When I first saw the headline in Saturday’s NY Times, I thought the writer, David Waldstein, was speaking metaphorically.
Turns out Dickey — the surprise pitching star for the Mets in an otherwise dismal 2010 — actually is writing a book, with the help of Wayne Coffey of the NY Daily News.
A passionate and critical reader, Dickey is writing a book scheduled to be published by Penguin a year from now.
“I’ve always been pretty good at journaling, and blessed with a pretty good memory,” he said. “I figured, once I started the knuckleball journey, it was a good place to put some form to it, dating way back to childhood and leading all the way up to this year.”
Dickey, 36, is far more literary than most pro athletes, and more than even most of the college-educated reporters who write about him. So he will be writing virtually all of the book himself, with some assistance from Wayne Coffey, a sportswriter with The Daily News.
Dickey described the book as a combination of “The Glass Castle,” Jeannette Walls’s best-selling 2005 memoir, and “Ball Four,” Jim Bouton’s groundbreaking baseball tell-all. Dickey promised he would not be “throwing everyone under the bus,” the way some of Bouton’s critics accused him of doing.
Dickey has informed General Manager Sandy Alderson of his literary venture to assure him he would not simply be exposing the Mets’ dirty linen. The similarities with Bouton’s book, he said, will come with the honest, sometimes painful self-reflection, and the inevitable disapproval of some readers.
Tim Wakefield, a member of the KB brotherhood, is publishing his story this year: Knuckler: My Life with Baseball’s Most Confounding Pitch
is available on Amazon.com,
Comments on this entry are closed.