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Episode 467: How to Bounce Back from ‘Viscerally Negative’ Feedback with Will Bardenwerper
0 Playsin 15 hours
Will Bardenwerper grew up playing baseball and even was a member of his college team at Princeton. As a result, he has a great perspective to write about baseball as he does in Homestand: Small Town Baseball and the Fight for the Soul of America (Doubleday).
That soul, in this book, is partially under attack from private equity firms gobbling up and eradicating minor league baseball teams. It's just one of the many threads of Will's wonderful book.
Podcast Specific Substack at creativenonfictionpodcast.substrack.com.
Newsletter: Rage Against the Algorithm
Show notes: brendanomeara.com
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Transcript
Upcoming Book Releases and Events
00:00:02
Speaker
Hey, see, in efforts, we're fewer than two weeks away from the publication of The Front Runner, so be sure to secure yourself a pre-order while supplies last. Call now. But seriously, go to your bookseller of choice and maybe pre-order it.
00:00:17
Speaker
Or order it. It's getting on that time. Go to The Independence, not the big A, if you can help it. Also, Wednesday, May 21st, 6 p.m., Community Run, Pub Day 5K with Run Hub and Eugene.
00:00:35
Speaker
guess it's going to three- to five-mile run. Then at 7 o'clock, we head over to nearby Coal Fire Brewing for a book event. And Thursday, May 29th at 7 p.m., I'll be at Powell's Books at Cedar Hills Crossing in conversation with Ruby McConnell.
00:00:51
Speaker
That's in Beaverton in the shadow of the Nike campus. Should be a biggin'.
Writing Workshops and Resources
00:00:56
Speaker
Also, from May 28th to June 1st, the Archer City Writing Workshops at the Larry McMurtry Literary Center are having a workshop called Feature Writing, the Reconstructed Narrative, led by Kim Cross, Hampton Sides, Glenn Stout,
00:01:13
Speaker
Visit lmcmurtrylitcenter.com.org. No, get that C-O-M out of here. you Get your organ. Slash events.
00:01:27
Speaker
Let's read that again, lmcmurtrylitcenter.org, org, org, slash events. To learn more, you'll enter the retreat, one writer, and leave a new one, a better one.
00:01:39
Speaker
he And he said, you know, I'll never forget the exact language he used. He said, I don't know how else to put this, comma, but I had a viscerally negative reaction to these pages, period.
00:01:50
Speaker
In short, comma, I feel as if you violated every rule of storytelling.
00:02:02
Speaker
Oh, Hank, who's on the docket today? Kevin, you got me? Insight? Lachlan? Go back to sleep. and We got a Friday matinee here. it looks like it's Will Bardenwerper.
00:02:13
Speaker
i mean, he's got to be a writer, right? like The Bard. The Bard is right in the name. It's right there. The Bard. author of The Prisoner in His Palace, Saddam Hussein, His American Guards, and What History Leaves Unsaid, and most recently, and the occasion that we have to speak with him today, Homestand, Small Town Baseball, and the Fight for the Soul of America.
Introduction to Will Bardenwerper and 'Homestand'
00:02:38
Speaker
It's published by Doubleday.
00:02:42
Speaker
The story takes us to Batavia, New York, in the western part of the state, not too far from Buffalo. Batavia used to be home to the minor league Batavia muckdogs, but was wiped out during Major League Baseball's consolidation of dozens of minor league teams. Not only consolidation, just eradication.
00:03:02
Speaker
And they're getting gobbled up by private equity, diamond holdings, or something like that. ah Teams that were often the beating hearts of so many communities. Gone.
00:03:14
Speaker
What took that team's place was a Woodback College Baseball Summer League, similar to the Cape Cod League, and they were able to adopt the Muckdogs name, but it's not quite as a wash in talent as, say, the Cape League.
00:03:27
Speaker
What separates Will's book from many of these, quote, a season with, unquote, books is that he focuses more on the people in the stands versus the ones in the dugout. The often quirky people who love the game more for what it symbolizes. Because obviously they're not there for, like, high quality ball, but let's face it, and these are good ballplayers.
00:03:48
Speaker
That wasn't a shot. It's just the truth. A meeting place and a chance to set aside our differences, maybe, to agree on the bang, bang, bang of a 6-4-3 double play.
00:03:59
Speaker
Show notes of this episode and more at brandonamara.com. There you can sign up for the monthly Rage Against the Algorithm newsletter. First of the month, no spam, can't beat it. And also the weekly pod stack, which you can find at creativenonfictionpodcast.substack.com.
00:04:15
Speaker
It comes out with every podcast. Sometimes it's a little blurby thing. Sometimes it's just a cache of quotes. don't know. It's evolving.
00:04:26
Speaker
I think it's worth your time. And that's something I'm very aware of. i know. What a guy. There's also the Patreon crew where you can elect a joint for free to be a wallflower or chip in a few bucks if you want some one-on-one time to talk things through.
00:04:40
Speaker
I post little videos over there, and it's a fun way to get a little something extra. As if you need more from your boy.
00:04:49
Speaker
So I graduated from Princeton. Smart guy. Served in the military after 9-11, is the author of two books, and has had work appear in the New York Times, Washington Post, Outside Magazine, the Denver Post, and more. He enjoys a tough CrossFit workout, and probably not eating an entire box of fucking chickpea pasta like I just did before I recorded this.
00:05:13
Speaker
Fucking asshole. You know, I say I want to get in better shape, then I go ahead and do that. Will also likes playing ice hockey and rooting for the Mets, Capitals, and Steelers.
Will's Background and Interests
00:05:23
Speaker
Lots of good stuff to chew on, to gnaw on in this conversation.
00:05:28
Speaker
So let's get after it, CNFers. We got a parting shot on learning by doing. So right now, though, we're going to go hear from Will on this double feature Friday.
00:05:38
Speaker
Whoa.
00:05:44
Speaker
Because the work I've made finds its readers because it is designed for them. For me, you know, Envy is a real sibling to Awe.
00:05:55
Speaker
I'm just a mule. but This is going to have to interest somebody somewhere other than me.
00:06:12
Speaker
to our conversation would be talking a little bit about the Ironman, Cal Ripken Jr. he was ah He was my favorite player growing up. and Oh, wow. Even though I was a you know Red Sox fan ah growing up in exurb, or if you will, of Boston, about an hour south of Boston.
00:06:30
Speaker
Yeah, Cal Ripken was my guy. I wore number eight in ah in my in my day, and I i was a shortstop primarily. in this Yeah, i just i love that guy. Well, yeah, there you go. that he was He was my guy as a kid too. you know Ever since I can remember you know as like a little first grader you know on the diamond, um you know I was always number eight, shortstop, same same deal.
00:06:52
Speaker
Yeah. it was ah were Were you an Orioles fan too? I was, yes. I grew up outside DC in Maryland and that was before there was a Nationals. um And so I grew up an Orioles fan. you know Subsequently, when I lived in Manhattan,
00:07:05
Speaker
I kind of adopted the the Mets in the late 90s. And you know I've always liked the Orioles, but it you know it was never quite the same. I never had a team that played in the place where I was living until I lived in in Manhattan.
00:07:16
Speaker
And where' when you played ball and played it at Princeton, ah remind me what your position was. I was third base um and a little bit of outfield. And I was, you know, unfortunately, primarily JV. I didn't travel um partly as a consequence, I think, of not having been a recruit.
00:07:34
Speaker
um I just had to confront the reality that as a walk-on, essentially, you needed to not only be as good as a recruit, you had to be like decidedly better. And I i think in some cases I was as good, but I definitely wasn't better. And and um therefore Didn't quite, ah you know, flourish there the way I may have wanted to.
00:07:55
Speaker
What would you identify as a lesson or two that and coming up against your abilities in baseball, you know, and reaching the limits of your ambition there, how that translated into your career as a writer?
00:08:11
Speaker
I don't know if there's any direct lessons I drew from that um other than, i guess, maybe just a general appreciation for how competitive life can be um and and how... um At some point, you just have to sort of confront, um you know, maybe whatever your your limitations may be. For me, that happened in college when um I just looked around the diamond, so to speak, and realized that there's probably a few guys out there that...
00:08:42
Speaker
that you know No matter how hard I work, I'm not going to be able to hit the ball 430 feet the way that they can. ah you know As a writer, i think you know I'd like to think that I've made the the the most of my ability, but at least it kind of has always served as a reminder that you really do ah need to work as hard as possible and that there's always going to be someone else out there who's probably working as hard as you and and is probably as talented, if not more talented than you.
The Impact of Baseball Experiences
00:09:07
Speaker
yeah i Yeah, when looking towards the end of my playing career, I played a little bit at UMass Amherst, but I was you know cut my sophomore year. I used the term play very loosely, as I was redshirted that year with an injury, and then and we coming back that fall, they just cut all the redshirts from the year before. and so ah But I remember my final summer league, I was playing in the Cranberry League in Brockton,
00:09:35
Speaker
and I was kind of burned out on ball anyway. i had long lost the fun of of it. And um from just that constant ah trying to get to the next level, to the next level, to the next level. And what I would and would look across ah you know If I was sitting on the bench for a game and I would look at the other infielders, and I looked at them and they were doing better than I was. And i objectively, I looked at them like, well, they're not not going any higher than this level. And if I'm not even at their level, then what's the point for me of even playing?
00:10:10
Speaker
And so I just, that's a word that was my realization was kind of like seeing other people that were not that much better than me. And I knew they were they were not going to get drafted or anything. i'm like, what am I doing here?
00:10:22
Speaker
any, any more. So that was kind of my realization. i yeah I can, I can relate. And, and, you know, coupled with that was the, also the unfortunate reality that I really, you know, did not have the world's best coaches, um, you know, and, uh, you know, that plays a large role in it too. And I have two younger brothers, both of whom went on to play in college and were fortunate enough to have, you know, coaches who really were wonderful. Um, and so just sort of watching them and contrasting that with my experience, um,
00:10:50
Speaker
you know i i was a little envious and it gave me kind of an appreciation for how important things like that are sometimes that you have you know very limited control over.
Writing Influences and Learning
00:10:59
Speaker
When you decided to to be a writer in this sort of nonfiction milieu, what what were, or who were some of the inspirations that you drew from that you wanted to model yourself after?
00:11:09
Speaker
That's a good question. And it's something that I've, I've given, you know, a lot of thought to since I did make that decision. And one of the things that I kick myself for, um and I know this will, will, will resonate with you because I've heard a number of your guests talk about this over the years, which is the fact that I was at Princeton when John McPhee was teaching there.
00:11:32
Speaker
And I mean, the list of McPhee sort of um students that have gone on to pursue this career, it's, you know, seems like it's endless. And every one of them, without fail, will will point to his influence on them. and And I look back and I'm like, I can't believe I was on the same campus and could have taken that class. But at the time, it wasn't something that I was really, yeah i don't want to say i wasn't interested in it. just wasn't really aware of It wasn't on my radar.
00:11:55
Speaker
And so it really wasn't until you know years after I graduated when I made a career pivot from ah the military and the defense world into writing. that, um you know, I began to to study it sort of in earnest. And and when I say study, ah part of that study entailed things like listening to your podcast, listening to the long form podcast, reading as much as I possibly could ah from, you know, practitioners. And, and the you know, the list of of practitioners that I admired or that I read is probably not that uncommon. You know, people like Sebastian Junger, John Krakauer, I mean, kind of
00:12:32
Speaker
ah some of the same names that that you'll hear and in these sorts of discussions. so But a lot of that was was sort of self-taught and and just by virtue of kind of just trying to absorb as much as I could from from resources like this. And the one thing I i really picked up on from that which might sound contradictory, but the fact that for many of these kinds of questions, it doesn't seem like there really is a right or wrong way of doing things. You'll hear two equally accomplished authors who do things like interviewing completely differently. One might use a tape recorder, one might write you know or write notes. um
00:13:05
Speaker
And so I just kind of recognized that and I sort of picked and chose which one seemed to suit me the best and and went from there. Yeah. What are some of the, the things that you've cherry picked from other people that you have, uh, uh, accessed in your utility belt?
00:13:20
Speaker
Well, think one is just the confidence that comes from recognizing that there really doesn't seem to be a right or wrong answer. Um, I think maybe had I not listened to a lot of what some of these other writers had to say, I would have been afraid that I was quote doing it wrong, you know? um but, but it kind of reassured me, wait a second. Um,
00:13:41
Speaker
the the the know some of of of the foremost practitioners do things in in very different manners and yet the outcome in the form of what they produce is still equally good and so i think there was a confidence that came from just recognizing that fact you know For example, to use the interview ah example, which which people talk about a lot, i i think partly because of the the kind of writing that I do where I'm spending days, weeks, months with people, it just wouldn't be practical to to have a recorder out that entire time because then I'd get back to my hotel room with eight hours of of recording, you know and what what good is that? um
00:14:19
Speaker
What I do is I usually just have a notebook and a pen. And, you know, the first few days I'm spending with someone, it might be a little awkward, but over the course of time, it just becomes, I think, just kind of an understood thing that I'm doing. i don't know. I think we get to the point where that they barely notice.
00:14:35
Speaker
and And then what I'll do is I'll just take notes periodically over the course of the time we're together. And then that night, I'll usually sit down while it's still fresh and and try to type it up into something coherent.
00:14:45
Speaker
um I think you had a guest on, I can't remember who it was, but he was saying how he would you know be in the car driving and trying to just kind of listen to the conversation and remember it. and as soon as he'd get to a red light or something, he'd you know quickly pull out a notebook and try to write it down as quickly as he could. And um you know my my technique is not entirely dissimilar from that.
00:15:04
Speaker
Yeah, that was Darcy Frey. ah That's right. Author The Last Shot. I was blown away at what he was able to capture and like his the yeah how he was able to you know scribble that stuff down and yeah fill up these yeah these volumes of notebooks. And I love that ideal, but I find that I just can't capture everything or I can't.
00:15:26
Speaker
My penmanship is such that I can't keep up and that I can't read it. And that means I lose it. And it's yeah. So I tend to lean on the recorder as much as I wish I didn't have to.
00:15:38
Speaker
And no, those are all challenges that I've dealt with, that the handwriting, the feeling like you might miss something. yeah um And, you know, so there's no getting around the fact that it it sometimes will seem obtrusive, whether it is a recorder or a notebook. um And so just kind of doing the best you can to not let that sort of interfere with the natural flow of the the conversation.
00:16:00
Speaker
And as you were developing your skills as a writer, you what did you find? you were talking about limitations a ah while ago. ah like What did you find that you you struggle with that that it doesn't come as naturally for you?
00:16:14
Speaker
I would say that – I don't know if this is directly answering your question, but I i think sometimes I have a tendency – to become preoccupied with the mechanics of writing and the construction of each sentence and, you know, making sure that, that those are done, you know, kind of as well as, as humanly possible.
00:16:39
Speaker
I don't want to say to the detriment of, but, but, without maybe spending ah commensurate amount of time thinking through kind of where where this will all fits kind of in the overall narrative arc of the story you know so kind of like yeah you don't want to become and I'm not saying I go to this extreme but you don't want to become sort of paralyzed with wordsmithing to the at the expense of the actual overall design of the story you're trying to tell if that makes sense
00:17:10
Speaker
yeah When does the the shape of a narrative start to reveal itself to you? um Well, that's one of the challenges, i think, of the kind of writing that I do. um And one of the questions that publishers will often ask is, okay, what's the arc of the story? And of course, it becomes its it can be a challenge to definitively answer that question.
00:17:33
Speaker
when you are doing sort of an immersive you know season in the life of such and such story, because you don't, by definition, you don't know how the season's going to end. yeah you know um And so um you know what I will generally try to to to explain is, okay, listen, like we don't know how this story's going to end, but I've spent enough time studying this and getting to know these people that I can tell you without hesitation that there will be no shortage. Like in the case I'm thinking of this story I did on an Indian relay race on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, the sport that these young Native Americans participate in that, you know, it's ah just on its own, it's an incredibly exciting sport, but it also delivers them, I think, a deeper ah meaning and and confidence and discipline and and happiness that helps
00:18:26
Speaker
them sort of overcome any number of challenges that come with living on this reservation. So i you know I wanted to do a story that was going to basically be like a season in the lives of ah these these Native Americans on Pine Ridge. And and you know so one of the questions that the editor had is, okay, well, you know what's the arc? And i so I can say, well, I don't know if they're going to win the championship or come in dead last. But, you know, unfortunately, i can tell you that there is going to be significant adversity in the form of, you know, the impact of substance abuse on their loved ones, the suicide epidemic, just the general poverty that defines their lives. um
00:19:04
Speaker
You know, while I can't tell you how it's going to end, I can kind of tell you the sorts of issues that they're going to have to to grapple with that I think are very important and that would make for a powerful story.
00:19:17
Speaker
What stories or central figures do you find yourself most drawn to? mean I mean, think my answer here is probably generally similar to what a lot of creative nonfiction writers would tell you, which is just trying to identify sort of representative yet colorful real people whose lives can kind of help shed light on larger societal issues. um You know, I don't think that answers necessarily earth-shadderingly
00:19:53
Speaker
unique But I mean, I think that is is the sweet spot. So you're not just writing sort of about abstract policy issues in like a wonky sort of academic way, but you're also not asking the reader to join you for 20 hours learning about the life of someone you know whose
Finding Stories in Everyday Life
00:20:10
Speaker
experiences may have Just, you know, little that they can sort of learn from or, you know, reason to to to immerse themselves in for that period of time. So, i mean, I think that's maybe what a lot of writers in this field gravitate towards. And I'm i'm one of them.
00:20:26
Speaker
Yeah, I know for speaking from my experience, I'm kind of drawn to ah central figures of very singular vision and ambition and focus, namely because it's something I lack and I deeply admire that in people who like like bodybuilders or something. like Sure, like we we can speak ah to how kind of like maybe gross their physiques are in because they're just so maximal.
00:20:53
Speaker
But I really admire the dedication that it takes to reach a high level, be it a basketball player, baseball player, or bodybuilder. And ah I find myself drawn to them because I think I lack that myself. And do you find that similar with you? Like sometimes some of the people you're attracted to are like, h they kind of have something I admire.
00:21:13
Speaker
um Maybe. And I think another maybe thing that that that that that draws me to someone is, and this gets to a quote that ah one of character one of the people I'm writing about said this, and and I Googled it because it seemed like something that someone else famous must have said, but like I couldn't find you know anyone else to attribute it to.
00:21:33
Speaker
um But he said something along the lines of, you know, every life is is ah novel, we just don't take the time to read most of them. um And you know I think that that that's something that that I found you know insightful, the idea that that you know you can really look into most people's lives and experiences and find a lot there you know if if if you just spend if you just spend a little time getting to know them. I think there was a book written by, i think he was maybe a Washington Post reporter, I can't remember who it was.
00:22:05
Speaker
But he kind of had the same idea and he ah he spent time. I think his he said, I want to get to know everyone that lives on my street. you know ah Because he you know he he had basically said, listen, I get up every morning, I go to bed every every night and I see these people for 30 seconds a day or whatever, but I couldn't tell you two things about them. and and But yet they're all living together.
00:22:27
Speaker
lives that are full of just as much you know heartache and joy and everything as as everyone else. And it'd be interesting for me to kind of try to discover some of that. um And he just literally went with a notebook and knocked on their doors and introduced himself and said, would you mind you know having me stop over and getting to know you over the course of the next few months or whatever the case may be. In the book, I think one or two of them probably said, you know no, we're not interested in doing that, but the others did.
00:22:52
Speaker
and he it like It was remarkable, the stuff that he discovered about people that lived, in some cases, you know two houses away that he never would have known had he not taken the time to to to try to find out.
00:23:03
Speaker
Yeah, I love that. I think maybe younger, younger raised. I know I was probably susceptible to this, too. Like to to feel like you needed to to write a big story, you needed to go to some big place.
00:23:16
Speaker
He had to go to a big country in a big and and it had to be a heavy lift like that. But there. These backyard narratives. i mean, Tracy Kidder made a career out of these backyard narratives. And to the the example you cite, it like the things aren't – you don't have to go to Nepal to find a brilliant story. It could be literally next door.
00:23:37
Speaker
Yeah. and And we are becoming such a, you know, it's it's so so much of our media attention and journalistic attention and entertainment attention is focused on, you know, a few cities and even within those cities, like a small sort of slice of celebrity life. You know, it's just, I think it would be wonderful if, you know, if they' this isn't, you know, I don't think there's any shortage of enterprising writers out there who would be willing to do it, but it's just hard to find someone who's to pay you to do some of these stories. But but it would be wonderful if if we had more opportunities for more people to to do that kind of report in on areas that would are otherwise kind of overlooked.
00:24:16
Speaker
And what are some of your favorite books that chronicle ah season in the life of, you know, ah that were, you know, kind basically comp titles homestand?
00:24:29
Speaker
isn um There's the, I think it's called the last best league maybe that was written about the Cape Cod league a number of years ago. That was a really good one. ah You know i mean, there's going back further, there's sort of the seminal books like who's John Feinstein's Hoosiers um season on the brain.
00:24:49
Speaker
Yeah. Season. Yeah. See, I'm sorry, not Hoosiers season on the brink. Yeah. um A good walk spoiled. Another one of of Feinstein's books um about the, uh, PGA tour, um, that, that those, you know, that's not like the only kind of narrative nonfiction that I've, I've read or that has influenced me, but I guess as far as like the, um, you know, providing kind of the, the, the, the skeleton for a book that, that is the approach that I took.
Critique of Baseball Corporatization
00:25:16
Speaker
Yeah. It's a, it's amazing how homestand uh, it made me really not like major league baseball. you know and like I was struggling with professional sport ah you know as a as a major umbrella anyway for a while. And then when you see how the the commodification trickles down to these mom and pop, what were used to be mom and pop minor league teams, it it really it really paints a sour picture of professional sport.
00:25:46
Speaker
No, it does. I mean, that that's a ah very real negative outcome that this entire project had on me. um And obviously, I know I i had ah sense of some of these things going in. That's one of the reasons I pursued it in the first place. But I think just recognizing some of the, you know, i don't want to say toxicity or corruption, but but just recognizing recognizing basically that the, and I alluded to this in the book, but the disconnect between sort of the Norman Rockwell Americana sort of field of dreams image that baseball has traditionally used to market itself. um
00:26:25
Speaker
And then kind of seeing behind the curtain at how things, at the decisions that are really being made and how they're often at odds with that image was, um you know, profoundly disillusioned.
00:26:41
Speaker
ah And as someone who's been a life, a fan of the sport for my entire life and who has a young son who I'd love to also be a baseball fan and go to games with, you know, it leaves a bitter taste in your mouth and it leaves you feeling very conflicted. You know, yeah like you, I don't really want to spend my hard earned money supporting an enterprise that does this. But at the same time, if you don't, you're really just punishing yourself because like, it's not going to make a dent in Steve Cohen's wallet, you know, whether or not I go to a Mets game, you know, or a Pirates game where I live now. um I mean, the Field of Dreams game is actually a great example that I refer to in the book where they stage this game once a summer um out in Iowa.
00:27:20
Speaker
And, you know, it's it's a TV hit. The ratings are through the roof. Everyone loves it. But if you step back, you're like, well, the people in the stands are mostly rich coastal people that fly out there for this one game.
00:27:32
Speaker
you know The tickets are exorbitantly expensive. they They try to earmark a few for the locals, but those sometimes get sold on the secondary market to you know for 10 times what they're worth. And yet, at the same time, they eliminated two minor league teams just down the road in Iowa. So, okay, you know where does that actually leave their grassroots supporters who had been going to these games all summer long?
00:27:53
Speaker
They have no team anymore. And yet, you know it's great for them. There's one game over the course of the summer that they can't even afford. But ah you know the way that MLB would pitch that is that this is a tremendous success celebrated in the history of the game. And so it's just things like that that just seem to me to be very...
00:28:10
Speaker
sort of hypocritical. And it was kind of hard. Once you once you've your eyes have been opened to that, it's hard not to kind of see it everywhere. Yeah. In the intro, you write, you know, bottom line, this is big business and that's no that's that's no secret. but like that ah but But the fact that it's now run, like you write, like a Wall Street boardroom where you pursue assets, like that is so, it has become so optimized and commodified in that way where it is almost clinical and dispassionate. It's ah really unsettling.
00:28:39
Speaker
No, you're right. um And and i mean, there's so many there were so many rabbit holes i could have gone down when you get into the sort of the business of baseball. And it took a lot of discipline to to determine, okay, I mean, this is important to the story. I don't want to ignore it because it provides valuable context, but I also don't want to lose knowledge.
00:29:00
Speaker
readers who aren't necessarily as interested in in that. And so, you know, there were any, not like, you know, the the evolution of talent, evaluation and development, you know, basically, what is the role of the minor leagues? What did it used to be? What is it now? What what does the future portend?
00:29:15
Speaker
You could write an entire book on that. um But at the same time, I didn't want to have characters I introduced on page three and then take a 50 page detour, dissecting the business of baseball before I reintroduced those characters. And by then everyone would have forgotten who they were in the first place. So you know it it it took a lot of discipline and sort of strategize it to figure out, okay, what do I think the reader needs to know? And then how much of that can I include without distracting people?
00:29:40
Speaker
Yeah, I didn't realize the that there was this diamond baseball holdings buying up minor league properties as an investment portfolio, basically.
00:29:52
Speaker
And yeah, I had no idea. That really surprised me. I didn't realize it had come to that where a conglomerate can basically gobble up teams to have all these assets to try to kick up to the majors. I don't know. just i didn't know I didn't know that.
00:30:09
Speaker
And that part Again, that's another one of those areas that would have been worthy of of further investigation. But it was it it just didn't pass the smell test to me in that that the the person who kind of orchestrated that had been a minor league owner who then got.
00:30:27
Speaker
paid by Major League Baseball to consult and advise on contractions. So essentially helping decide which 40 teams are we going to get rid of? Oh, how many are we going to get rid of and which ones are they going to be?
00:30:38
Speaker
And then as soon as he finished that, he jumped ship and started up his own investment company to buy contracts the surviving teams, the teams that that had escaped the side that he had been wheeled in.
00:30:53
Speaker
And now they've amassed, you know they started at zero and now they're at, I think over 40, which is you you know a large percentage of the 120 total. you know so and And I just you know didn't have really the resources or the bandwidth to do like a deep dive investigation into what was going on behind closed doors and what led to that. But I knew enough about it to know that this just doesn't quite feel right. And and more importantly, I don't think this is going to bode well for the future of of the minor leagues, because I think what you're probably going to see This is kind of best case scenario. Worst case scenario is even worse. But I think best case, there's going to just be a degree of sort of homogenization.
00:31:29
Speaker
i think one of the professors I spoke to of sports business called it the home depoization of minor league baseball, where um you know it was kind of the whole PT Barnum you know, back road America story, which is what made it kind of special in the first place. You know, you go to a game in rural Georgia, it's going to look different from one in Coney Island or whatever. And, and, but because each one was owned by, you know, generally speaking by like a mom and pop owner that was ah from that community.
00:32:00
Speaker
Now, if if if it's owned by a distant investor in New York or LA, are they going to start making decisions? Well, okay, this seems to be a ah promotion that's working great down in Texas. Let's try it up in Minnesota, you know, and and all of a sudden kind of this regional...
00:32:16
Speaker
you know, lore that minor league baseball has had historically is, you know, you run the risk of of that getting lost. That's best case. I think worst case, you just start seeing more teams get cut, you know, if if their profits start looking like they're in jeopardy or or, you know, we've seen kind of what private equity has done to other industries that they've taken a big stake in like newspapers, for example, and it oftentimes does not end well for those local businesses.
00:32:41
Speaker
Now, a lot of books that follow a season ah more often than not focus on the players. And you do do to some extent, but you spend a lot of most of your attention with just the quirky fans of the community, you know, the you know the owner.
Community and Baseball as Unifying Forces
00:32:58
Speaker
And to the manager, too, gets quite a bit of real estate as well. So I wanted to get a sense of the decision you were you were going into to be to focus on the butts in the seats versus the ones in the dugout.
00:33:10
Speaker
Mm-hmm. Yeah, that's right. I think if you were to just look at the word count, for example, that was devoted to what was going on on the field versus off the field, you'd probably find something like an 80-20 ratio in favor of off the field. And that was intentional, I think, for for a few reasons. One is that The book was, i always had envisioned it as a vehicle to kind of tell this bigger story of what these teams mean to these communities. where kind of The ballpark as a civic asset, as a third place for people to come together and find happiness, especially in in these sort of very partisan times.
00:33:54
Speaker
at at an at an affordable price, which helps distinguish it from major professional sports. And there's other elements that that also distinguish it that I think are important that maybe we could get into later. but And so, mean, that was always the the intent. It was never, I think, to tell the story of how the 2022 sports Batavia muckdogs finished in the perfect game collegiate baseball league. you know I mean, that was a useful mechanism to, to use, to to help tell that bigger story.
00:34:21
Speaker
But, but so therefore I spent probably six out of every nine innings in the bleachers, getting to know that the people whose lives were, were so, um, you know, caught up in following this team.
00:34:33
Speaker
And then maybe three innings in the dugout with the players and the manager, but because I did want there to be enough sort of baseball action, so to speak, to to kind of help propel this story forward. um And that after all was what was bringing the people to the ballpark in the first place. So it wouldn't make sense to ignore it entirely, but that was never really, you know, which which of these players was gonna get drafted or how the team was gonna finish. That was really never gonna be my my overall focus.
00:35:00
Speaker
Yeah, and early on in the book, too, you write that, i you know you you know, you're a veteran who served overseas. And, you know, you're right. After fighting alongside fellow young Americans, taking on a real enemy that was trying to kill us, it was depressing to see how many Americans back home saw the opposing political party as the existential threat that needed to be vanquished by any means necessary.
00:35:22
Speaker
So as someone who really did, you know, but is put your life on the line, and then coming back and seeing that, like how um and not disorienting an experience was that for you as you articulate in this book too?
00:35:35
Speaker
Yeah, it it was disorienting. Luckily, I was not ever personally impacted by kind of the traditional manifestations of PTSD as far as you know waking up in the middle of the night with flashbacks or things like that. But I was bothered probably more than maybe some folks who hadn't served just with this idea that, you know, coming home to a country that seems so broken in so many ways and thinking to yourself, is this really what, yeah, I had quit my job after September 11th to serve. And I think I had this sort of idealistic notion of what America at least sort of meant or represented to me. And then you come home and it just doesn't really
00:36:12
Speaker
resemble that. and And, and, and that was sort of just a source of sort of persistent ah frustration. And in the ballpark, I found a place that just seemed to exude kind of ah ah serenity that was, was that you couldn't help, but, but sort of fall, fall for, um you know, and I think I, you know, I came, I was sort of looking for that in my own life. And I think a lot of other people there, know,
00:36:39
Speaker
um you know Certainly, they weren't all veterans, but I think you know everyone has challenges in their lives that they're looking to either distract themselves from or to or to to somehow get past or escape.
00:36:51
Speaker
And you know I talk about a few of them in the book, and I think you know all of them kind of discovered... uh something at dwyer stadium that that kind of transported them to a better place and away from some of the the the more challenging elements of their lives i talk about a vietnam veteran um in his experience maybe be more closely mirror mine and that he was a veteran but i talk about other people you know who had lost loved ones or who had lost jobs or were we're suffering really difficult economic circumstances i mean that the town that the towns that i write about are not
00:37:22
Speaker
ah particularly well off. um and And that's, again, what what drew me to the story in the first place. I just kind of had this intuitive sense that the last thing we kind of the last thing that these 40 cities need, many of which had already been struggling, is to kind of have this one source of happiness that that could bring them together extinguished you know by the same sort of economic forces that had already taken so much from them over the course of the last 20 years.
00:37:47
Speaker
Yeah, what did embedding in Batavia yeah just teach you about rut Rust Belt communities and maybe writ large the state of the country in 2022 through now?
00:38:01
Speaker
Well, I found them to be tremendously welcoming, um, which, which I don't want to say it was surprising, but, um, anytime you show up somewhere with like a notebook and you say, I'm, I'm here to write about you. Um, I think you naturally can expect maybe some degree of, of at least hesitation, but, um, I found them to be, yeah, just wonderfully welcoming, friendly, um, almost grateful that someone was taking the time to spend there, um,
00:38:28
Speaker
and and making the effort to kind of tell to tell this story about something that was so meaningful to them. but it it But it also did drive home. And I live in Western Pennsylvania, which is not entirely dissimilar from Batavia in in certain regards, in that there's there are no shortage of sort of smaller towns that have suffered from deindustrialization. You drive down Main Street and three out of four businesses are closed and the other ones that are open, it's like ah a vape shop or a liquor store or a tattoo parlor. you know They're just places that haven't been flourishing um for a while. um
00:39:05
Speaker
And relative to some of those towns, Batavia is actually doing pretty well. I think they may be undergoing a bit of a renaissance there's a few there's a two new brew pubs there's some nice coffee shops i talk about there's kind of a little bit of an underground art art movement taking root um so you know i think you know hopefully they're they're maybe beginning to emerge from this downturn but but certainly not all of their neighbors uh are you know similarly benefiting
Importance of Trust in Storytelling
00:39:31
Speaker
Yeah. And how important was it to the people you were covering the that you were taking the time and bedding with them for weekends at a time and not just helicoptering in?
00:39:43
Speaker
Sure. I mean, that's something that I'm very sensitive to. And I think I learned a lot on that from that story I did out on the Pine Ridge Reservation, um, Because that community in particular has suffered just numerous times from what they would call poverty porn, where you have, you know, in their eyes, some rich person from a city because, you know, relative to them,
00:40:07
Speaker
Most of the reporters coming in there would be rich, even though we're not. As anyone who works in the the freelance journalism business, we are by no means rich, but um but um but, um you know, relative to one of the poorest parts of America, we are.
00:40:21
Speaker
And, you know, so what would happen is as these reporters would come there. They would maybe spend two days. They'd gravitate to the worst possible corner of the reservation, take pictures of the most sensationally you know awful things they could find, and then they'd leave and they'd write a story about how terrible this place was. And understandably, the people that live there would say, okay, well, you know how in the world do we benefit from this? you know Just you coming not even learning who any of us are, and then leaving and broadcasting these images to the world. you know Not not that that we don't have our problems and not that that wasn't
00:40:55
Speaker
real But is that really capturing the whole truth, so to speak, um you know, of who we are as a people? um And and so what i in the course of researching that story, I said, listen, the best I can do is just promise you that I'm not going to do that. I will spend.
00:41:10
Speaker
lots of time out here, probably more time than you even want me to. You're you're going to be sick of me being out here. um And so, you know, at a minimum, you have that commitment from me. And and and I think that made a big difference um in in just kind of winning some degree of of trust that, you know,
00:41:29
Speaker
that that you're gonna put in the time. ah And then ah when it came time to to publish that story, I said, listen, you know i can't overlook some of those unfortunate realities of life here. Because the whole point of the story is how this sport enables, why the sport is important to begin with. And one of the reasons for that is how it helps ah people overcome some of these challenges. If I don't highlight the challenges, then the sport is less significant and less meaningful.
00:41:55
Speaker
And so, and you know ultimately, I think I struck the right balance there um in in that I managed to, to to I think, you know tell this the truth about you know that the the the good and the bad.
00:42:08
Speaker
Similarly, in Batavia, think having... i think having Having had that experience on the reservation, you know I kind of tried to employ the same approach where I said, I'm not going to try to come in here. yeah Like you said, parachute in go to one game, talk to five people, and then leave. I'm going i'm goingnna i'm going to really try to as best I can to get to know you, to get to know the community, um and and get as you know good of ah an understanding of of sort of the rhythm of of life here as I can.
00:42:38
Speaker
I was particularly struck by and amused by your interactions with Eric. ah yeah like it won he The way he would get under your skin, i found like really relatable by someone who is just that very just a a pretentious guy who doesn't think much of your art, but like definitely thinks a much of his. Yeah.
00:43:03
Speaker
Yeah. What did he say? he said, um he said, I don't mean, don't, don't take this the wrong way, but what you do is not art yeah because you're not, you're not creating something from nothing ah um implying that, you know, because that's what I do. In other words. Yeah. um So, yeah, I, yeah you know, I, I, I'd like to think I did the best I could. And I think this comes across in the pages to, to, you know, kind of give him the benefit of the doubt and,
00:43:28
Speaker
get along with him but but you know there's just some people that that no amount of diplomacy is going to overcome what whatever and i'm going to punch in right here not to interrupt but after will and i were were done he shared a really telling anecdote about getting feedback and persevering in the face of kind of brutal feedback and i feel like this is a good place to insert it This is a ah moment where Will shares this experience of getting pretty savage feedback and then persevering in the face of that. And I think this is a germane point to put this part into the show.
00:44:07
Speaker
Sure. So just to to kind of put it in context, I had just left what had been ah a good job at the Pentagon and one that that I had enjoyed. um in pursuit of this this idea that I was going to going to write a book. And so, you know, i wasn't it wasn't completely unplanned. I had spoken to an agent who had then, you know, put me in touch with a publisher. And at that point, I had secured a book deal. But still, I had, you know, a pretty limited body of of work.
00:44:38
Speaker
Nonetheless, I set out with with the intention of of writing this book and I put together what I thought were 40 of the most wonderful pages I had ever written. um And BC had said, you know, hey, why don't you get started? Send me, ah you know, your first few chapters and we'll just do an azimuth check and kind of see see how you're doing.
00:44:55
Speaker
And so I worked on these, you know, I worked on these night and day and I was really proud of what what I had produced. I sent it in. This is a pretty prominent publish or editor at a prominent publishing house. I was probably, you know, one of his, if not probably one of his least distinguished authors at at that point.
00:45:12
Speaker
Anyway, so he he takes it and reviews it and sends me back this attachment. It was actually an email, but with like a seven page document attached on, you know, the publisher's letterhead. And so I double click on it. I open it up.
00:45:25
Speaker
And it just says, dear Will, he and he said, you know, I'll never forget the exact language he used. He said, I don't know how else to put this comma, but I had a viscerally negative reaction to these pages, period.
00:45:38
Speaker
In short, comma, I feel as if you violated every rule of storytelling. Yeah. So you can imagine like yeah and I'm sitting at my desk, you know, in my apartment, having just walked away from this job, you know, to take this leap, you know, into the unknown world of of writing. And here I have this this prominent editor basically telling me that, that um you know, I'm terrible at this.
00:46:00
Speaker
and And and it was tough. I mean, it as any writer knows, I'm. there's something, you know, you're you're sort of vulnerable when you put yourself out there on the page. And I've been to Army Ranger School, I'd subjected myself to all kinds of sort of physical torments over the years. But this is kind of a unique um vulnerability that that I think you assume in this profession. And um ah and to have someone you know, that candidly tell you that you fell short was was not easy.
00:46:27
Speaker
um And so it took me a few days, I'm sure, to kind of lick my wounds and and and get back up off the ground. And ah after that initial, that first paragraph, he actually went on for six more pages to kind of highlight in detail all of the areas in which I had come up short in his estimation. and you know looking back on it now, and even at the time, ah you know i began to understand what what he was saying. And what he was really telling me um was not so much that I was a bad writer. um
00:46:58
Speaker
It was just the wrong kind of writing. um And so what i was doing, i think, was too much of sort of the grad school slash op-ed kind of writing that I had that I had done prior to that point, prior to trying to write this book of narrative nonfiction and, and, and I wasn't telling a story and that's basically what he was trying to communicate to me. You know, this isn't bad writing. It's just not what we're looking for. Um, uh, we're not making an argument. We're, we're, we're not trying to necessarily convince the reader of something. We're trying to tell a story and then allow them to connect the dots and emerge from that, you know, at that point, maybe and enabling them or empowering them to emerge from that with their own lesson.
00:47:37
Speaker
um and got me or at least guiding them to that point um less overtly, you know, to use an example. and And I wasn't this bad, but this is kind of an oversimplified version of what I was doing wrong. I would chronicle, you know, or tell the story of like four murders that Saddam Hussein was responsible for.
00:47:56
Speaker
And then I would conclude that by saying, you know, this shows just what a bad guy Saddam really was. you know And he's like, yeah you know trust the reader. if If you do a good enough job of telling the story of what he what he did, they're smart enough to conclude that he's not a nice guy. You don't need to to to then beat them over the head with these these edit with this editorial voice to connect every dot.
00:48:17
Speaker
and And so you know at the end of the day, thankfully, I was able to change course. After 30 pages rather than 300 pages and keep that advice in mind as I wrote the rest of the book. And I think the the rest of the book or the you know the way the book turned out would reflect you know well on on his guidance and on my ability to to incorporate that into my write-in.
00:48:37
Speaker
yeah the Yeah, but the the phrase of a viscerally negative reaction, like i don't know. that That is like a – that is you're down on the mat and you might not get up. like It was borderline you know sadistic, I think. I mean he he didn't have to do it that way. and and I mean some of your listeners may have worked with this particular editor. I'm sure when I say this, you know one or two of them are like, oh my god, I know who that is.
00:49:01
Speaker
um because he I think he is pretty notorious for for lack of a ah bedside manner in in so many words. and And I've talked to other of his writers who have told me, you know, so yeah I wasn't the only writer actually that that he delivered a message like this to.
00:49:17
Speaker
um But at the same time, he was ah workaholic, you know, tremendously talented. And I think the book absolutely benefited. I mean, nine out of the 10 things that he suggested I do, i ended up agreeing with trying to do. And I think the book was better as a result. And I find myself even today, I'll go back to some of his editorial letters and just sort of reminding myself of those lessons and applying them to my my work today.
00:49:42
Speaker
Yeah, and i mean naturally, you know when you hear that degree of feedback, a it does a lot to your confidence. And I imagine you were just dealing with a lot of doubt at that point. and yeah you know To your credit, you know you dusted yourself off and proceeded.
00:49:58
Speaker
But you know take us to the and he just that doubt that you inherently felt in that moment, but maybe even some of the doubt that you feel today, given that you have two books in. It doesn't really go away ever. Yeah.
00:50:10
Speaker
No, you're right. You're right. um I mean, I think you have less of it. You know, the more times you've kind of proven yourself, um you know, the the more confidence I think you have and the more other readers and and critics have hopefully sort of validated your work. You know, you have you develop confidence that, hey, like if these people are telling me it's not bad, it's it's probably not bad. um Whereas that time it was literally like my first or my second, I guess, if you were to include my agent, you know, professional reader telling you it's bad. You're like, oh, maybe it is bad. Maybe it is bad. And so, but no, that doubt never goes away. And I think it comes back to that point of there is something about the writing process. I think particularly in this kind of writing that we're talking about that, and to the extent that you insert yourself into the story, maybe even more so, like with this most recent book, where you're exposing things that can be, you know, either uncomfortable or you're showing the world something that can be
00:51:06
Speaker
that There's a vulnerability associated with that um and and and and exposing that for for sort of the world to see. um and and and And then to to to hear people come back to you and say, you know, you didn't do it right.
00:51:20
Speaker
You know, I think that is that is tough for any writer to to kind of internalize. Yeah, the idea that when you're getting feedback that they're being critical of the work and not you, but when you are in the work, it can be very much harder to discern the difference but between between the two. It's like, okay, no, they're not...
00:51:43
Speaker
They're not criticizing me as my ability as a writer, but like this is ah wholly different thing that is taking on the feedback. And like the the best editors and the best readers are the ones who will be like, yeah. like every you know if everve Especially yeah my wife is kind of like this. If she doesn't say she likes something,
00:52:02
Speaker
Or she only makes she only points out what she doesn't like if she doesn't say anything else. It's like, and that's cool. That's good. And you have to kind of learn, ah you know, ah kind of like the love language of a particular writer. Be like, you know, it's it's all right to give a little bit of a compliment because, you know, we're kind of fragile people. Yeah, yeah. But at the same time, I think that experience did harden me and toughen me in a way that's valuable because now i and i think it made me recognize the value of a good editor, you know, because I looking back on that now, i'm like, you know what, as miserable as that was and as horrible as I felt for you know a period of time.
00:52:40
Speaker
I wouldn't do it over again because I'm proud of this book. He was right. um And the book is better as a result. And that was ah a good, you know, if it meant I had to be miserable for a month, I'd rather do that than have the book come out and be less good than it could have been had he not shared that with me.
00:52:56
Speaker
You know, so I think it in a certain way, it it it it strengthened me. in that it it it it illustrated to me the value of having a good editor and the fact that a good outcome is worth some degree of of pain along the way.
00:53:09
Speaker
A few weeks ago, a couple weeks ago, I had um um spoke to him in December, but finally ran the podcast like a couple weeks ago, is John Gliana.
Writing Routines and Reader Interaction
00:53:17
Speaker
He's just a journalist and he followed. He wrote No Friday Night Lights. And um he brought up on the on the show because kind of like his favorite part of his day as a writer. And it came up in a Facebook group or something he was talking to. And some people were like, oh, I'm...
00:53:34
Speaker
on pub day and so he tongue in cheek is just like oh when i win my pulitzer prize and and uh but his thing was you know getting up early getting that first hot cup of coffee and like rereading a few words from the day before and then getting after it again and it was like a really good sentiment and so i say that as a table setter for you well just like where where do you feel alive and like engaged in this whole this whole mess that we've gotten ourselves into I'll tell you what it's not, and that's staring at an empty or and ah you know a Word document that has nothing on it.
00:54:08
Speaker
That's what I absolutely hate and yeah you know triggers quite a bit of of anxiety. um So that that process of kind of starting from scratch. I think what i what I enjoy, and this may be consistent with other writers, but what I enjoy is is further down the road where you look at pages that you've finished or are nearing completion on. And you actually can sort of sit back and be like, wow, that's that's actually pretty good. you know And you know it may take a while to get to that point. And it probably does take a while to get to that point.
00:54:39
Speaker
um But you know when you can finally look at something with some degree of confidence that this actually turned out pretty well. um And you know i'm I'm going to make a few tweaks here and there, but I'm almost to the point where I can hit send you know and and send it to my editor and and be pretty confident that this is not going to generate the response that it's that that they're going to have something more than a ah viscerally negative reaction to to what you just sent them.
00:55:02
Speaker
um I think that's where there's a degree of satisfaction. And then finally, just actually you know hearing back from readers ah in response to something that has been published and hearing how what you wrote resonated in their lives. There's nothing more gratifying than that.
00:55:19
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, that's great when, yeah, when when that happens, you're like, because so because it's such a ah solitary thing, by and large, you know, doing this and working in nonfiction, yeah, we do interface with people, for the most part, doing reporting and stuff. But yeah, ultimately, it is.
00:55:35
Speaker
by yourself, a lot of solitude, even doing doing the podcast. A lot of times it's kind of just like me on mic and then, you know, it's like me and you, but it also feels it's just me and my little studio here.
00:55:47
Speaker
And it does feel kind of like kind of lonely. And but so then when you do get that feedback from people, you're like, oh, wow, this is, It's landing on someone and connecting with someone and that there's some juice there, too.
00:55:59
Speaker
And just the opportunity to get to. I mean when you step back to the research and the the reporting phase of these projects um and there's more of that in some than others. But, you know, when you actually do get out into the real world and you meet real people and you and you get to know them.
00:56:14
Speaker
And, you know, in many cases become friends with them. And I know that can be challenging in its own right because it can kind of blur the lines between them as source, you know, slash subject versus, you know, friend. But I think it's almost inevitable that if you're spending dozens, if not hundreds of hours with someone, you know, you're in many cases you're going to get to know them pretty well and you may start to like them um and uh there's something cool about that too because you know in many cases these are parts of the country that you may not have spent time in they're they're they're uh these people are engaged in in in jobs that you may not be particularly familiar with before you started the project um and and and that's just always i think you know there's always something kind of fresh and invigorating about that
00:56:55
Speaker
ah over the course of the how however many months you you spent there, and you know you probably have lots of other conversations with people that don't didn't necessarily like ah make the audition, maybe, ah for the book. So what was it about the people, the primary people that you chose to really latch on to that spoke to ah Batavia and your vision for Homestand?
00:57:20
Speaker
Well, I was i can't underscore enough, I think, the importance of the fact that the person who introduced me to this whole project, Bill Kaufman, is ah is an accomplished writer in his own right. and and And the way this whole thing materialized was he had read a piece I did in Harper's Magazine on the death of the Appalachian League. um He just wrote to me from my website and said, you're not going to believe it. I read your article. I loved it. Everything you said about this league, it resonated so much. It reminded me so much of this team that we had that was also eliminated.
00:57:51
Speaker
ah Can I buy you a beer? I'd love for you to come up here and and just talk baseball. and And at the time, I still am living in Pittsburgh. It's about four hours away. I said, sure. And I drove up there, got to know him, had a Guinness. We talked. He talked about the muck dogs. He introduced me to some of his friends and And then I thought to myself, well, this is maybe this is the story. It's the death, but then the rebirth of baseball in this community, in in this other form of this collegiate wood bat league, kind of filling the void that had been left behind when when Major League Baseball canceled these teams.
00:58:23
Speaker
But I think to get back to your question, having another writer kind of turn me on to the project helped because writers sort of just intuitively know what makes for a good story. And he he happened to know a number of people up there that were just tremendously sort of colorful in their own right that happened to be friends of his that and so rather than I didn't just show up at the ballpark on day one and just start introducing myself to random fans in the hopes I'd meet someone interesting. I had a little bit of a head start because Bill had already introduced me to some of the people he knew, many of whom were extremely interesting, probably because he is, and and people like that tend to you know hang out with each other. And so, for example, he helped to introduce me to Betsy Higgins, one of the women I write about, who is this, she lives in Buffalo. She and her friend Ginny would drive an hour
00:59:15
Speaker
each way all summer long to these games. And they're not even sports fans, which is what made it even more ironic. They they just love the the aura and the atmosphere of of the ballpark. And that was their thing that they do during the summer.
00:59:26
Speaker
But she you know loves Thomas Hardy. So we would find ourselves talking. And she had a rare book an enormous rare books library in her home in Buffalo. So I would just hang out with her. We'd talk books.
00:59:37
Speaker
There was a retired teacher named Ernie Lawrence who would put together little rosaries and the in the bleachers as he watched the games. Another just really, really thoughtful, cerebral, contemplative guy that whose company I really grew to enjoy.
00:59:52
Speaker
And the list kind of just goes on of of these people that um that I met who just had very rich sort of inner lives and and had really interesting experiences that they would share with me.
01:00:03
Speaker
And, you know, I think that, again, accounts to what you were saying as far as the amount of time I ended up spending in the bleachers with talking to them as opposed to in the dugout watching the game. Yeah. How did you ah navigate or maneuver around the stadium, ah you know, when it came, you know, when ah when it was game time and you were reporting and deciding where to perch?
01:00:25
Speaker
that was That was one of the bigger challenges, honestly, as you you you could probably imagine, but you might not be able to totally imagine it until you were to see me trying to do it because it it it could be awkward in that I would only be there, of course, you know, for the the length of the game. I'd spend time with these people, of course, you know, like,
01:00:42
Speaker
We'd go get coffee or go to dinner, but the the game's only nine innings long and and there's only one of me um and the game's not going to stop to allow me to to do my reporting. And so I had to be very strategic, almost sort of cold bloodedly. So as knowing that as wonderful of of a conversation as I may be having about Dostoevsky with Betsy Higgins,
01:01:04
Speaker
I can't have a five inning conversation about it because the game's going to be over and I will have lost the opportunity to talk to the five other people that I wanted to talk to. You know, it was a little awkward because you wanted to be social. You didn't want the people you're spending time with to think you're just kind of desperately mining them for information as quickly as possible before you had to, to leave, to talk to, you know, someone else.
01:01:25
Speaker
um But at the same time, you did need to, to be deliberate about it because you're not just there to have a beer and, and, talk, you are there to to to gather material for a book that you're trying to write. And the two can bleed into each other because these did sort of evolve into real friendships, which he almost made it more difficult because it would be hard to say, okay, you know, I really got to go now as much as I'm enjoying this conversation because I got to talk to these other six people.
01:01:48
Speaker
And by the way, I need to be taking notes on how the game's actually going because I'm writing about the game. You know, fortunately, the games were um broadcast on YouTube and taped. And so I could go back and watch the YouTube broadcast of the game to kind of help connect the dots. you know If I missed like a double play here or a home run there, you know like and and I could talk to the players the next day. And if I needed someone to remind me about you know who got what hit or you know things like that to help fill the gaps of the of the actual game.
01:02:17
Speaker
But no, it was it was a challenge to try to, in a very condensed amount of time, talk to all the people that I felt like I needed to talk to, and then to put it together in the book and in a way that came across as being at least a little bit seamless.
01:02:29
Speaker
Yeah, there was a charming amount of for love of the game aspect to to to the to the team because this is a this isn't exactly the Cape League for for baseball. ah This is the final stop along the road for many of those players, even managers. I mean, even...
01:02:47
Speaker
the announcer who does the everything pretty much pro bono on YouTube, like probably deserves a shot at something more professional, but here is someone just doing this for the sheer love of it. And I found that, don't know, just kind of a lovable backdrop to what was kind of happily, what is ultimately kind of a story of transitioning kind of the decay of some of these communities, you know, as a result of these, know, degradation of minor league teams.
01:03:15
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah, there there was something I think really special and and kind of beautiful about that, especially when you do look at the sort of the corporatization of everything, basically. um You know, you look at the fact that you have individual major league players now making, it's not going to be long before we have the first billion dollar player. And yet you had the minor league teams that were being cut to save $700,000 year to the major league parents.
01:03:39
Speaker
You look at n NIL money now, which is basically sort of ruined you know whatever innocence college sports may have at one point had. I don't think anyone was under the illusion that they had it recently, but it certainly hasn't gotten any better in that regard. And so this was kind of a place where It's as close to sort of a more pure experience as I think you're going to find. And the players loved it because these are players who in some cases came from sort of Division III or mid-tier Division I schools where in some cases they were playing in front of 75 people a night.
01:04:12
Speaker
And here they are in Batavia with 3,000 people. They're like local celebrities. The kids are asking them for their autographs. So it's a summer that they'll never forget. And and the community in turn loves it too because...
01:04:22
Speaker
If you're a seven-year-old kid in Batavia, you don't know the difference between the muck dog player and you know a major leaguer. To you, it's just another cool-looking, big, strong athlete that's signing your autograph that you can play catch with before the game.
01:04:38
Speaker
um And so it's like this pretty cool little symbiotic a relationship that ah is is very, very different from what you're going to find if you go to ah a major league ballpark, for example. Yeah.
01:04:50
Speaker
And when you started to set down to to write, what what are some rituals you like in place you know when you're setting down to write? You're today's a writing day. yeah These are the things that like I like in place.
01:05:05
Speaker
is I would say that generally big picture process is spending the big the first chunk of time gathering the material in the course of research and reporting, interviewing.
01:05:18
Speaker
And then what I'll do is I'll take all of that, like I explained earlier, and I'll usually type type it up ah in my in my notes each day. So at the end of the day, I'll kind of have a record of of what it was that I observed and and and the interactions I had that day.
01:05:32
Speaker
mean I do a lot of outside research that doesn't make it into the book, but just books I need to read to sort of familiarize myself with the subject matter writ large. And so I'll take notes on those. um And then, you know let's say it's like a one or two year project, you know usually like the first half of that. So let's say year one, for example,
01:05:49
Speaker
will be the information gathering phase. And then I'll transition into the the writing phase. And what I usually do for that is kind of just at at the most basic level, I'll just kind of start cutting and paste in interview material into like a blank Word document.
01:06:03
Speaker
and And that just kind of gives me like the frame or the skeleton of what will ultimately become the story. And then and then I'll start writing. And as far as the writing in itself, I have two young kids. So, you know, it's somewhat dependent on their schedules, but If they're at school or at daycare, I'll try to do get as much done as I can during the course of the day when they're not around. And then the rest of it will have to kind of by default occur late at night once there once they're in bed. um But I don't know. i've I've had this discussion with other parents. I don't know if.
01:06:34
Speaker
having children, you know, is the, from from a the writing standpoint, if it's a net positive and that it makes you more disciplined and efficient, or if it's just makes everything a lot harder because you just have so much less time to do everything.
01:06:47
Speaker
yeah I can see both arguments. I'm not, I'm not sure if I've i've yet concluded which one is more accurate. Yeah, and speaking with ah people on the show who have children, lots lots of people do. it It's a little bit of both. Like sometimes it's hard to get into a groove because you just never know.
01:07:02
Speaker
Or it's like, you know what? I know I got 20 minutes. I'm just going to hammer for 20 and see what I get done. And it's ah ah it's a little bit of both. Yeah. that's yeah and And that's something that's hard to explain. So my wife you know has a full-time job as well, and and we both work remote. yeah she she She does her job and I do this.
01:07:20
Speaker
And she'll always say, well, you know, you have 20 minutes here, 30 minutes there, you know, why can't you get any work done? and And I try to, and I think maybe only writers would appreciate this, but, you know, I can't sit down and get any meaningful amount of writing done in a 20 minute window. mean, it takes that long just to kind of turn that part of my brain on And before I, you know, and so, you know, i don't know if I'll ever convince her of that, but what I will do to to overcome that challenge, which is a real one when you have kids is, is ah that's the time I'll use for like my administrative work, you know, the emails, you know, getting a hotel room in Batavia for the weekend, all the logistical stuff that you have to do.
01:08:01
Speaker
um And then, you know, i'll I'll wait until I have a longer period of uninterrupted time to actually write because yeah, I don't know, maybe other writers can do it, but, but the the idea that you can do anything of, you know, of any worth in in a 20 minute window, I think is is next to impossible.
01:08:19
Speaker
And these days focus is such a hard thing to come by. Just but everything, you're just over connected social media, whatever. It can be very hard to focus. Phone is near you.
01:08:30
Speaker
You're like, Oh, he's checking. Should check my email or just check it? Oh, it's terrible. It's, it's, it's, like I don't know about you, but like it's, it's a borderline addiction that I think sure can, can be crippling if you don't watch it. Um,
01:08:44
Speaker
ah and and it's only getting worse. and And actually, the one little anecdote in the book, and and I hope to maybe move in this direction, but I don't think it's a coincidence that the two people that I ah noticed had this kind of contagious sort of spiritual calm about them.
01:09:02
Speaker
The one thing they had in common is they did not own, and I don't think they even had a cell phone, much less an iPhone. um and And I don't think it's it's pure coincidence that that's the case. And actually I learned, I discovered that one night when I had planned to rendezvous with one of them at the ballpark. And I got there and I called the number, I called the number, no answer, no answer, no answer. And then I see him sitting there and I'm like, Hey, how come you didn't answer? I was, I've been calling you for the last half hour.
01:09:28
Speaker
And he said, what do you mean? and I said, well, I've been calling you. How come you didn't answer? He's like, well, I don't have a phone. That's my landline back home. I don't have a phone with, with me. i say And it just never even occurred to me that that that that would be the case with with anyone. um but ah But he was like one of the happiest people I've ever met. So yeah, I think you know if there's something I learned from that, a takeaway, I think it's that I need to sort of help or I need to to do the best I can to discipline myself with that, you know with with limiting the phone time as best I can. Yeah, if I have the phone way out of our way out of my sight line, certainly more than arm's length away, and I have over-the-ear noise-canceling earmuffs, and when I put those on, I'm someone who's chronically distracted, I put those on, and it does kind of do this Jedi mind trick to me where I i am able to get into a zone because there's context with it, and it helps. It blocks out the sound, and I...
01:10:23
Speaker
I find that helps me at least try to work on interrupted as possible. Oh, yeah. No, it's something I, yeah I mean, it got to the point where on smaller writing projects, I was noticing like, this is insane. It's taken me like an hour to write a paragraph because every two seconds I'm checking Twitter, I'm checking ESPN.com, I'm checking this, I'm checking that. Like, this is, this is lunacy. Like, you can't function like this. And so, no, I think that's a real challenge that I think we have and and in today's day and age that we're all going to have to to work on.
01:10:54
Speaker
Well, fantastic. Well, I will. We could ah talk about a lot ah lot of different threads in this all day, um but I you know want to be mindful of your time and and everything. ah But as I think, as you know, is ah I like to bring these conversations down for landing by asking the guests for a recommendation for the listeners, just like anything you're excited about like yeah that you want to share. So I'd extend that to you as we ah bring our conversation down.
01:11:14
Speaker
Sure. um the ah i mean My reading list is so insanely varied that it it probably would shed no light on anything to share that because there's everything imaginable on on my bedside table.
01:11:27
Speaker
But the one thing I would share with you and and your listeners that that I've been really into recently, because i do a lot of drive-in when I'm um on these different reporting trips, is I think it's called Masolit, M-A-S-S-O-L-I-T. And my father actually told me about it. but It is a subscription service where you can have access to essentially college lectures, college courses on any topic under the sun. So right now I've been on this like Shakespeare binge. ah You know, many of the plays I had read at one point or another in my life were seen performed, but
01:12:03
Speaker
as I'm learning in the course of these lectures, like I probably had gleaned like one, 1,000th of what, um you know, I, what was there to be, to be discovered. um And it's just been super cool. um And, and I think it's something that um just sort of as a writer, when you, you, you embark on one of these projects, there's always the risk that you just start going so far into these rabbit holes that you,
01:12:29
Speaker
um you know, it can just become kind of like one dimensional. And and it I think for me, at least, there's a real sort of therapeutic value and just taking yourself completely out of, you know, the creative nonfiction world and and whatever world it is that you're exploring for whatever project you're working on and and immersing yourself in ah like Macbeth, you know, or Romeo and Juliet, as as the case may be, um just sort of for a form of sort of ah creative escape. um So that's something that that I've been doing a lot lately that I've found to be pretty enjoyable. Oh, fantastic. And helpful.
01:13:04
Speaker
Oh, that's wonderful. Well, yeah, I think that's really, really great to kind of get out of our our own genres and si like our creative silos. So that's really great. but Well, Will, thank you so much for carving out some time to come on the show and pitching the book my way. It was a wonderful read and And, i yeah, it really got me thinking about the state of baseball and capitalism and small town, minor league baseball, as as we're about to lose our team for 70 years here in Eugene.
01:13:30
Speaker
um They're moving. They're not contracted. But, yeah, they'll be moving because they didn't get a stadium. But ah I could really relate to so many of the themes ah in the book. So I just want to say thank you for the work.
01:13:41
Speaker
No, thank you. Thank you for having me. I've been a longtime listener, so it's ah it's a real treat to get on the show.
01:13:55
Speaker
Swing. Swing. Awesome. It's the Wayne's World thing. You had to listen to the parting shot of the Katie Goh episode to get the Wayne's World reference. Big thanks to Will and to you, the listener. On this Double Feature Friday, we are moving along here.
01:14:13
Speaker
Moving along. As you get older, there's definitely this reluctance to take on new hobbies or new skills. Because they take a lot of time. And shit, we don't have a whole lot of time.
01:14:24
Speaker
And it can take years and years to reach mastery. Or some facsimile of mastery. I didn't train as an audio guy, but on a whim in 2012 and 2013, when I officially launched the pod, I started experimenting and now look at us.
01:14:41
Speaker
But I didn't start with a $300 or $400 microphone, boom arm, an interface, or fancy software. It was a very gradual leveling up through constant repetition and trial and error after error after error.
01:14:57
Speaker
Now, as the Patreon gang knows, I've flirted with video and posited what video might mean, and whether or not to incorporate it as part of the podcast, following that trend or not.
01:15:11
Speaker
The short answer is no. There will never be a video component to the show. not going to do that to you. I'm not going to do that to my guests. Though I have started having the camera on during the interviews.
01:15:25
Speaker
It leads to a different kind of energy. i usually i Historically, I've always had it off. And I've put it back on for now, just ah maybe have that extra connection. Also, if they're having audio problems or I can diagnose things a little better.
01:15:40
Speaker
You would think, ah, shit, I've got to take something out of the oven. hold Hold on. and My timer's going off. got to take something. I've got to take a little ah field roast thing out of the oven.
01:15:55
Speaker
Be right back.
01:15:57
Speaker
All right, I'm back. No video component to the show. That said, this room to fuck around with video is a wing of the CNF pod expanded universe.
01:16:08
Speaker
The CNF P E U. I've started fucking around with what I already have. So I'm not going super fancy. iMovie free my phone, you know, not free, but it's what I have.
01:16:23
Speaker
And that's it. I've watched a few videos on YouTube, but I don't want to get too skilled with iMovie because I'm ultimately going to level up to Premiere.
01:16:35
Speaker
And you might as well dive into the software you will ultimately you ultimately want to learn and then eventually master. So even though there's going to be redundancies between the software, as you like it's like you don't want to get so used to the interface of one if you're just going to learn from another. and i don't know. Call me crazy.
01:16:58
Speaker
Now, the video interface way more overwhelming than audio. More moving parts, quite literally more levels and layering in the program itself.
The Fun and Learning of Video Creation
01:17:10
Speaker
But once I got going, just taking a little bite of the apple, just this little tiny, like a 30-second thing. Let me have less than a minute. I don't know. It was pretty fun to play yeah the main clip and then overlaying B-roll and photos to something that...
01:17:27
Speaker
you know It looks a little better than something you would just like on a whim shoot on your phone and post Instagram or something. And it's far from fully polished, professional or slick-looking YouTuber setups with 4K cameras and lighting and microphones with intercuts of licensed or pirated photos and B-roll of like The Office or...
01:17:48
Speaker
Batman, I don't know. My point is that it's far too easy to get overwhelmed, like overwhelmed by a new thing. And I've learned more through the early doing of making tiny videos than I ever could from just watching tutorials or or something like that.
01:18:05
Speaker
And I'm not doing it because it's like trendy to do it. But I think it's a good skill to learn. I think video is the next frontier for platform building. And the cross-pollination of audio and video will further lend greater breadth to what I do here at CNF Pod HQ.
01:18:22
Speaker
As I see it, video is a chance to make goofy, irreverent mini-movies that poke fun at being a writer. Or kind of like vloggy type things that poke fun at being a writer.
01:18:33
Speaker
Poke fun at myself. The video audience would be its own audience. But there'll be some bleed and that's cool. But as I see it, it's just another wing of the platform.
01:18:45
Speaker
And maybe just a chance to fuck around. I've long resisted video mainly because it feels so complicated. But through the doing... It's becoming less so.
01:18:55
Speaker
And I've only made a half dozen or so little things. I made a little book trailer that my marketing people at Mariner Books said was pretty good
Reflections on Filmmaking and Education
01:19:06
Speaker
and liked And I've seen some other videos from authors, other Mariner book authors who've posted their little book trailer, things that they were encouraged to make.
01:19:15
Speaker
And mine's way better. But it's got to be fun. I hate hearing people feel like they like, oh, I need to start a podcast or YouTube channel and just complain about that.
01:19:28
Speaker
You hear this a lot with comedians and podcasting. They're like, oh, I got to start a podcast. No, you don't. In fact, if that's the attitude, then definitely don't. Don't do it because you feel like it's a trend or an obligation.
01:19:42
Speaker
Video for me goes all the way back to my high school days, believe it or not, in the late 90s. My pals, ah Pete and Keith primarily, we we made these comedic detective movies on micro VHS tapes. We had handheld cameras that filmed right to these little cassettes.
01:19:59
Speaker
We had no idea what we were doing, but we made it work. And we just kind of learned on the go. and we just had We just had a blast. It was some of the most fun I've ever had in my entire life.
01:20:10
Speaker
And a big regret I have in this life, believe it not, of the many. Actually, I don't have that many. I have a few and this is one of them is not pursuing filmmaking in college.
01:20:21
Speaker
I kind of resent some of my teachers in high school who were kind of on the doorstep of retirement and were really checked out like many of them, not all of them, but a good chunk of them. And I resent them because they should have seen what we were doing and they knew what we were doing. It was no secret.
01:20:38
Speaker
And maybe telling us, and like, hey, maybe you should consider this path. Maybe you should consider ah school that has a movie program or film program. you know And encourage us, like, oh, wow, there' there there's there here's this thing that these kids are, like, clearly very passionate about. And actually kind of talented at. The movies, even though, like, the film quality was garbage, they were actually pretty good for 17 and 18-year-old kids. they were pretty funny.
01:21:01
Speaker
So I've always been into making movies. And so making videos now, be it book trailers or just goofy writer videos with some polish, is all about having fun and learning a new skill.
01:21:12
Speaker
That actually might keep me relevant over the next 10 years or 15 years. yeah It's kind of just ah a Trojan horse to learning something new and diversifying the talent portfolio. Not that talent, but you know what I mean. like The skill portfolio, let's call it that.
Embracing Video and Audio Skills
01:21:27
Speaker
And audio has opened doors for me. I would never trained as an audio guy. You know it it opened doors. it It hasn't blown them open in one gust. But deadbolts began to unclick and I could slip a credit card and I threw the thing and Jimmy the door open.
01:21:46
Speaker
It's allowed me to platform hundreds of writers. You know, video might have or I might similarly pave new roads. you to quote Tom Petty under my feet, babe, grass is growing.
01:21:59
Speaker
So you've got to be nimble. You can't just be a writer, even though that's like that's the that's the meat and potatoes of it all. But you can't just be the one thing. The next frontier is Dancing with AI, but I think I'm going to wait a few years to tap that maple tree.
01:22:15
Speaker
So stay wild, CNFers, and if you can't do, interview. ya.