National Pastime Radio: The Darling trifecta/Jeff Passan

Might as well wind up with this: Ron Darling was a guest on the April 6 Leonard Lopate Show to hump his latest, Game 7, 1986: Failure and Triumph in the Biggest Game of My Life (which has gone up three spots since I posted the best-seller entry a few hours earlier).

Darling, a Yale graduate and one of the more respected analysts in the game these days, was very honest in discussing the “failure” and “triumph” parts of the title. On the one hand, he personally “failed” in his start in the last game of the Series. On the other hand, the Mets won the championship. Isn’t that what’s supposed to be the most important thing?

But we all have egos. Sure, we’re happy when the team wins, but we also want to do well personally and feel badly when we don’t believe we’re a part of the success, even if we did well over the course of the whole season. We know we’re a major reason the team got to this point, but the past doesn’t matter; what you did today is the only thing that counts. And when that time came, Darling didn’t perform well.

As is almost always the case, a lot of attention has been given to the most salacious parts of the narrative. In this case, it’s the drug use of several members of that ’86 team. Several media outlets made this the focus of their stories, not the more personal and human part of Darling’s memoir. This has been the meat for the press when it came to books by Joe Torre and Selena Roberts’ bio on Alex Rodriguez. Early articles and reviews about each book focused on the negative: Torre’s contentious relationship with GM Brian Cahsman and A-Rod’s suspected steroid use, respectively.

Back to Game 7: This drug angle isn’t new; other books have recounted tales of the substance abuse. Doc Gooden wrote about it with brutal honesty in his memoir; so did Darryl Strawberry. But Darling shows an understanding of the publishing game in the Lopate interview; he knows what sells books. I give Lopate credit for not bringing it up until almost a half-hour into the show, rather than leading off with it.

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Lopate also interviewed Jeff Passan, author of The Arm: Inside the Billion-Dollar Mystery of the Most Valuable Commodity in Sports. Just his luck to be on the same time with Darling, that scene-stealer.