’t think Andruw would be in there. But because it was position by position, it’s a little different concept. So those are the kinds of debates, those are the kinds of challenges that I ran across as I went about writing the book. Every position and every name had its own set of complications, criteria, and differing needs to interview a lot of people or do the research than others.

BC:
I think for me the underrated side of the chapters tended to be more interesting. Sometimes confirming things that I believed, but other times there were some names that really surprized me. There were a few guys that I wanted to talk to you about. First of all, how can Babe Ruth -- the Bambino, the Sultan of Swat -- how can he possibly be underrated?

JS:
(Laughing) Well, obviously he wasn’t underrated as a hitter, but do you really think that many people are walking around with a working knowledge of just how dominating a pitcher Babe Ruth was?

BC:
I’d have to say no. I consider myself a big fan, a Babe Ruth fan, but there were some things that you pointed out in that section that -- you really have to say, wow! Thinking about Babe Ruth, it’s interesting to think about, what if he had never picked up a bat? How would history view him today?

JS:
Right. Exactly! It’s very possible we’d be looking at him as the greatest left-handed pitcher ever. Very possible! This was so much fun to do this chapter. This was one of the really fun chapters in the book, because I learned a lot myself. I didn’t know that those six seasons that Babe Ruth pitched he had the highest winning percentage of every left-handed pitcher. I didn’t know that! And when I started stacking him up against Walter Johnson...

BC:
That was amazing to me.

JS:
I realized that in his two full seasons as a pitcher, Babe Ruth was better than Walter Johnson! That blew my mind! Walter Johnson’s the greatest pitcher that ever lived, probably, right? And then the fact that they faced each other seven times and Babe won six and would’ve won the seventh, right, if he hadn’t blown that lead in the ninth inning? Unbelievable. The World Series dominance? Incredible. Again, this is about perception vs. reality. If all this was going on, and people haven’t noticed it, then that’s the definition of underrated or overrated for me, and that’s the way I went about the book. The other thing that was really important to me is that every name who was number one in a chapter, underrated or overrated, my criteria was it can’t be somebody that the reader will say, “who the heck is that?” Nobody cares if Hippo Vaughn was underrated or overrated, but Babe Ruth? That can get your attention. It’s a book written with the idea that people are supposed to react to it. That doesn’t mean I threw names out there for effect, it means I wanted this to stimulate debate. I wanted people to read this book and think. I want them to bring it to their next session with their buddies sittin’ around watching a game and say what about this guy? Can this guy really be underrated, or can this guy really be overrated? I wanted to make them think and debate and laugh. A lot of people think I wrote it to make people mad. That really was never the intent. It was really to make you think.

BC:
And what about Bert Blyleven? Recently, in the last -- I don’t know, it feels like the last three or four years -- it’s become kind of popular to champion his cause for the Hall of Fame.

JS:
Right.

BC:
Do you think he’s ever gonna get into the Hall of Fame?

JS:
I think he’s heading in that direction now, I’m not sure. I don’t think it’s a slam dunk, yet. There was a time I thought he’d never make it. I admit, he’s one of the hardest candidates ever to appear on a Hall of Fame ballot for me. I have spent more time agonizing over Bert Blyleven than any pitcher who’s ever been on the ballot. But deciding whether he’s a Hall of Famer is a different process than deciding whether he’s underrated or overrated. He shares a lot of the same characteristics as Nolan Ryan, the stuff that caused me to say that Nolan Ryan was overrated, a lot of that applies to Bert Blyleven. I understand that. Two all-star teams in 23 years, right? Never won a Cy Young, finished in the top three only two times. Didn’t have a real good winning percentage compared to his teams. Those are the things that stopped me from voting for Bert Blyleven for a long time. I finally did come around to the point where I got nudged over the edge by people that I respect. But here’s the difference between Bert Blyleven and Nolan Ryan for the purposes of this book. You have a lot of people walking around who think Nolan Ryan’s the greatest pitcher who ever lived. If he were the greatest pitcher who ever lived, you have to think he’d have won one Cy Young Award, right? Or he would’ve finished in the top three more times than Dan Quisenberry, or his winning percentage would’ve been more than twenty-seven points higher than his team. And so I recognize how great Nolan Ryan was, I only jump off the train when people start calling him the greatest pitcher of modern times. But in Bert Blyleven’s case, you know, those 287 wins, if you look closely at them, could very easily have translated into well over three hundred. And the fact that he was thirty-seven games over .500, it very easily could’ve been a better record with better run support. Bill James has documented this exhaustively. So because of just a slight difference in the numbers, Bert Blyleven is not in the Hall of Fame. Even though if you look at that division play era, look at shutouts and strikeouts, it’s basically Nolan Ryan and Bert Blyleven. Their numbers are so similar, and yet one guy is regarded as the greatest pitcher of his time and the other guy’s not even in the Hall of Fame? That’s where the overrated/underrated disparity comes from.

BC:
This is hardly scientific, this whole process. One of the guys who violates all the rules of the overrated/underrated paradigm, I guess we can call it, is Derek Jeter.

JS:
Absolutely.

BC:
He’s the ultimate glamour boy, playing shortstop in New York for teams that have been winning, and yet you’ve got him on the underrated side of the coin. At the same time you could find dozens of guys who could talk for hours about how overrated he is. How is it possible that he could be seen in both lights?

JS:
(Laughing) Yeah, good question. Derek Jeter was the reason to write a book like this. When I first started researching the book, trying to come up with definitions and examples, I Googled “overrated” and “baseball”, and Derek Jeter came up right away. And then I Googled “underrated” and “baseball”, and Derek Jeter came up right away. And the more I thought about it, the more I talked to people, it really became clear he was the classic case because you’ve got people out there saying he’s so overrated he’s underrated, so underrated he’s overrated. It’s hilarious, because he’s that kind of figure. In some ways his numbers are spectacular. In other ways, there are people who just look at numbers who think he’s not that good. But the reason that I called him underrated was I just feel like there are certain players, in this sport and every sport, whose numbers can’t tell you what they are, and Derek Jeter is one of those players. The argument that drives me crazy is when people say if Derek Jeter was a Royal, you wouldn’t even know his name. That, to me, is the most irrelevant argument in the history of mankind. Because he’s not just a guy who happened to pass through the Yankees while they were winning rings. He wasn’t mopping up the clubhouse until they gave him a World Series ring just because he was hanging around. He was a major difference maker. He was the heart of the Yankees. You know, I’ve done a lot of appearances for this book in the New York area, and when I ask people how many rings they think those Yankees would have if Derek Jeter had never been a member of that team, they say, I don’t really know -- one? Nobody says all of them. This little section of the book was a response, basically, to all those people who think he’s overrated, who think he’s just a great player because he was a Yankee. For me, guys who love the moment, and have that feel for how to rise to the moment... You have to be a Yankee to get to that moment, I acknowledge that, but I don’t know how you can deny the fact that this guy loves the moment.

BC:
I agree. He’s been my favorite player, probably since the day he was drafted. I’ve followed him that long, so when I picked up the book, the first thing I did was turn to the shortstop section, and I expected to find him on the other side. I was already getting angry before I even found him...

JS:
Yeah, he was one of those people that a lot of people have asked me about. Originally he was gonna be the most underrated, but then last year it looked like he was gonna win the MVP award as I was working on that chapter, and thought I better not put him number one if he wins the MVP, so I couldn’t take that chance.

BC:
Well, you could’ve bumped him up as it turned out.

JS:
Easily.

BC:
I have some numbers for you. You have sixty overrated players, and twenty of them were Yankees. And then of your number ones, twelve number one overrated, and half of them -- six -- were Yankees. Can you explain yourself to me please?

JS:
(Laughter)

BC:
Is there an axe you have to grind?

JS:
No. I can’t remember which chapter it was that I went into this. It might’ve been the Graig Nettles chapter?

BC:
Yeah, it was.

JS:
When you’re looking for overrated, the Yankees just have more opportunities for overratedness than any other team! Think about all the different ways you can get to be overrated. One of the classic ways is one swing, one game, one week, one stretch in October can vastly inflate the national perception of what a guy is, right? That goes for any team, but the Yankees show up in October every year. And because of that, I think quite a lot of their players are just lucky. They get this opportunity to seize that moment and become far greater figures than they probably otherwise would be. Now I know I just used a similar argument to explain why Derek Jeter’s underrated, but being in the spotlight the way they are, it’s almost like the Yankees are in color and everybody else is in black and white. It just creates those unparalleled opportunities for overratedness. When everything was equal, it was often hard not to pick a Yankee.

BC:
I think I agree with you, I just thought I’d give you a chance to say it out loud.

JS:
I’m glad you did. But you know, the fact that Yogi Berra is probably the most well-known living ex-Yankee could be considered underrated. That tells you I don’t have any axe to grind. The fact that Derek Jeter is in there tells you that I don’t have any axe to grind. Certain players, just because they were Yankees, are regarded by the world as superstars, when that’s probably not what they were.

BC:
One guy I wanted to talk to you about also is Steve Garvey. I grew up out here in LA, and watched him as a player, you hear a lot out here about how great he was, and isn’t it a crime that he’s not in the Hall of Fame. What’s your response to that?

JS:
Well, the fact that he’s gone through fifteen years on the ballot, and the voters never saw it, he never got close, would tell me that the general public agrees with me. Look, Steve Garvey was a real good player, and just because he’s in this book as overrated doesn’t mean I don’t think he was a real good player. But the reason that he obtained this lofty status as most overrated first baseman is that somehow, and in great part because he was a Dodger, he really became the face of the sport. He was a guy who started the all-star game every year, he was the guy who was yucking it up on the Tonight Show every time you turned it on. He was the first player in history to attract four million all-star votes. Was he a good player? Yeah, he was. He was a real good player. Steve Garvey, in a lot of ways, was a reflection of his times. Back in the seventies, the early eighties, the stuff people looked at was batting average, home runs, RBIs, fielding percentage. Very basic kinds of stats. Nowadays we live in a much more sophisticated age where you look beyond those stats. And when you look beyond those stats, it’s clear that Steve Garvey wasn’t the player that people perceived him to be. If he was a feared slugger, he probably would’ve slugged .500 in a season once, right? Once. If he was really a complete offensive player, he would’ve averaged more than twenty-nine walks a year, right? Out of six 200-hit seasons, he would’ve scored a hundred runs once, right? He’s the only player in history to have more than two 200-hit seasons and not score a hundred runs in any of them. And the fielding percentage? Hey, it’s great that he won those Gold Gloves. It’s great that he owns that record for the longest errorless streak by a first baseman, but anybody from that era will tell you that the reason he never made an error is that he would not throw the ball. And so this is stuff that didn’t always show up on the stat sheet at the time. Now we can look back at it with more perspective and understand what the limitations of the player were. In this book, at times, I guess I play reality police. And again, it doesn’t mean I think Steve Garvey was some kind of bum who never should’ve played a day in the big leagues. He was a really good player, but the fact that he became the face of the sport, that’s where perception and reality, to me, diverge.

BC:
Who do you think needs to be in the Hall of Fame? I know this isn’t necessarily an overrated/underrated thing, but you mentioned in a few chapters some of the guys -- Blyleven and Gossage -- are there other guys on your radar?

JS:
I think Gossage is gonna get in. The guy I worry about is Ron Santo. I think of all the players who are not in the Hall of Fame, and who may never get in the Hall of Fame, he is the most deserving. I think that Ron Santo is not in the Hall of Fame basically for one reason. Because people say, well how can you have four Hall of Famers from a team like the Cubs that never won anything? I don’t know. There’s no quota, there’s no government quota on Hall of Famers from one team. I guess there’s quotas on pimento imports or something, but not on Hall of Famers from one team! And it’s not Ron Santo's fault that he happened to play with Ernie Banks and Billy Williams and Ferguson Jenkins. And the thing that’s revealing to me is, who was the guy who hit cleanup on those teams that had Banks and Williams on them? It wasn’t Banks, it wasn’t Williams, it was Ron Santo, year after year after year. That should tell us all something. And then if you really look at Ron Santo and compare him to his peers -- I don’t want to compare him to A-Rod or Mike Schmidt or Brooks Robinson -- compare him to his peers in that league. It’s obvious he was the greatest offensive and defensive third baseman in the National League in his time, without anybody really being close. So I guess I just don’t understand this. And Ron Santo has been through so much, personally. He went through so much as a baseball player. It just really pains me that this is a guy who should be in the Hall of Fame, and I would really love to see him get elected while he’s alive. All that he’s been through, if he ever gets to that podium, that’ll be a special moment. I’m not talking about a baseball moment, I’m talking about a human moment. That turned out to be a really emotional chapter. I didn’t think of myself as a guy who had a big emotional investment in Ron Santo, but I just think that’s a huge injustice that I don’t understand.

BC:
I did appreciate that chapter because he was not a guy that I really knew a lot about, except you would hear his name mentioned as a guy who should be in the Hall, so I appreciated that chapter. I guess the last thing I’ve got for you then is that as we sit here on August 17th, how do you see the rest of the year shaking out? Who are your playoff teams and who do you see winning the World Series?

JS:
Well, a lot has changed over the last couple of weeks, don’t you think?

BC:
Yeah, in both leagues.

JS:
Tim Kurkjian said the other night that it’s the first year in history where we got to the 15th of August and all six divisions and the wild card races were within five games. So it really is a free-for-all. I was among the group who thought the Yankees were done, and the Cardinals were done, and the Rockies were done, but they’re not so done. Right now, I think the Yankees are gonna make the playoffs. I don’t think they’re gonna unseat the Red Sox, but I think they are gonna be the wild card. I think the Cubs are gonna wind up winning the Central, but who the heck knows anymore? I think the Red Sox are gonna get to the World Series, but in the National League I’ve never been more confused. If you can tell me what Pedro’s gonna be like when he comes back... I’m very tempted to pick the Mets still, even though I don’t think they’ve had a great year compared to their talent level. I think that’s probably the most talented team in the league. I think they’re a team that was constructed unlike any other, to win the World Series. I don’t think they can do that unless Pedro can make an impact, but if I were gonna pick right now, I’d say Mets-Red Sox, and I guess I’d say Red Sox win.

BC:
Alright. That’d be something to see.

JS:
Bill Buckner better not watch his TV that week. He’s liable to show up in a film clip or two.

BC:
Yeah, talk about emotional investment right there...

An Interview with Jonathan Eig

Just in time for the sixtieth anniversary of Jackie Robinson's first appearance with the Brooklyn Dodgers, Jonathan Eig has recently released Opening Day: The Story of Jackie Robinson's First Season, a book which features a new look at Robinson's historic rookie campaign. (Click here to read an excerpt, and here for my review.) Last week he was nice enough to meet me at Starbucks in between an appearance on the Tavis Smiley show and a book signing at a local L.A. bookstore. (The lineup makes perfect sabermetric sense, by the way. Smiley's on-base percentage is much higher than mine, but my slugging can't be denied.) Anyway, here's the interview. Enjoy.

BrokenCowboy
I wanted to start out with this. When I was growing up I was a huge baseball fan, and I learned about baseball history -- and just American history, I think -- by reading biographies. And so as a young black boy growing up, Jackie Robinson’s story obviously had some special appeal to me. So I was curious -- what drew you to the story? What about Jackie Robinson’s story really touched you or made you want to pursue this?

Jonathan Eig
It wasn’t the baseball at all, it was the history. Like you, I learned about prohibition by learning about Babe Ruth, right? All I read was baseball stuff, so what little history I absorbed was through the baseball books. I think I can relate to that. And with Jackie Robinson’s story, I just became really curious about what it was like in ‘47, what that particular year was like. Because I knew all the stories about him, I knew all the myths. I knew all about his career with the Dodgers and the World Series, but as I got older what really got me going was thinking about this friendship with Pee Wee Reese. It’s probably what sparked the idea for me. When I realized that they weren’t such good friends in ‘47, that Jackie was really alone for that first year -- later on it got easier -- for that first year he was all alone. I wondered what it was like -- where did he live that year? I didn’t know any of that stuff, so I just became really fascinated by that.

BC
Obviously there have been a lot of books written about Jackie Robinson. What inspired you to do another one? I know that your angle here is a little bit different, but what made you think you could bring something new to the picture that we have of Jackie Robinson?

Eig
It was a challenge, there has been so much written. But I felt like lately over the years we’ve tended to mythologize him, and I felt like it was time for somebody to sort of scrape the barnacles off the story and look for the truth, just get at the bones of it. I felt like if you just focused on a really tight time period, on one year, you could really get beyond the baloney and find out just what happened. Just stick to the facts. And I was also intrigued by the fact that, you know, Rachel Robinson was still around, and she wasn’t going to be forever. She cooperated on a biography ten years ago, and it was a good biography, very good, but nobody had ever tried to force their way into that apartment with her and ask what their life was like as newlyweds, and I thought if I could get her to open up I might have a shot at doing something different.

An Interview with Jeff Pearlman

A few weeks ago Jeff Pearlman was kind enough to spend part of his day talking to me about his recent Barry Bonds biography, Love Me, Hate Me.  Following the themes addressed in the book (review forthcoming), our conversation focused on Bonds the person as well as the baseball player, and we also talked about steroids for a while.  Enjoy...

BrokenCowboy:
I think I’m almost as interested in the process as in the resulting book.  In your acknowledgment section you spoke a little bit about it -- the 524 people you interviewed, the investigators you hired, etc. -- what was this whole experience like?  When you did you first get the idea to write about Bonds, and how long did the research portion of the project take?

Jeff Pearlman:
It took about two years overall.  I started the whole thing about two years ago.  I got into it with the idea that I’d interview everybody.  I didn’t know what everybody meant, but I wanted to interview everybody -- anyone who had interaction with Bonds, the people who knew Bonds best.  I didn’t even think about interviewing Bonds himself, because I knew he probably wouldn’t talk, but I wanted to interview everybody who knew him.  And the truth of the matter is, when you write a biography interviewing the main subject doesn’t matter that much, because people have skewed visions of themselves.  You really learn more about someone by talking to the people who know them well and interact with them.  So that was my goal.  The best thing for someone in my position is word of mouth, and you just start.  Who knows Barry Bonds?  You talk to his first grade teacher, you say, do you know any other teachers?  You talk to the Cub Scout den mother, oh, do you know any of the other kids?  One name usually begat five others, and five begat ten, and I ended up with 524, which is a pretty good number.

BC:
Yeah.  I obviously haven’t written a biography, but that seems like a really big number.  Based on what you’ve heard, or what you know about, did you go above and beyond, or is this kind of par for the course?

JP:
It’s probably above and beyond, but I’m not sure.  My first book, I wrote a book about the Mets, and I interviewed about 150 people.  I probably should’ve done more, looking back, but I don’t know.  The thing is this. A friend of mine is Leigh Montville, who has a Babe Ruth book coming out.  Babe Ruth is dead, so that’s more of a historical analysis.  You’re not gonna get a million new stories about Babe Ruth now because his contemporaries are dead, but Barry Bonds, his contemporaries are all still alive.  I know that sounds real simplistic, but it makes you interview more people than a biography of someone who’s been dead for a long time.

BC:
That makes sense.  Something that’s always intrigued me about professional athletes, especially the great ones, is that they must’ve been insanely dominant as kids when they were playing against people who grew up to be teachers, say, instead of linebackers.  What kind of an athlete was Bonds back when he was just Bobby Bonds’s kid?

JP:
Oh, he was great.  Great.  He was only Bobby Bonds’s kid for a very short time because he was such a good athlete that he kind of jumped off the page at you.  He was four years old, actually two and a half years old when he shattered his first window.  His mom used to go down to the window pane store all the time because he was breaking so many windows with a wiffle ball off of a bat.  He went to a school called the Kerry School, which was his elementary-slash-middle school.  He was the catcher in baseball, he was a great catcher, strong arm.  He was the star forward in baseball.  He was above and beyond, I’m not doing it justice.  He was the fastest kid, he was the strongest kid, he was the biggest kid, he was the quickest kid.  Across the board, he was he best athlete.  Nobody you talk to is really surprized that he is a major league ballplayer.  It would be hard to expect 700 home runs, but he was just so advanced, so beyond everybody else, he was legit.  He was the kid.  You know how every school, or every school district has that kid?  He was the kid, times a thousand.

BC:
Growing up like that, not only as the greatest athlete anyone had ever seen, but also as the privileged son of a major league all-star, it almost seems like the end result is obvious.  Again, I’m not talking about the seven hundred home runs, but it might have been something of an upset if Bonds had turned out to be polite, well-adjusted, and compassionate.  How did his experiences as a player at Serra High School and Arizona State affect the man he would become?

JP:
I think the first place you have to look for him is his dad and his godfather, too, Willie Mays.  He was watching these two guys who were just adored by the public, these two guys who were worshipped by people.  When you see that great athleticism equals worship and adulation, that registers with that eight-year-old kid.  So he learned from a very, very early age that if you perform athletically, everything will be taken care of for you.  When he was at Serra High School, he was the kid who during batting practice would be napping in the outfield.  He was the kid who wore his dad’s jerseys during practices, who would expect that his glove would be run out to him into the outfield...

BC:
He was a major leaguer already...

JP:
He the major league attitude at fourteen that takes others at least another ten years to get.  You learn from an early age that if you walk the walk, people will treat you a certain way.  It’s hard to blame him.  I always say it’s kind of hard to blame him for being who he is.  He’s easy to dislike, because he is dislikable, but it’s hard to blame him because this is what he was raised to be, essentially.

BC:
I think that’s my feeling as well.  There are a lot of great guys, I’m sure, but it’s almost expected that he’d turn out this way.

JP:
Like David Bell, as an example, was raised in a major league clubhouse, and he’s a great guy.  Aaron Boone is a real good guy.  So it’s not that it’s hopeless, but I think your odds of becoming normal...  I would be interested to see what Celene Dion’s kids are gonna be like one day, you know?  It’s not a normal way of growing up.  You don’t learn to interact with people normally, you don’t see your parents coming home from a nine to five job exhausted and cooking dinner.  It doesn’t work that way.  You have your dinners made for you.  Barry Bonds signed his first autograph when he was, like, ten.  Just for being the son of.

BC:
Wow.  I have to admit that there were times when I cringed when reading something Bonds had said or done.  Before reading this book, to be honest, I would sometimes dismiss some of the stories you’d hear about Bonds.  You mentioned the incident reported in Ron Kittle’s book, about Bonds saying he wouldn’t sign autographs for white people. 

JP:
Right.

BC:
When I first heard that reported in the press, it didn’t even occur to me that it might be true, because I couldn’t imagine anyone actually saying something like that. 

JP:
It’s so funny you say that, because as soon as I heard that, I knew it was true.

BC:
Really?  I was gonna ask you that, because my perspective is obviously different from yours, so I was wondering -- what was your response to all this?  Were you shocked by anything you heard, or was this, based on your different experiences and perceptions, was this what you expected to find out?

JP:
Good question.  I didn’t expect the depth of bad behavior, I would say.  You hear a guy is a bad guy, you hear he’s difficult, and you see instances... Like for example, the one thing that blows my mind in the book, two grounds keepers for the Pirates die... did you read the whole book?

BC:
Oh, yeah, I loved it.

JP:
Thanks.  Two grounds keepers from the Pirates die, and they hold this auction and Bonds refuses to sign autographs.  Brian Fisher’s son has cystic fibrosis and there’s a fundraiser...

BC:
This is what I’m talking about.

JP:
Right.

BC:
I can’t imagine a human being reacting that way.

JP:
I know, it’s hard to believe a human being that big of an asshole.

BC:
What about the good things he did?  Sometimes it seemed like he could actually go out of his way to do the right thing.  Was that what was surprizing to you?  Were you surprized by those things?

JP:
No, because I think everybody has humanity in them, you know?  I was more surprized... you hear the story about the grounds keepers, and you think, god, that’s a crappy thing to do.  And then you hear the thing about Brian Fisher, and you realize the guy’s done it more than once!  That’s what’s surprizing sometimes.  I can understand you being a jerk to someone, but he really can totally emotionally distance himself from situations and detach himself, not just distance himself, but detach himself from the feelings of other people and not read the feelings of other people.  And the depth of that, his ability to do that, I’ve never come across anybody like that.  We’ve all met jerks in our life, and I’m not even saying he is a jerk... Well, it’s unbelievable to me.

BC:
I think what surprized me is that, kind of like how we were talking about his upbringing, I can completely understand that there can be an athlete or an entertainer or whoever, when you have microphones in your face every day, and people questioning you every single day, I can understand how you could become a jerk.  You could get tired of that, and you could -- to the press -- really be a jackass.  But in these situations where it’s someone he knows coming to him saying people have died, can you help us out?  And he responds that way.  There’s something deeper going on.

JP:
I agree with you.  I agree with you a hundred percent.  If you ask me what surprized me, that did surprize me.  You hear one story, and you think maybe it’s an isolated incident.  You hear two, and you think, well maybe he’s had two bad days.  Then you hear seventeen of them, and you think, man, this is a different kind of guy.  He just handles things in a different way, sees things in a different light, doesn’t have the emotional maturity.  You can only hear, “Oh, nobody knows what it’s like to walk in my shoes” how many times before you realize that, if I was walking in your shoes, I still wouldn’t handle that situation that way.  There could be a million people asking me for my autograph when I find out that some grounds keeper died and he didn’t have health insurance and all I have to do is sign three baseballs to make his life a little easier, I have to question the person that doesn’t make that move.

BC:
Another thing about his personality, I think people generally feel a need to make connections, you know, when you’re talking to somebody new. For instance, you mentioned that you became friends with Brian Johnson?

JP:
Right.

BC:
Immediately I want to tell you that, hey I once played basketball against Brian Johnson.  With Bonds, though, it seems the opposite -- he even denies connections that actually exist.  Is this just a superstar trying to maintain distance from his fans, or do you feel like there’s something -- I know I’m asking you to kind of psychoanalyze a little bit -- but do you feel like there’s something more going on with Bonds?

JP:
I do.  Yes, there’s a distance thing.  One thing that really interested me in the book, and I almost wish I had gotten more into, is how when guys are traded all of the sudden he opens up to them.  Darryl Hamilton spends two years as a Giant, they barely talk, and then he gets traded and Barry says, “I love you, man,” and gives him a hug.

BC:
It’s like he doesn’t have to worry that now there’s a friendship.

JP:
Right, but I also think there’s an element to Bonds that he’s always thinking in his head, “What is a superstar?  How is a superstar supposed to be perceived?  How is a superstar supposed to handle this situation?”  When Richard Hoffer of Sports Illustrated in 1993 comes to do a profile of Bonds and Bonds blows him off for eight days in a row.  Now, that’s not just him being too busy, because if he was too busy he was busy picking scabs and watching Growing Pains or whatever on TV.  He wanted to give this impression that I am haughtier than you are, I am higher than you, you’re gonna have to wait for me, and I know you’re gonna wait for me.  It’s not that he wants to be guarded, he wants to give a certain impression to people.  Bonds tries to tell people that he doesn’t care what people think.  To me, it’s just the opposite.  He cares tremendously what people think, and he’s working hard to show that he doesn’t care.  It’s almost like he’s doing reverse psychology on himself.

BC:
Yeah, I thought it was interesting -- there was a point in the book where you talk about when players were leaving from the hotel to the bus to get to the game on the road, talking about how all the players would just kind of hole up in the hotel to avoid the crowds, and Bonds would stand on the sidewalk just so that he could wait for the crowds and then tell them to get the hell out of his face.

JP:
Vintage Bonds.  Vintage.<