Of theater, Iowa, writing and needing AN help

"rec’d.

Thank you for sharing your tale.

Looking forward to this thread.

As for your question I have been to spring training eight times in the past and the thing I like about it the best is how close you can get to the players, (minor league ball is like this all the time). You can be having dinner after an afternoon game and in will walk Eric Chavez with Tim Hudson and Mark Ellis. I have found that in this type of situation the players are very approachable for autographs or just to talk, (Byrnes was my favorite for this). Another thing I love about spring training is you get to meet the minor leaguers who are a couple years away from the big club. I don’t know how many times I would turn to my buddy and say “Man he is going to rake for us next year” after some minor leaguer crushed a changeup over the right field wall or "That play was sick, who is that guy" after a double A short stop made a diving back hand play and threw the runner out by five steps, (Miggy of course). I have not been able to go for a couple years because of my new job but I will make it back.

“If only I were talented enough to get into the Iowa Writer’s Workshop.” I want the MFA.

As for your questions, if your story is literary, try the New Yorker. That’s aiming really, really high but there’s no reason to aim low. The first (and only, so far) magazine byline I got was in Chicago magazine.

Years ago my best friend and I decided to celebrate Spring Break by heading to Arizona to check out Spring Training. My friend had a cousin who played in the Dodgers organization and he’d agreed to take us out to the Phoenix night spots with the his teammates. I learned two things during my trip:

1) Minor league guys who aren’t considered top prospects within the organization will do everything they can to hide the aches and pains they endure. I met one pitcher who had been signed out of the Independent Leagues and his shoulder was hurting him so bad he had to take a dozen Extra-Strength Tylenol every morning just to start the day. He believed (and he was probably right) that if he told management that his shoulder was hurting they’d just release him rather than spend the money on medical bills. He was hoping to make it through Spring Training, get assigned to a minor league team and then “get hurt” and go on the DL. It was the only way to make sure he earned a paycheck while hurt, plus the Dodgers would foot his medical bills.

I never found out what happened to the pitcher.

2) Being a professional baseball player, even a career minor leaguer, makes it incredibly easy to get women in bed. It’s so easy that the ballplayers I was around pretended NOT to be professional athletes when they approached women! My friend’s cousin pretended to be an Australian plumber when he hit on girls! (No, he wasn’t Australian… he had to fake the accent. This is much easier to do when you’re in a club that plays the music really loud but I’ll give the guy credit, he sounded pretty convincing!)

My friend decided that he and I were going to partake in the game and I was to pose as a reporter doing a piece on Spring Break/Spring Training and the associated nightlife. He was going to be my photographer… even though he didn’t have a camera. Yes, we had had a few beers before we came up with our cover story.. Anyways, we finally found a couple girls who were buying our story and after a surprising display of charm on my part (I don’t have many good days but when I do, they’re golden) had agreed to an “interview”. I had told them that we were a freelance writing team and hadn’t planned on working that night, but I found their story interesting and if they didn’t mind we could head back to our hotel and grab our gear to do the interview. (Yes, they had had a few beers as well.)

Just when I thought we were in the clear one of the girls asked which magazine we were supposed to be writing the article for. I thought I had covered that with the freelance angle but I guess she needed a name. My friend, whom I love like a brother and would end up being my best man when I got married, gave them the first title he could think of. I don’t remember exactly what he said, but it included “boobs” and a few choice XXX terms.

There was no interviewing that night.

I know some writers who publish in the A’s and Giants magazines. I could put you in touch with them.
The Society for American Baseball Research publishes several different research magazines and I think there are some international chapters. www.sabr.org

Rec’d.

Your parents would be proud of what a good writer you are.

A number of years ago, my cousin and I went to an A’s ST game at Phoenix Muni. We were camped out in the bleachers along the third base line, and I turned around to discover that Bill King was sitting right behind me, with his papers spread out on either side of him. (He was preparing for his first radio broadcast of the spring the following day.) I said hello and told him that we had some friends in common (people I used to sit near at the Coli who were close friends of his), and then I turned back to the game, not wanting to interrupt his preparations. However, he was in a talkative mood, and we ended up talking for quite a while. I asked him for restaurant recommendations and he told me about Havana Cafe (the one on Camelback), which my cousin and I went to for dinner that night. It’s become a Phoenix staple ever since, and we always hoist a glass to Bill.

See, back in a day and especially back in the communist driven sport centers, the math was simple. The more and harder you practiced, the better you would be. It was a linear math, the one that provided very little room for creative approach or personal opinions. Or, as my charming coach used to comment: “When you say you can’t run anymore, it’s your point of view. When you pass out, it’s objective”.

I had a Yugoslav fencing coach for a few months in college — a guy who’d been on the Yugoslav Olympic team a few years before — who used to lead footwork exercises with us (he was a sabreur, incredibly fast) while screaming “Maximum! Maximum!” at us. Made quite an impression on me.

Curious what you think.

I lived in germany in the mid 80’s. On a train ride, I was next to a russian guy who had been a fencer in their olympic program and defected on a tour of the west. We got to talking about how so many athletic programs were so good there.

I asked him about drugs, but he said that, while a lot of guys in the east used PED’s, he was pretty sure it was, if anything, worse in the west.

His guess was that there was a combination of things. First, the best athletes in the US want to play football or baseball, while those in Europe want to play soccer. But second, and more interestingly, he said “imagine that Donald Trump had no way to make a name for himself in business in politics, and his only option were sport. How would he do in sports?”

His point, of course, was that anyone in the east who wanted to make a name for himself went into sports, as it was the only real way to do it.

Does that make sense to you?

And there might be something to it. Other factors are probably that most of those countries were poorer than the western ones and although I have no numbers to back it up, I strongly feel that rich countries kids, with their guitar hero and PSP alternatives, don’t show that much interest in sports. The third one would probably be that communist countries loved to decorate themselves wither their athletes medals, so that they made sure all the coaches for the perspective athletes squeezed as much out of them as possible.