I recently re-discovered Gelf, a San Francisco based webzine, which is a great source for baseball author interviews. Of all the topics I read, I am most fascinated by stories that involve the creative process, whether it’s the thoughts of a movie director or an author. For non-fiction writers, there’s a double responsibility. The first part is fact-finding. Lee Lowenfish and Joshua Prager (see below) spent years researching their subjects. But then there’s putting it all together into a readable format. All the details won’t mean anything if the book is unreadable.
One of the reasons I prefer reviewing non-fiction is because fiction is too subjective. Too many variables: the author’s voice, the subject, the genre. For me, it’s “just the facts, ma’am.”
Among those writers who have shared their wisdom and observations with Gelf are:
- “Cor van den Heuvel, a lifelong fan of the Red Sox, has been writing haiku for nearly half a century. His twin loves come together in Baseball Haiku
, a collection of more than 200 haiku and senryu from American and Japanese poets. “
- Curt Smith, author of the Mel Allen biography, The Voice. “When he was growing up in upstate New York, Curt Smith would listen to Mel Allen broadcast the New York Yankees. Allen was the voice of baseball’s most-glamorous and most-successful team, and his articulate gamecasts and signature ‘How about that!’ call made him a celebrity. Then his game started to slip, the Yankees fired him, and he was suddenly a Voice without a sport to call.” (For my profile on Smith, see here.)
- Joshua Prager, author of The Echoing Green. “Prager burrows like a wolverine into the ‘shot heard round the world’—the 1951 homer by the New York Giants’ Bobby Thomson that saved the National League pennant from the clutches of the Brooklyn Dodgers and their pitcher Ralph Branca. Heart attacks and faintings accompanied news of the unexpected home run, and the ‘shot’ reverberated throughout the country, from the White House to the holding cells of soon-to-be executed Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.” (For my interview with Prager, see here.)
- Jeff Pearlman, author of the Barry Bonds bio Love Me, Hate Me: “Pearlman interviewed over 500 associates of Bonds, 60% of whom, Pearlman guesses, never had spoken before about Bonds. ‘I loved the challenge of getting inside,’ Pearlman, age 34, tells Gelf. ‘To me, the whole fun of journalism is the digging process.'”
- Sam Walker, author of Fantasyland: “As part of his gig as sportswriter for the Wall Street Journal, Sam Walker would routinely head south and west in the spring to visit baseball training camps in search of feature articles, preferably about the business of baseball. But in 2004, his mission was quite different: Walker, on book leave, was scouting out players for his fantasy-baseball team.” (For my review on Fantasyland, see here.)
- Steven Goldman, co-editor of the Web site (and annual publication) Baseball Prospectus: “Goldman critiques the science of performance-enhancing drugs, rips on center fielder Juan Pierre, and defends BP from the barbs of New York Times writer Murray Chass.” (For my profile on Goldman, see here.)
- Lee Lowenfish, author of the massive new biography on Branch Rickey. “How does an author chronicle the life of Branch Rickey, the baseball innovator who had already built the St. Louis Cardinals into perennial contenders and invented the modern farm system well before his most-famous act of signing Jackie Robinson to break the sport’s color barrier? By not reaching the famous first meeting of Rickey and Robinson until page 373. In Lee Lowenfish’s exhaustive new Rickey biography, the former Cardinals and Brooklyn Dodgers executive emerges as a political and social conservative who had great capacity for innovation in baseball.”
is available on Amazon.com,
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