Diamonds Are Forever

I promised myself. Someday, I’d read many books by authors including Homer, Hemingway, Tolstoy, Joyce, Dostoevsky, and Steinbeck. After my kids came along in the 90s, I abandoned books except for the occasional one. I traded Thomas Wolfe and Sinclair Lewis and Willa Cather for thousands of backyard baseball tosses to Quinn Tracy and Ian Tracy. Colin Tracy favored soccer and track and field, about which I knew very little. Yeah, we’d do some math and science homework back then, but those kinds of books were not my strong suit.

I could never abandon baseball. But I started to see it through different lenses.  It was more than just being a San Francisco Giants fan hoping for championships. It was how watching boys play a boys’ game began to put me on a road to somewhere. You can always dream about making it big but baseball remains a kids’ game. Don’t just take my word for it. Take the word of someone who knew better.

Seven decades ago, Roy Campanella told a group of sportswriters: “It gets me real excited to be in a (World) Series and see these writers here and all them flags. It makes me feel like I was at a circus. There’s nothing a boy likes better than a circus, and to play this game good, a lot of you’s got to be a little boy.”

I’m not sure everyone in today’s game understands what Campy was saying. The spirit of professional baseball often gets waylaid by the material trappings.

Along my road’s indefinite path I fell instantly in love with this game that borders on art. It is steeped in beauty. A light at the far end of the way moved me to leave a mark behind. My mark and those of a few other people. You could call it religion but it ain’t that. The light led me to what I wanted to be when I grew up— now that I’ve reached that milestone. Yet I’m sure God has something to do with it.

A couple years back, I read many of those classic books. Between August 2023 and now, I plowed through a couple hundred of them. Thomas Hardy. Mikhail Bulgakov. John O’Hara. I feel like I fulfilled that old promise to myself. But there are more to keep. After all, the road is making its way to those woods— the Frostian ones.

Reading and writing go together like throwing and pitching. You can excel at the latter if you practice a large amount of the former. As a kid, Shamokin’s Stan Coveleski threw thousands of rocks at tin cans between shifts in the Antracite coal mines. That was long before he’d win a World Series with the Indians and get elected to the Hall of Fame. Ninety percent of the writers I read, in their novels, refer to some vast store of books at their disposal— in their homes, in libraries— or anywhere else they could find them. Reading was indispensable to their writing talent.

I started writing again about ten years ago when I needed some extra money. I wrote advertisement-type blogs for businesses in cities I’d never visited. They paid writers eight bucks a pop if they used the pieces. You’ve heard of puppy mills? Well, these were content mills. Believe me when I say there’s not a whole lot of ethical distancing between the two. 

Things have improved in ten years. I’ve done business stuff for big companies. But writing about cap rates and capital expenditures gets boring unless you have that stuff flowing through your veins. I never did. In fact, I’ve bled out more than once.

I figured if I could write passable pieces for big companies, maybe I could write something more meaningful, more enjoyable. My friend asked me what I wanted to write about and baseball seemed a perfect choice. I love the game and my love has always been strengthened by the tales of my grandfather’s journey through minor league and semi-professional baseball. I’ve written a book about that, and it’s coming closer to publication.

My advisor Mike has secured the commitment of a former Major League Baseball pitcher who will write the book’s foreword. Mike didn’t need to coax the former Cincinnati Red at all. And he liked what he read. This gives me confidence in the book’s quality, which I wasn’t quite sure I objectively had before Johnny Bench’s old batterymate gave me a big dose of it.

In advance of its release, I’m embarking on a mini-tour to promote my book and another I have in the works with my friend Terry. I have to speak in Pittsburgh and Baltimore in front of some highly knowledgeable baseball folks. And for that I need to cram. Thus, I have once again given up classic literature, this time for baseball books. Two of the best any baseball history fan can read are The Boys of Summer by Roger Kahn and The Glory of Their Times by Lawrence Ritter. I once again have homework to do. I sure hope I pass the test.