Could this be the end of the line for the Tigers? Their ace hopes to keep their season going. But I say the series ends today.

Let’s Go Base-ball!

[Photo Credit:  WLLLy Volk]

Peace to Cliff C for point out this New York City greatness.

Over at Fangraphs, Mark Hulet looks at the waning Yankee dynasty:

Sabathia is a horse. The 31-year-old southpaw has pitched at least 230 innings for the past five seasons, and his highest FIP during that time was 3.54 (highest ERA was 3.37). He produced the second-highest strikeout rate (8.82 K/9) of his career in 2011 and posted his third seven-win season in the past five years. The issue with Sabathia, though, is that he can opt out of his contract this off-season and pursue a larger contract elsewhere. I find it hard to believe that he won’t be wearing pinstripes in 2012 but stranger things have happened and this remains a huge question mark that needs to be answered quickly, as it could shape the club’s entire off-season approach.

The organization has shed some young pitching talent over the past two years that it may have given up on a little too soon (Ian Kennedy, Tyler Clippard, Mark Melancon) but it wisely held onto David Robertson. Although pitchers such as Joba Chamberlain and Phil Hughes have had more hype, it could be Robertson, 26, who eventually replaces ‘Rivera The Robot’ in high-leverage situations with New York. The right-hander had one of the most dominating seasons by a reliever throughtout the Major Leagues in 2011. He posted a 1.84 FIP (1.08 ERA) in 66.2 innings and struck out batters at a rate of 13.50 K/9. He also improved his ground-ball rate almost seven percent to a career-high 46.3 GB%. One thing Robertson does need to work on is his control (4.73 BB/9). If he can continue to command his fastball-curveball combination like he did in ’11, the Yankees could have the best one-two punch in the late innings in the American League for the next few seasons.

Will C.C. leave? That’s the $64.000 question, ain’t it?

Here’s a smile for you: watching Steve Martin and Lily Tomlin dance.

The Tigers need to win today, man, if n they are gunna make a series out of this. By I think the Rangers will take it.

And tonight, the Brewers and Cards move to St. Louis.

Let’s Go Base-ball!

Red Sox Wednesday continues with the news that Theo Epstein is headed to Wrigley Field.

Hard Labor, Hollywood Style

By John Schulian

Where to start with the wonders of “Hercules”? With the writers who couldn’t or wouldn’t write? With the terrified, unqualified directors who spent more time tossing their cookies than they did directing? With the executive producer who would have stabbed me in the back even if I had gone deep-sea fishing with him? With the star who thought he was the next Harrison Ford when he should have been thanking Jah or Allah or whatever deity it is that looks out for big lugs who show up at the right place at the right time?

Or should I just tell you about the treachery I could have set my watch by? And the endless rewrites of scripts so bad my eyes crossed when I read them? And the office at the bottom of a parking garage at Universal, with cars coming and going overhead with such a rumble and clatter that skittish visitors thought it was another earthquake?

But you know something? I loved that office. First and foremost, it was a half-mile from the offices where Rob Tapert and Sam Raimi ran their three-ring circus on the lot. But it had other virtues as well. Outside my window was the Los Angeles River, its bed of cement unsightly most of the year, but in heavy rains, it threatened to overflow and its current was so fierce I expected to see refrigerators and abandoned cars being swept toward the ocean. The Lakeside Country Club sat on the other side of the river, lush and green and rich in the legends of the big names who had played there–Bobby Jones and Walter Hagen, Bing Crosby and W.C. Fields and Oliver Hardy, when he wasn’t the fat man next to Stan Laurel’s skinny one. I saw the course every time I looked up from my computer, and for a few minutes I could cease thinking that I was stranded in a job that would allow me only one week off in two years. By comparison, blacktopping roads in a Utah summer was a breeze.

Tapert foisted a young writing team on me and they refused to get with the program. They were bright and occasionally likable, and I’ve been told that they’ve grown up since I had to deal with their petulance and bad attitudes. But when our paths crossed, they were reeling from having been told their first serious show business lie. Tapert had promised them they’d be the head writers when “Hercules” went to series. Then, of course, he hired me. The boys were too new to TV to realize they lacked the experience for the job, along with a lot of other things. I was their enemy before we said hello.

I wish I could blame Tapert for hiring the other writer on my misbegotten staff, but he was my mistake entirely. He lived on a houseboat and had a ponytail, a British accent, and some miles on his odometer, which made me think he’d be a counterweight to the petulant kids. Best of all, his writing sample was a script for an unproduced movie that was so good I wondered why I wasn’t working for him. But he turned out to be an unmitigated fraud. I could barely coax a coherent sentence out of him. All he did was smile and wink and hit on my assistant. I never did learn who wrote the script that got him the job.

So these guys, the Brit and the boys, were my burden for our first 13 episodes. It seemed as though I spent every waking moment either giving them notes on their stories or rewriting their scripts. But I couldn’t have spent every waking moment dealing with them because I had Tapert to deal with. He certainly understood the genre, but he couldn’t write, and I came away from more than one meeting convinced he hated me because I could. Worse, he wanted to let all his buddies direct episodes, just send them to New Zealand, where we filmed the series, and let them run amok. None of them had ever directed a minute of TV, and those are not the kind of people you let determine the destiny of a new series. But Tapert was oblivious to all that.

I didn’t realize just oblivious until I heard a rumor that he was planning to go deep-sea fishing off the coast of Mexico just as we were getting the show off the ground. After a story meeting, I pulled him aside and said that none of the great executive producers I’d worked for–not Steven Bochco, not Dick Wolf, not Stephen Cannell–ever went on vacation at a time like this. Tapert’s eyes filled with tears. He looked like a kid who’d been told the chocolate chip cookies were off-limits. He didn’t say anything to me, though. But I heard a few days later that he’d cancelled his vacation and was making life miserable for everyone in the office.

Rob Tapert and Sam Rami

He steered clear of me for reasons that were never made clear, but it may have been because of good old-fashioned fear. God knows I regularly thought of ways I might end his life with my bare hands, or at least break his nose. Every time I spoke of my dark fantasies in front of the petulant kids, I’m sure they ran off and told him. No doubt word reached Universal’s executive suites, too, which is no way to succeed in show business. But it was the only way I could get Tapert to back off and let me tend to the job of churning out scripts.

I was all too aware of my limitations as a TV writer, and I wanted to do everything I could to make up for make up for them. But once you get a reputation for something, especially in Hollywood, there’s no shaking it. Years after “Hercules,” when I was working on “JAG” and getting notes on my first script from the head writer, the exceedingly smart Ed Zuckerman, I could see him getting fidgety as the session ran long. Finally, he looked at me over the top of his glasses and said, “Is this when you punch me?” The thought never entered my mind.

With Rob Tapert, however, it was a different story, because he was always saying something behind my back, something willful and foolish and insulting. It made no sense because we had a hit show by the standards of syndicated television, the netherworld that exists apart from the four major networks. Tapert and Sam Raimi had certainly proven there was an audience for something besides shows about pretty people in designer clothes screaming at each other. We even got high marks from reviewers–Daily Variety called me a “TV veteran,” which gave me pause, but I guess that’s what I was after nine years in the game. And still Tapert couldn’t help himself.

He hit bottom in the second season when he hired a husband-and-wife writing team to freelance a script for an episode he would direct. The problem was, I was writing a script for the same episode. This kind of thing happens a lot in the movie business, which is not to excuse it. But for Tapert to do this to his head writer, the guy who was killing himself to make sure there was a new script every eight days, established him in my mind as lower than whale shit. If he’d wanted the husband-and-wife team to write the script, he should have had the decency to tell me to save my energy. But decency wasn’t part of his game, and no matter how fervently I pleaded my case or how loudly I shouted, he wouldn’t give in. After all, he was in New Zealand when I found out, too far away for me to strangle.

So we went with the shadow script, wretched though it was, and Tapert ordered me to rewrite it. What I should have done was quit on the spot. Instead, I took a deep breath and went to work. By the time I finished, almost every word in the script was mine. I made sure I sent a copy of my rewrite–all that cramped scribbling in the margins–to the writers who had been party to Tapert’s treachery. But they weren’t the villains. The villain was Tapert.

Click here for the full “From Ali to Xena” archives.

There is at least one thing Red Sox fans can look forward to this fall and that’s the publication of Glenn Stout’s new book. But it’s not just for Sox fans, it’s a story that will appeal to seamheads everywhere. In a review for The Christian Science Monitor, Nick Lehr writes that Stout’s “narrative could have easily become bogged down in a never-ending sequence of truncated game recaps, culminating with the World Series; however Stout’s greatest triumph is his ability to manage the pace of the 152-game season, breaking up game summaries by delving into the lives of the teams’ larger-than-life characters.”

I got a chance to talk to Stout before he lit out for Boston on a book tour. Here’s our chat.

Dig in.

BB: You’ve written about the Red Sox before, many times, most notably in Red Sox Century. But that was an overview of a long period of time. What was it like to tackle a more concentrated narrative?

SG: It’s far more fun to take on a concentrated narrative, but that doesn’t mean that you just get more detailed, or use detail for detail sake. With a big survey history like Red Sox Century or Yankees Century (which, incidentally, is still in print and still selling after more a decade), I have to be very disciplined and contained. Inevitably at times I have had to race over some good stories or just tell them in shorthand, because the focus of those books is a longer sweep of history. There is very limited space to veer off the main highway and follow a story down a side road, no matter how interesting, unless it carries the larger narrative farther along. In a book about single event, or in this case, a season, there is more freedom to follow the stories that naturally occur. Truths can be revealed organically, over a much more natural span of time, rather than all at once. Take the story of Smoky Joe Wood’s 1912 season, in which he goes 34-5. In a book like Red Sox Century there was no space to do much more than cite the details of his season, touch lightly on the famous early September pitching matchup with Walter Johnson, jump into the World Series against John McGraw’s New York Giants, and then boom, the next year he hurts his arm. Wood appears as some kind of comet, suddenly great, then gone.

But the full story is more nuanced, and in this kind of book I get a chance to tell those kinds of stories. In this case I show Wood’s personality, how and why Wood was so much better in 1912 than before, and how and why he improved over the course of the season; his manager made him change his windup with runners on base and injuries to two catchers thrust rookie Hick Cady into the lineup. He was much better defensively and Wood was much more comfortable with him. And Wood’s arm was already going bad in 1912. There are many, many references to that over the course of the 1912 season, and it was no surprise when he was hurt in 1913. In a book like this, I can get to stories that otherwise go untold, or are overlooked, and use those stories to create characters. The history becomes much more layered, immediate and three-dimensional. In that way it is possible to write a book with wider appeal, one for people who love baseball, and baseball history, not just Red Sox fans. Fenway, like other classic ballparks, transcends the fan base of a particular team and I think Fenway 1912 will be a breakout book this holiday season. It’s about a place and an era, not just a team.

BB: There seems to be a cottage industry of sports books that are about a specific season. Your new book is not just about the 1912 season but about the creation of Fenway Park. Still, can you explain your approach to this kind of story? Do you any hard rules about creating the narrative from the facts and maybe stretching some things to fit a dramatic arc?

GS: I just try to follow the facts as I find them, and not create a narrative arc ahead of time and make the facts fit or enhance it. My proposal for this book was one paragraph – to tell the story of the building of Fenway Park and its first season. Beyond that, I had little idea what I would find, but I trusted in the truth – the truth tells the better story anyway. If it doesn’t, that’s because you haven’t done enough research. There’s never, ever any need to put words in anybody’s mouth to make things “more colorful.” Dry history is the fault of the writer, not the event. And by building the story from actual events, rather than trying to use the events to fit a story, you inevitably uncover new information, so that even a place as familiar as Fenway is surprisingly revealing. In this book, I just tried to track the whys and hows of Fenway Park coming into existence, then track it during its first season to see what that told me. I was quite surprised, for instance, to see how Fenway’s personality, the same personality that in many ways is still in effect in the park today, was revealed over the course of the 1912 season and World Series. Even though the game was much different, the personality of the place was already visible.

BB: As a writer how do you avoid clichés when writing about a game? How much of a challenge is it to make a game recap sound fresh?

GS: You have to be vigilant, because there are times you just have to take the reader from point A to B so you have context for something more important you really want to write about – why and how the score is 2-1 entering the ninth inning for instance – and there’s a great temptation to take the easy way out and get lazy. To avoid that I have to think backwards and ask “What does the reader really need to know entering that ninth inning?” Than I have to deliver the game description to that point economically and without distractions, and that’s the argument against clichés – they are distractions. Staying simple is best, just straightforward reporting without reaching to create any false drama or using writing that calls too much attention to itself. It’s far better to be a bit spare than too florid, because florid writing not only takes readers out of a story and restrains the imagination, More spare, restrained writing leaves room for the readers’ imagination to expand and fill in the blanks.

Then, for texture and context, which is always needed, I try to make use of period sports reporting. Something can be said better by a reporter at that time that if said by the omniscient narrator would sound stupid, or hackneyed or forced. I mean, at one point during the Series Joe Wood is in shock after being shelled. But I don’t write, “After being shelled, Wood was in shock.” I use the reporting of baseball writer Paul Shannon of the Boson Post. He wrote that “A place at the right hand corner of the Red Sox bench was taken by a stopped, wilted figure [SWF]. The SWF was Joe Wood.” I loved that. Another strategy I use throughout Fenway 1912 is that I drop appropriate headlines throughout the text, simply to provide that kind of textural change and period flavor. I guess the short answer is don’t try to write like you’re wearing a fedora and chewing on a cigar. That never comes off as authentic.

BB: Is being spare in your prose something that you come by naturally from your background in poetry?  Do you arrive at that kind of clear, straightforward prose after many drafts or at this point is it something you achieve early on?

GS: To a degree I guess, because in general I’ve always been more drawn toward plain speaking and work that works when listened to rather than poetry that is more mannered and academic. In prose, I aim for transparency. In many instances I almost want my actual writing to be completely invisible, so submissive to the story that you don’t notice it. I want the readers’ first reaction to be “great story” and then realize that it was the writing that delivered that experience.

BB: Did you read a lot of the other material–not from the period but since then–on the 1912 season and the building of Fenway? Was there anything that you tried to avoid repeating?

GS: There was very little that was worthwhile. It hadn’t been written about much before and so much of that was just factually wrong or incomplete. Obviously, I tried to avoid using information I knew not to be true, even it contradicted prevailing wisdom. In places I even correct what I had written before when I had depended on a secondary source that I discovered was incorrect. Here’s an example. Years ago, when I write the official 75th anniversary story about the park for the Red Sox yearbook, I had used a secondary source that called Fenway’s architectural style “Tapestry.” In this book, I learned that was incorrect – “tapestry” is simply the commercial name for the style of brick used, and after consulting with some architectural historians I was eventually able to identify Fenway’s architectural influences. That’s why you try not to use secondary sources.

Frankly, no one had ever written anything in depth about the beginnings of Fenway Park before, so there weren’t too many misconceptions to counteract. It’s funny, but it has been around so long that I think most people, and certainly most Boston baseball writers, had simply assumed that there was nothing left to be known about the origins of the park so they had never bothered to write about it. Historians, even architectural historian, had never viewed it as an object worthy of scrutiny. In reality, the opposite was true. It was virgin territory.

BB: What is the new research that you are bringing to this book? And, as a former librarian, how much do you enjoy the hunt for new stuff?

GS: I love doing the research. There is nothing better than discovering something new about a subject that everyone thinks they already know everything about. And there’s no trick to that apart from putting in the time. Today, with so much material available online, many history writers don’t bother going beyond what is readily available, but it becomes even more important. Here’s how it can work. I discovered one key document that I don’t think anyone has ever used or even seen in nearly one hundred years. I only found it because, over time, I realized that there were many different euphemisms for ballparks, and for the Red Sox. So instead of just searching “Fenway Park” I literally spent t an entire day searching for material online under different combinations of euphemisms. I was several hundred Google search pages into it when I found one obscure reference in an index dating from 1912 that seemed like it might be about Fenway. Then I had to find out what library holds the publication, and then physically go find it.

BB: Do you have researchers that work for you or do you do the legwork yourself?

GS: I do about 99% of my research myself and use a researcher to a very, very, very limited degree, and then only when my life schedule or location makes it impossible for me to look things up myself. In this case, I spent weeks in libraries looking up things on microfilm, and untold hours doing the same with sources that were available on-line and in books. There’s no substitute for that, because what inevitably happens is that when you are locked in doing research, you find things and make connections that you never, ever would have made if you were just contracting out to someone to do it for you. I recently heard from a writer who has researchers do almost everything, including interviews, and he had questions concerning a subject he had a researcher interview, but the interviewer apparently hadn’t asked all the right questions. The subject has since passed away, so now he will never know. I can’t imagine doing that. I really question the veracity of any book where the writer doesn’t do the vast bulk of his or her own research.

Generally, I’ll only use a researcher when I’m on deadline or toward the end of a project, to fill in blanks I might discover at the last minute. I live on the Canadian border in northwest Vermont and it’s not always possible to run down to New York or Boston – I have a family, animals and responsibilities, and a real long driveway I have to plow in the winter. For instance, there was one point where I was writing about the 1912 World Series when I suddenly had more questions about a particular event took place that. I already had accounts from four or five different papers, but what took place still wasn’t exactly clear. So I asked Denise Bousquet, a young woman from my town up here in Vermont who went to college in Boston and now works at Harvard, to look up some additional accounts for me. She’s done that for my last few books, and she also does some fact-checking, mostly on numbers and stats, because it’s way too easy to trip over those, and even then, stats from various sources don’t always agree. Many people think publishers fact check – they don’t. It’s the responsibility of the author, but there are discrepancies everywhere, even in data sources like Retrosheet and baseballreference.com. A book of this size – almost 200,000 words, probably contains 30,000 different facts. You try as best as you can to get it right.

BB: The mini biographies are always some of the most compelling sections of a book like this. Can you talk a little about the architect of Fenway Park, James E. McLaughlin and the builder Charles Logue? Also, I know you had experience in construction as a young man, and that you compiled an oral history about construction workers at Ground Zero. How much of your personal experience informed how you presented the relationship between McLaughlin and Logue?

GS: Fenway is perhaps the best known sporting facility in the country, yet both the architect and the builder were essentially unknown. McLaughlin and Logue had never been written about in any detail – even architectural historians knew virtually nothing about McLaughlin. Well, I bring them back, and show how both the design and building of Fenway Park was influenced by each man’s personality and philosophy. Both were immigrants. McLaughlin was Nova Scotian and Logue was Irish. McLaughlin’s practical and understated architectural philosophy was expressed in his design of Fenway. Before this book no one had ever decoded the specific architectural influences in the design of Fenway Park, or related Fenway to McLaughlin’s other buildings or to other nearby buildings built in the same era. I do, and that is one of the reasons why Fenway still works today – it fit the city then, and still does. And because I spent a number of years working in the construction industry, specifically working with concrete and reinforcing and structural steel, I understood the challenges that building Fenway created for Charles Logue, and spoke with his great grandson to give some sense of the man behind the name. My construction background was of immeasurable help in translating what would otherwise have been arcane construction and engineering information into English, and experienced how builders and architects interact. I think I make it possible to envision Fenway Park being built, and that in the end the reader walks away with an intimate understanding of the place that simply was not available before. After reading Fenway 1912 the reader will never be able to look at Fenway Park the same way – I guarantee it.

BB: You mentioned having to get rid of details sometimes if they take the reader away from the larger story. Even in this book, where you could afford to be more in-depth than in a general history book, were there things that you liked that had to be left on the cutting room floor?

GS: Only a little. It would have been nice to use another 20,000 words to better flesh out some characters, and perhaps to give those who are unfamiliar with Boston a bit more to hold on to, but I managed to squeeze in almost everything I wanted, either in the main text or in the endnotes, which are substantial.

BB: What was the most difficult part about writing this book?

GS: The story, to a degree, told itself, but the research was daunting, particularly in trying to pin down exactly how Fenway was built, and precisely when things took place, because I had to look in multiple newspapers and other sources every day over a six month period, never knowing if there would be a story or a picture that would be useful. Sometimes I’d spend all day and only find a sentence or two of information, but that one sentence could tell me something new. That’s how I found out the groundskeeper supervised the transfer of the sod from the Huntington Avenue Grounds to Fenway Park, which is the scene that opens the book. It took place in October, just after the 1911 season ended and work was just starting at Fenway Park, but I found the reference in a story written in late January of 1912, just a sentence.

BB: I loved your book on Trudy Ederle and I remember talking to you about how you spent long hours alone on a lake in an attempt to have some small understanding of what she must have experienced swimming the English channel. How did this experience, strictly from your writer’s perspective, compare with that?

GS: Completely different. For the Ederle book I had to bring myself up to speed about an experience I knew very little about. I didn’t have to do that for this book because I am very comfortable writing about both baseball and construction work. I already have insight into those subjects – I mean I’ve poured concrete day after day after day, pitched with a torn rotator cuff and from other projects already knew a great deal about the time period and the City of Boston during that time.

BB: Can you talk about the alterations that were made to the park during the 1912 season?

GS: There were two Fenway Parks in 1912. The park that opened and the park that was altered for the 1912 World’s Series. They were radically different. The park that opened was a very Spartan facility – just a small concrete and steel grandstand that barely extended past the dugouts with a tiny, ramshackle press box stuck on the roof, a mostly wooden “pavilion” that extended down the right field line, then a standalone block of wood bleachers in center field. There were no stands in right field at all, just a plain plank fence at the back edge of the property, and no stands down the left field line. In left was the earthen embankment that became known as Duffy’s Cliff and a long plank wall that extended to center field, the precursor to the “Green Monster.” The whole place seated just 24,500 people, that was it.

With the Series approaching, the club realized that Fenway was already obsolete. Overflow crowds that had been allowed onto the field during the regular season had been problematic and the National Commission told them they wouldn‘t allow that during the World Series. So while the Sox were on a road trip in September, in only a couple weeks they built 11,000 more seats, adding wooded stands down the left field line and stands in right field connecting the bleachers to the pavilion, giving the field of play the same basic footprint it has today. Fortunately I have a wonderful drawing in the book that shows those changes. And when the park was renovated and reconstructed after the 1933 season, that same footprint basic was retained.

BB: One of the incredible things about Fenway Park is that it has changed over 100 years, and although it may seem antiquated, the current Red Sox ownership has done a lot to add modern touches without tearing the place down. Can you talk about some of the most significant alterations the place has seen and why it continues to last.

GS: Fenway Park has lasted because until quite recently they never really tried to preserve it. There was little waxy nostalgia about the place until the 1980s. If they needed to change something, they just changed it. In that way the ballpark was allowed to evolve, and, except for the original grandstand, was almost entirely rebuilt in 1933/34 anyway. Significantly, I think, is that despite all the things they’ve done recently, they’ve left the interior footprint of the field alone. That allows fans to imagine they’re in the same park where Ruth and Williams and Yaz played, and where Fisk and Bucky hit it over the wall, and to connect that history. That’s mostly a fantasy, but an effective one. So despite the fact that I find Fenway far too busy these days – there are signs EVERYWHERE, and a constant barrage of noise – in many ways the park more resembles the retro parks that were built in imitation of Fenway more than the original Fenway Park – fans can still have a unique and memorable personal experience. A significant number of fans at any given game are tourists, and tourists will even find cramped seats and posts charming.

BB: Fenway and Wrigley are the only two old timey parts left. Do you think they’ll still be around in ten years?

GS: Wrigley, certainly, and Fenway probably, although at a certain point, particularly now that the 100th anniversary is about to pass, the benefits of Fenway to the franchise may begin to play out. As long as Fenway is full for every game, the park will be retained, but economically, they need it to be full. When it isn’t is when I think you’ll start to hear whispers that it’s no longer financially viable that they can’t “compete,” in Fenway. Then the drumbeat for a new park will start. Yet in this political climate replacing Fenway isn’t real viable either, and ballclubs are loathe to pay for new parks without substantial governmental help. A new ballpark in Boston, including surrounding infrastructure, would be a billion dollar project, and I don’t see that happening any time soon.

BB: Did you visit Fenway at all during the writing of the book or did you rely on your past memories of the place?

GS: I’ve seen some, but not all the changes that have taken place over the last decade because I’ve only been back to Boston a few times since I moved up here, and as you know they’ve made substantive changes to Fenway almost every season. But what they’ve done to Fenway recently is only a very small part of this book, and I was familiar enough with the park from when I did live in Boston for what I needed. I used to attend twenty games or so a year, and for a while had a pretty regular gig on NESN as a commentator on Red Sox history and got to roam around a lot. In the late ‘80s I narrated and did a walk around for a big special they did on the park and got to go all over the place – they showed it during rainouts for about a decade. I’ve covered a few games as a reporter, both in the old and new press boxes, snuck in a few times as a fan, taken batting practice there, and been in the dugouts and clubhouses, on the roof and in the lux boxes, under the bleachers when the batting cage was there, that kind of stuff.

BB: I know if this tangential to the book but you do mention in the introduction your own relationship with Fenway and how a ballpark is more like a civic institution, it’s a landmark for generations of people. Can you share some of your experiences at the park, and also, how you used to read poetry outside of it?

GS: Well shortly after I moved to Boston I decided to do something that would combine my two major interested – poetry and writing. I had collected a fair amount of baseball inspired poetry from Casey at the Bat to contemporary stuff, borrowed a little Pignose amp and microphone from a friend, put on an old baseball uniform, sent out press releases, filled a liter soda bottle with Bloody Mary’s and set up shop about 9:00 am on Opening Day and started reading. Back then, people would line up on Lansdowne Street to but bleacher seats.

It was fun as hell. People wondered what the hell I was doing out there, but no one told me to stop or tried to punch me in the face. A few heckled, but some people would actually stop and listen and every once in a while drop a few dollars at my feet. A couple TV and radio stations covered me, and columnists wrote about me – I met George Kimball that way – he did a story on me one year, and so did Peter Gelzinis of the Herald and Bob Hohler, before he was with the Globe. I met Bill Littlefield of NPR that way as well.

Glenn Stout (in uniform), and behind him (also in uniform), Scott Bortzfield, aka The Baseball Bards

So I kept doing it, and did it for nine years. Eventually my friend Scott, who I now live across the road from in Vermont, joined me out there, and people started expecting us. My Mom even made us old style Boston uniforms, and by the end there would be six or eight of us who would all go to the game together afterwards. One poem I would always read was by Tom Clark, a great poet who also wrote the Charlie Finley bio “Champagne and Baloney, called “To Bill Lee.” Wouldn’t you know it that one year, after we stopped and took our seats in the bleachers, who sits down next to us but Lee – this was only a years or two after he had stopped playing. I told him what I did and showed him the poem, which he knew and said, “That’s a great poem!” Which it is. I’ve met Bill a few times since and he remembers it.

It sounds crazy, but if I hadn’t done that, I might never have ended up writing for a living. Reading poetry in public really empowered me, and convinced me that there was a way to combine my interests in writing and baseball.

You know, I moved to Boston because I wanted to live in a city with an old ballpark, and I write that Fenway Park is the kind of place that can change your life. And I mean that, because it changed mine.

Fenway 1912: The Birth of a Ballpark, a Championship Season, and Fenway’s Remarkable First Year is available everywhere books are sold.

The season ended in a miserable way for the Boston Red Sox and now things are getting ugly. Craig Calcaterra links to a piece by Bob Hohler in the Globe.

Yikes. If it is as bad as all this, why would Theo Epstein stay?

The Tigers look to get back in this series.

[Photo Credit: Not a ‘tit’ blog]

“Perhaps because he decamped to Hollywood in the 1980s, while he was still in his prime, John Schulian has never quite been recognized as one of the last in the great line of newspaper sports columnists that started with Ring Lardner, ran through W.C. Heinz and Red Smith, and probably ended when Joe Posnanski left the Kansas City Star in 2009. This is a shame. On his better days, he rated with anyone you might care to name.”

Tim Marchman on John Schulian’s latest collection, “Sometimes They Even Shook Your Hand: Portraits of Champions Who Walked Among Us.” (Wall Street Journal)

John Schulian has been entertaining us this year with the story of his career in “From Ali to Xena.” He has a new collection of sports writing out and we recently caught up to talk about it. Here’s our conversation.

Enjoy.

BB: Your work has been collected twice before: “Writers’ Fighters,” a boxing compilation, and “Twilight of the Long-ball Gods,” a collection of baseball writing. What was the genesis of your new anthology, which is both broader and more specific than those two?

JS: “Sometimes They Even Shook Your Hand” was born of a mixture of ego and an urge to remind readers of the kind of sports writing they’re no longer getting in newspapers. What writer doesn’t want to have his work, at least that portion of it which isn’t embarrassingly bad, preserved in book form? I got my greatest lessons in writing by reading collections of my favorite sports writers—Red Smith, W.C. Heinz, Jimmy Cannon, John Lardner—so having a collection with my name on it became a goal early on in my career. Because “Sometimes” is my third, I may have exceeded my limit, but I hope people will forgive me when they see that it’s wider in scope than “Writers’ Fighters” and “Twilight of the Long-ball Gods.” I’m not just talking about the number of different sports it touches on, either. I’m talking about the personalities involved, and how open they were about themselves and their talents.

I realize, of course, how rare such accessibility is in today’s world, with athletes wary of any kind of media, protected by their agents, and generally paranoid about revealing anything about themselves except whether they hit a fastball or a slider. I think it was you who told me the change came about in the early ‘90s, which did a lot to shape this book. Suddenly, I knew how to make it more than a vanity project. The key was to make it stand as a tribute to the kind of sports writing that enriched newspapers when guys like Dave Kindred, Mike Lupica, David Israel, Leigh Montville, Bill Nack, Tony Kornheiser, Tom Boswell and I were turned loose with our portable typewriters. It was my great good fortune to work in an era so rich in talent, so full of talented people who were both my competition and my friends. Likewise, the athletes were there to talk to when you needed them. I know I didn’t always get the answers I wanted, but I got enough of them to give my columns and my magazine work the heartbeat they needed. It was a wonderful time to be a sports writer, and I hope “Sometimes They Even Shook Your Hand” bears that out.

BB: I was struck by your piece on John Riggins in Super Bowl XVII. Your starting and closing image is the most famous one from that game. You didn’t get any special access that your peers didn’t have and yet within those limitations the piece is just so writerly. The kind you don’t see today. How were you able to condense a guy’s career into a single column?

JS: It was pure reflex. I forget how much time I had for post-game interviews, but it wasn’t much before I had to get back to my computer. I’m guessing I had an hour or so to write the column. There were some guys who routinely finished in less time than that, but for me, that was a sprint. I still wanted the column to be as stylish as possible. Sometimes that was my undoing, because I spent too much time massaging the language and not enough just saying what I wanted to say. With the Riggins column, though, things fell into place. I’d spent a lot of time around the Redskins during the regular season and into the playoffs, so I was pretty well steeped in his story. As for working with the same post-game material everybody else had, there was something liberating about that. No scoops, no exclusive interviews, just a good old-fashioned writing contest. When you get in a situation like that, if you can get your mind right, everything just flows. And that was certainly the case when I wrote about Riggins. I knew instantly where all the pieces of the puzzle were supposed to go—imagery, post-game quotes, back-story. Then my instincts took over, and I even made my deadline. What could be better than that?

BB: The majority of the stories in the collection were written for newspapers. Can you describe the atmosphere of that business in the post-Watergate, Woodward and Bernstein days when columnists were stars?

JS: The newspaper business became truly glamorous after Watergate. Robert Redford played Woodward, Dustin Hoffman played Bernstein, and Ben Bradlee, the Washington Post’s executive editor, practically became Jason Robards, who portrayed him on the screen. It just didn’t get any cooler than that, and the people at the Post were certainly aware of it, maybe too much so. I noticed the self-importance and inflated egos when I showed up there in 1975, in the wake of Watergate. The Post was a wonderful paper—beautifully written, smartly and courageously edited—but it was still a newspaper. There were still typos and factual errors and the kind of bad prose that daily deadlines inspire. The ink still came off on your hands, too. And there were still desk men with enlarged prostates and reporters who stank of cigar smoke, and one night some son of a bitch stole my jacket. Maybe worst of all, if you looked beyond the Post, you could see the storm clouds gathering. More and more afternoon papers were dying, and there was a segment of the population that hated the Post for unhorsing Dick Nixon and the New York Times for printing the Pentagon Papers. But newspaper people, who can be so sharp about spotting trouble on the horizon for others, tend to be blind when it comes to their own house. No wonder it felt safe and good and even magical to work on newspapers after Watergate. I loved it as much as anybody. And I probably would have liked the dance band on the Titanic, too.

BB: Before we get to the players, let’s talk about the section you have on the writers—Red Smith, A.J. Liebling, W.C. Heinz, Mark Kram and F.X. Toole—because it reminds us that the era you cover wasn’t just about the athletes, it was about the writers too. Can you talk about what a remarkable stylist Mark Kram was in his prime?

JS: I don’t think any sports writer ever wrote prose as dense and muscular and literary as Mark Kram’s. He opened my eyes to the possibilities of what you could do in terms of pure writing even though the subject was fun and games. If you want to read classic Kram, you need only turn to the opening paragraphs of his Sports Illustrated story about the Thrilla in Manila. It has to be one of the most anthologized pieces in any genre of writing. I know that it was a mortal lock to be in “At the Fighters” as soon as George Kimball and I sat down to edit the book. Kram had been on my radar since I was in college. He absolutely killed me with his bittersweet love letter to Baltimore, his hometown, on the eve of the 1966 World Series. He was under the influence of Nelson Algren when he wrote it, but I wouldn’t figure that out until years later. All I knew was that he had taken a mundane idea and turned it into a tone poem about blue collar life. Baseball was only a small part of it, and even though I was under the Orioles’ spell—Frank Robinson! Brooks Robinson! Jim Palmer!—I loved Kram’s audacity. He wasn’t afraid of the dark no matter how bright the lights on what he was writing about.

No wonder he was so great when the subject was boxing. When I was in grad school, he did a piece about the fighting Quarry brothers and how their old man had ridden the rails from Dust Bowl Oklahoma to the supposedly golden promise of Southern California. He had LOVE and HATE tattooed on his knuckles, and Kram left me with a picture of him standing in a boxcar door as the train carried him toward a future filled with more sorrow than joy. I read the story standing at the newsstand where I bought SI every week, and when I got back to my apartment, I read it again. I would discover A.J. Liebling, W.C. Heinz, Red Smith, Jimmy Cannon, John Lardner, and all the other giants of fight writing later, but Mark Kram was the one who lit the way for me. And it began with that story about the Quarry brothers and the image of their old man in the boxcar door.

(more…)

Here’s a good piece on a new book about Heminway:

From his father, who loved the natural world, Hemingway learned in childhood to fish and shoot, and a love of these things shaped his life along with a third thing, writing. Almost from the first there is his distinct voice. In his journal of a camping trip he took with a friend when he was sixteen years old, he wrote of trout fishing, “Great fun fighting them in the dark in the deep swift river.” His style was later said to have been influenced by Sherwood Anderson, Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, journalism, and the forced economy of transatlantic cables, but he had his own poetic gift and also the intense desire to give to the reader the full and true feeling of what happened, to make the reader feel it had happened to him. He pared things down. He left out all that could be readily understood or taken for granted and the rest he delivered with savage exactness. There is a nervy tension in his writing. The words seem to stand almost in defiance of one another. The powerful early stories that were made of simple declaratives seemed somehow to break through into a new language, a genuine American language that had so far been undiscovered, and with it was a distinct view of the world.

Like maybe C.C. doesn’t want to stay in New York. Maybe I heard something like that.

Nah, I hadn’t heard that. Don’t want to think about that.

NLCS Game Twoski.

The ALDS continues…

[Photo Credit: Eric Gay/AP Photo]

If the Phone Doesn’t Ring

By John Schulian

It took me a year to realize my career was in free fall, but it wasn’t because I was extraordinarily dim or yet another example of the writer being the last to know. Even with the taint of my lost season at “Reasonable Doubts” fresh upon me, I got enviable gigs. The first, an assignment to write an HBO movie about Mike Tyson, actually had me thinking it might be a springboard to bigger things than episodic TV. At the very least, I expected to learn something from the producer I was working for, a walking piece of history named Edgar Scherick. He was a screamer, old Edgar was, but when a man can say he produced movies like “Take the Money and Run” and “The Taking of Pelham One Two Three” and put “The Fugitive” and “Wide World of Sports” on TV, allowances are made.

I have this memory of him nervously chewing hard candy as we worked on the Tyson story in fits and starts. He’d stop in the middle of sentences to take a call, or yell at his assistant to call someone for him, or order one of the bright lads in his employ to fetch this, that or the other thing. And then he’d pick up our conversation exactly where he had left it. He was smart in a Hollywood way, and in a read-the-classics way, too. And if I thought he was nuts, well, sometimes it couldn’t be helped. Maybe you’ve heard how Scott Rudin, a Scherick protégé who became a hugely successful producer, forced one of the over-educated serfs in his employ to get out of their car while they were on the freeway. I’ve heard it said that Rudin learned that trick from the master.

No sooner had Edgar and I begun collaborating than two friends, Ken Solarz and Jacob Epstein, offered me a job as a consulting producer on an attempt to resurrect “The Untouchables” as a syndicated series. They hired David Israel, too, but more important, they caved in to my most hubristic act in Hollywood. I said I only wanted to come into the office on Mondays because that was the day my cleaning lady was at the house–and they let me get away with it. It was the act of a prize horse’s ass and I soon paid for it.

First, HBO put a new executive in charge of the Tyson movie. His predecessor was Eva Marie Saint’s daughter, who couldn’t get past the idea that Tyson was an icky rapist. There was no denying it, of course, but he was also a kid who was formed by the hellhole in which he had grown up, and that was something Edgar and I very much wanted to address. And then there were the deaths of Cus D’Amato and Jimmy Jacobs, who were Tyson’s guiding lights. Don King compounded the odds against Tyson when he filled the void by warping the kid’s perspective and relieving him of vast portions of his fortune. Which was all fine and dandy, but HBO’s new executive still wanted to bring in his own writer. He didn’t bother to meet me or even pick up the phone. I was gone, and I hadn’t written so much as FADE IN.

HBO ended up paying me every cent I would have received if I’d gone the distance with the script. But money was beside the point. I’d missed a chance to take a step toward writing movies.

I gave myself 15 minutes to feel bad. Then I had to get back to work on a script for “The Untouchables.” As fate would have it, it was about a boxer. The show’s executive producer said he loved it–and then he said he wanted me to change it entirely by ripping off “Detective Story,” a hit Broadway play that had become a Kirk Douglas movie in the 1950s. The friends who had hired Israel and me were long gone, leaving us in the clutches of this emaciated, overmedicated madman who, according to rumors, had made so much money that he once bought an airplane he never learned how to fly. He just wanted to say he had one. Whatever, I told him I wasn’t ripping off anything. He responded exactly as I expected him to. He fired me.

My phone didn’t ring for the next year.

While show business rolled on without me, I lived through the death of my mother and an earthquake that did major damage to my home. I wrote for Sports Illustrated, GQ, Philadelphia magazine, and the L.A. Times Book Review. I even ran into an executive I knew from Stephen Cannell’s company who said, “I was just telling someone today that we need a great writer like John Schulian.” I wasn’t cheeky enough to tell him the genuine article was his for the asking.

The agents who had been telling me what a big deal I was–young men on the make, every one of them–acted as though I no longer existed. The only agents who looked after me were female, and you can make of that what you will. Nancy Jones, Sue Naegle, and Jill Holwager took turns calling every week or two to pump up my spirits by saying they were looking for work for me. It was a kindness I’m not sure I thanked them for–until now.

The lack of a TV job, with its long hours and attendant pressures, may have been a blessing because my life was in tumult. There would be no more Sunday afternoon visits on the phone with my mother, and there wasn’t a wall in my house the quake hadn’t cracked. For the second time in my adult life, I needed to get my feet under me. The difference this time was that I had every confidence I would. I began my resurrection by adapting a short story for a hard-boiled anthology series that A&E never put on the air. Then I wrote an episode of “Lonesome Dove” for an old friend from “Midnight Caller” who was trying to turn it into a syndicated series. The “Lonesome Dove” project turned out to be a fiasco, but at least I had some money coming in and my name was back in circulation.

And then along came “Hercules.”

It was hardly the kind of show I’d dreamed of doing, but as Steven Bochco had told me, you go where the work is. Sam Raimi and Rob Tapert, two friends from Detroit who had scored big with horror movies, were making “Hercules” their first venture into TV. Or rather Tapert was doing it while Raimi tried to get his directing career back on the tracks. “Evil Dead” and “Army of Darkness” had made him a cult hero, but his latest effort, a Sharon Stone western called “The Quick and the Dead,” had stalled at the box office, and he was a million miles creatively from rebounding with “A Simple Plan,” a wonderful, un-Raimi-like movie, and “Spiderman.” The times I saw him, and they weren’t many, he was wandering around the Raimi-Tapert offices on the Universal lot, looking like he’d taken one too many punches. Tapert, on the other hand, was wired. He saw TV as a chance to prove that he brought as much to the party in his way as his illustrious partner did in his.

I was the guy Tapert hired to lead him and Sam into the world of episodic TV. They had already done five “Hercules” movies for TV, and they had fought every step of the way with the series’ creator, Christian Williams, who was coincidentally a former Washington Post reporter. It was hard to tell who hated whom more, but suffice it to say Chris was long gone by the time I walked through the door.

However much blood had been spilled behind the scenes, I still liked what I saw when I watched the “Hercules” movies–the big action sequences, the special effects, the stunning locations in New Zealand, and especially the star. Tapert and Raimi, to their everlasting credit, had passed on that cyborg Dolph Lundren and chosen a clean-cut unknown from Minnesota named Kevin Sorbo. Kevin was strapping without being muscle bound, and he possessed an amiable, self-deprecating screen presence, a nice way with humor, and the ability to tap into his emotions on those rare occasions when a scene called for it.

One more thing I liked about the show: it was, at its roots, a western. Hercules wanders the countryside, finds people who need his help, comes through for them in a big way, and moves on. Hell, I’d been working on plots like that since I was a kid drawing movies on strips of paper. So I went in thinking I would have fun doing “Hercules” even though it was a decided step down in class from what I’d worked on before. I’d just brainwash myself so I could pretend it was the 1950s and I was heading to Universal every day to write sword-and-sandal movies or Audie Murphy westerns. And it worked–but only for a little while.

Click here for the full “From Ali to Xena” archives.

Alex Rodriguez has been getting killed by the press since the Yanks were bounced last week, but that’s nothing new. He’s getting killed by fans–at least the ones I’ve talked to–and that, too, is nothing new. The one Yankee player who has benefitted most from this is Mark Teixeira. Over at SI.com, Tom Verducci weighs in:

Teixeira, who came to the Yankees as a .290 career hitter, followed that .256 season with another decline, to .248. Put him in a postseason environment, with better pitching and home runs tougher come to come by, and Teixeira’s rally-killing style is going to be more pronounced. He has hit .167 over his last 108 postseason at-bats.

His troubles are particularly acute from the left side. Teixeira batted .224 from the left side this year while getting only four hits all year to the opposite field.

His batting average on balls in play has dropped every year with the Yankees: .302, .268, .239. That’s not unlucky. It’s symptomatic of his hitting style. His fly ball rate has increased every year as a Yankee (37 in 2008, followed by 44, 46, 47). His infield pop-ups, which are no different than strikeouts, and were as low as 14 in 2008, have grown to 21, 30 and 27 as a Yankee.

Teixeira’s swing simply is not built to make him a consistent clutch hitter. After coming to the Yankees with a .308 average with runners in scoring position in 2008, he hasn’t come close to that kind of reliability with New York (.264, .273, .268) — especially in the postseason environment.

Teixeira turns 32 years old next season. The Yankees already have age-related issues with Alex Rodriguez and Derek Jeter. You can put Teixeira in that category, not because of health, but because his pull-happy, fly ball swing is the kind that doesn’t age well, sort of like those of J.D. Drew and Adam Dunn.

I wonder how long before Teixeira starts to feel the heat?

More playoff baseball.

Have at it:

Happy October.

[Photo Credit: It’s a Long Season]

Al Davis died yesterday.

He was 82 and he was as big a legend as the NFL has ever seen.

Is there a better baseball writer in the country than Tyler Kepner? And I’m not just talking about newspapers. If so, please let me know because I’m missing something special. Kepner covered the Mets beat and then the Yankees beat for the New York Times before becoming the paper’s general baseball writer/columnist. His work features measured, even-handed analysis, good reporting, and, oh yeah, the guy can actually write. He’s just getting better and better. I got to thinking about him when I opened the sports section of the Times this morning. There are few sports writers than have all of Kepner’s skills these days and I, for one, am grateful to have him on the scene.

Also in the Times today is a long feature by Ken Belson on Hideki Irabu.