Veteran sportswriter Tim Kurkjian joined ESPN in 1998 as both a reporter for Baseball Tonight and a senior writer for ESPN The Magazine. His extensive background covering baseball included a stint at Sports Illustrated as a senior writer from 1989-97. Like many of his sports brethren, he took a large chunk of his accumulated anecdotes and put them down on paper, resulting in Is This a Great Game Or What? published by St. Martin’s Press in 2007; the paperback version will hit bookstores this spring.
On a hectic January morning, Kurkjian took time from the hectic task of both moving into a new residence and waiting for a prospective buyer to look at the old one to talk about his work and the process of putting his book together.
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Bookshelf: Do you keep track of how your book is doing?
Tim Kurkjian: I’m not really good about that. I call my publisher once in a while to say, “how’s everything going?” And they say “It’s going great,” so I assume that means it’s going great. It comes out in paperback in May, so I’m looking forward to that.
Bookshelf: With 25 years worth of stories, how did you pick the ones that made it into the book?
Kurkjian: I just basically picked my 15 or 16 favorite stories, my favorites things about baseball — whether it’s spring training or statistics or fear of the ball or general managers — that interested me the most, figuring if I like this stuff, and all I do for a living is baseball, hopefully baseball fans will like it also.
Bookshelf: Do you have a favorite chapter?
Kurkjian: Yeah, the fear of the ball chapter is my favorite just because you don’t see that story written very often. I reported that one better than I think I’ve reported any story because I talked to at least 30 guys who had been hit… either by a pitched ball or a batted ball, and their stories just literally made me cry in a couple of cases, they were so gruesome. I think we all know what that’s about; any kid who’s ever been hit by a pitch understands.
The point of the chapter was that fear exists throughout the Major Leagues, too, but the major leaguer’s ability to deal with it is so different than the average person. I just think it’s necessary to point out exactly how hard that ball is, exactly how quickly it is traveling, and exactly how much it hurts when it hits you. So again, with all the people I talked to who had been hit, I know a little bit about this. I have total admiration for anybody who can stand in against anything thrown 98 miles an hour, get hit, and then come back and play the next day. The average fan [would] never get back in there.
Bookshelf: It seems that these days, people in your profession are called on to multi-task, to do so much more than just write. Do you enjoy that?
Kurkjian: I really enjoyed my beat writer days, because all I had to worry about was the beat and my team [Kurkjian started his career covering the Texas Rangers], which was plenty, by the way. I went to Sports Illustrated in 1989. CNN/Sports Illustrated was formed in 1997 and a bunch of us ended up on TV and that was really, at least for me, the start of the whole multi-tasking thing. I enjoy it to some degree, but you really have to be organized to do it because on certain days I’m writing for ESPN The Magazine, ESPN.com, doing Baseball Tonight on TV, [and] four radio shows — all on the same day. You really have to be able to organize your time and understand what you’re writing for. The script I might write for television is going to be different than the story I write for ESPN.com and you pretty much to figure out what you’re going to do on the fly….
Bookshelf: At one point in the book, you write about young athletes copying some questionable behavior from the athletes they see on TV, but isn’t ESPN and other sports entities at least partly responsible for that?
Kurkjian: Of course. We’re just as responsible as anybody else. That’s really why Web Gems was formed, because we felt like all we were showing were a bunch of home runs hit by a bunch of big, slow sluggers. That’s when we decided to show some of the great defensive plays.
It bothers the heck out of me when I go to a Little League game and watch a kid “raising the roof” as he runs around the bases after he’s hit an home run. And you ask, where did he see that? And the answer is, he saw it at a Major League baseball game, and there’s a really good chance it was it on ESPN.
Bookshelf: I’d like to turn to the publishing process. Your editor was Marc Resnick. Was he very knowledgeable about the game?
Kurkjian: Oh yeah, and that’s one reason I chose St. Martins Press when we interviewed with them to see which publisher we were going to go to. It was clear right away that Marc was going to be the one to edit the book and when I sat and talked to him it was obvious that he loved baseball, that he understood baseball, and that’s what I needed. I needed someone to understand the language that I was speaking in this book and he understood it completely….I could not have been happier with the way the book was edited because they left the tone and my work alone for the most part and, again, that’s because a baseball lover was the editor of the book.
Bookshelf: You say for the most part. Was there anything they wanted to change that bothered you?
Kurkjian: No, not really. Although it was real interesting. This was my second book, but it’s really my first one that went through the entire editing process. The lawyer had some questions about some the things that I wrote. I had a couple of cuss words in the book, only a few, and they were in a direct quote — I didn’t use them; I would never talk that way. But they were in a direct quote and he wanted to make sure I was comfortable putting them in and that it didn’t give the person who used them a bad image. Is this the way [the player] is sometimes, and I said absolutely; he talks that way all the time. So that was the most interesting part about it to me, what the lawyer had to say and what we should and shouldn’t put in. But overall he was great, too. So that was a really enlightening experience for me
Bookshelf: Was that a consideration, deciding to use such earthy language? Books aren’t rated like movies, but does something like that change it at all: You throw in one word and it goes from a PG to a PG-13?
Kurkjian: Right. My brother, who’s my age, read my book and he was a little surprised that there were swear words in it. There may be six of them, I think. I counted because I was so cautious about using them.…It’s not like he didn’t think they should be in there; he was just surprised that I would use one or two because kids might read this book. But this is a big person’s book also, and you really have to get across the real message here. That’s the way a lot of major leaguers talk, so I felt the need to get it across that way.
Bookshelf: Do you really have a library of 6,000 baseball books?
Kurkjian: Oh, no, no, no. I need to change that for the paperback [version]. That was an exaggeration on my part. I have a ton of books…but it was just kind of a joke. I’m gonna switch that; you’re the second person that’s now asked me about that. I have a lot of books, but I don’t have 6,000. I was just trying to make a point
Bookshelf: Do you have a favorite or two?
Kurkjian: David Halberstam’s Teammates is one of my favorite books. Ball Four is [another]. Those might be my two favorite books . But I’ve read all the “classics.” Summer of ’64, also by Halberstam, is at the top of my list, just about anything he’s done
Bookshelf: Do you think there’s going to be a “rush to publish” in the aftermath of the Mitchell Report?
Kurkjian: Well, we’ll see about that. I frankly think the American public has read enough about steroids, which is one reason why I didn’t go heavy on steroids or drugs or anything else in my book. Because I think that even though it’s an extremely important story and needs to be reported — and believe me, on ESPN we did a seven-hour special on the day it came out, so we understand the importance and I was all over it — I think the average fan every once in a while still needs to be entertained, he needs to laugh once in a while and that’s what was essentially in my book.
But, yes, I’m sure there will be some sort of book in the aftermath of the Mitchell Report because this story obviously is not going away. It’s going to live for years to come and then we’re going to come across another designer steroids of sorts, another performance enhancing drug that we’re going to have to deal with.
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