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Episode 20—Glenn Stout Returns!
129 Plays9 years ago
Glenn Stout, author of the newly released "The Selling of the Babe: The Deal That Changed Baseball and Created a Legend," returns to the podcast to talk about the book, writing, and the transcendent nature of hitting a home run.
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Transcript
Introduction and Call to Action
00:00:01
Speaker
you know what's happened in cn ever's pardon my voice i'm getting over a a vicious attack from several malignant microbes uh... it's been quite brutal at casa de omera
00:00:16
Speaker
Before we get into the delicious and tasty meat of this latest episode, let me ask you to subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, subscribe to the monthly email newsletter on my website, brendanomare.com, and if you'd be so kind, to share the podcast with friends or anybody you think who would enjoy it. I'd love to see the podcast grow. Should it deserve to grow, of course.
00:00:42
Speaker
And that all starts with you. So, now that that's all done, let's cue up the theme.
Introducing Glenn Stout and 'The Selling of the Babe'
00:00:48
Speaker
This is episode 20 of the hashtag CNF podcast, and I welcome back to the show Glenn Stout, a fan favorite among the sports writing literati. His latest book, The Selling of the Babe, published by Thomas Dunn Books, a division of St. Martin's Press, comes out Tuesday, March 8th, the year 2016.
00:01:11
Speaker
It's the first book to get super granular about the selling of Babe Ruth from the Red Sox to the Yankees, and we dive deep into what makes this book one of a kind. I'd like to think you won't find a longer interview dealing with this wonderful book anywhere else, but it's probably a jinx of sorts. The interview is a great companion to the book and offers some wonderful insights into the making of it, so I hope you enjoy it. So go buy the book, listen to this,
00:01:40
Speaker
then buy another copy of a book for a friend. And no, I don't get any kickbacks. So that's enough from me. Here's the incomparable Glenn Stout. Well, very nice. Well, first let me just commend you on another job well done with this book. This was a lot of fun to read. And also it's just beautifully designed. That book cover is going to really kill, I think.
00:02:08
Speaker
Yeah, they did a when they sent me that book cover, I was like, whoa, this looks really nice. They did a wonderful job at St. Martin's and Thomas Dunn books on that. And, you know, the book isn't even out yet. But to this point, it's the best selling new baseball title of the spring, which
00:02:26
Speaker
is very exciting because you can't even get it yet and some of the other books are already out. So that's really nice to see and the reception so well critically has been very, very good. I can't wait for people to actually get it in their hands and crack it open.
Methodology and Baseball's Era Transition
00:02:40
Speaker
Ryan, so how do you dig up, I was talking to Mary Pillen about this a lot. She had chosen Monopoly to write about, Steve Prefontaine for her feature, and the Jumbotron. We were calling it these generic tokens, these things that are so ubiquitous that we just take them for granted. And yet she was able to really weave these really cool narratives around it. And Babe Ruth is one of those
00:03:09
Speaker
Big bigger than life images and I wonder like how did you dig up a new angle on a topic that feels on its surface so saturated Yeah, well, that's sort of what I've always done throughout my career. No matter what I've written about I've tended from the very first story I did to find stories that people thought they knew and
00:03:31
Speaker
And I had the experience early on with a couple of stories where I discovered that, my gosh, everybody thinks they know what happened. And the result of that has been that nobody's ever really looked at it. So I found that you could look at what seemed to be time-worn topics and almost without fail, you find something new and you can tell a better story, a different story, a truer story.
00:03:59
Speaker
You know, I've known for over 25 years that the so-called curse of the Bambino was a bunch of hooey, just factually incorrect, and all that. And I've written about that several times in Red Sox Century, the big book I did on the Red Sox, and in several lengthy articles that have appeared on ESPN and elsewhere. But I've never looked at it, I've never really thought about looking at it in book form,
00:04:28
Speaker
But I suddenly realized that no one had ever looked at this period in Ruth's career, the transition from when he starts as a pitcher and becomes a hitter. And it takes place in a very brief time period, three years, 1918, 1919, and 1920. And it's not just that he was sold during that period, but in the title of the book, I actually found a metaphor, the selling of the babe.
00:04:54
Speaker
which also refers to this selling of a new game. Baseball went from the dead ball era to the lively ball era in this three-year time period. Ruth was at the center of that. So by looking at the deal closely and then looking at the impact that Ruth had on baseball, it kind of explodes open this small period in time period in baseball where the game changed utterly,
00:05:24
Speaker
and forever. And no one had ever really looked at that before. There's never been a book about the transition between the dead ball era to the lively ball era. And no one had looked at the deal, the sale of Ruth, in all its complications. It's a very complicated story. It's a fascinating story, but it's not a simple story. And everyone had always tried to present it simply. And then, of course, you have at the center of it the greatest character
00:05:54
Speaker
in the game, arguably the greatest player in the game in Babe Ruth. So it's a nice confluence of ideas and characters and history. So how did you come to that central question of how George Ruth became the Babe?
Historical Research and Writing Approach
00:06:16
Speaker
you know, it all goes back to reporting. I mean, you know, I do an awful, awful lot of work when I'm doing these historical books in going through the day to day historical record as presented in the newspapers. And when you do that, and you do it to the depth that I do, and you've been doing as long as I have, because I've been doing these kinds of books on and off for almost 30 years, you know, you start to see more things than
00:06:43
Speaker
than somebody else would. I don't just look at one paper. I look at multiple newspapers. And in that way, you start to see larger trends. And you do start to see Ruth being written about one way in 1918. And then by the time you get to 1920, he's written about it in an entirely different way. In a very simple fashion, for instance, in 1918, he's often still referred to as George Ruth. And they do call him Babe. Babe is in quotations.
00:07:13
Speaker
By 1920, it's Babe Ruth. He's this different character. So that's how it all builds is just through your reporting and paying attention and seeing how things change in the world. And you did this a lot with The Young Woman in the Sea as well, where you know the ending, yet you're still able to create a lot of narrative drive. And I wonder, what is your approach to metering out narrative when people essentially know the ending?
00:07:42
Speaker
Well, you do that with detail and you do that with color. Um, you know, yes, you know, the ending, you know, Ruth joins the Yankees, but you have to put him in places and you have to describe scene. And you do that again, by building of detail. You don't just look at one report of a home run. You look at five of them or six of them. And you get one little piece of information from one report and one from another.
00:08:11
Speaker
and a little bit more from a third. And it's almost like you're filling in the picture more and more with each report you look at until you have this full portrait. And once you have a full portrait, then you can put that in motion, so to speak. And that's the way you create a scene. And it gives the book forward momentum. And it keeps it from being just a dry as dust descriptive story into one that's animated and kinetic.
00:08:38
Speaker
And in some ways, you know, cinematic. There's already been a little bit of film interest in this book, which I think would be fascinating to do a film of Babe Ruth during this time period. And that's the challenge because you're right. As a reader, you need to be entertained when you know the end of the story. You need a reason to keep going while you try to do that by the way you put words together, the scenes you make, the pictures you draw.
00:09:06
Speaker
And I wonder how much fun is it for you to be working with dead people with these books? It's a lot better working with dead people sometimes than it is with life. That's for sure. You know, it is interesting. I'm not particularly comfortable as an author.
00:09:27
Speaker
or as a writer being too intrusive, I don't really enjoy the interview process, although I've done, you know, a ton of it. I did an oral history on the cleanup of the World Trade Center, which was, you know, hundreds, well, not hundreds, but about 100 hours of interviews. But I kind of prefer working with the kind of raw material of somebody who's gone and trying to bring that one-dimensional
00:09:55
Speaker
person back to life and animating them. That's just a lot of fun for me because it's almost like you're creating something new. Well, it's like an archaeological dig. You've got that brush out and you're just like, you found the skeleton and you're just like dusting off. Yeah, or it's almost sculptural. You're taking something that's kind of formless that doesn't have a personality and you're trying to endow it with personality.
00:10:22
Speaker
And I think with Ruth in this book, you know, I do give him personality. It's not quite the personality that everybody I think expects because the Ruth that survived in history is almost cartoonish, is almost simple. And I think he was more complicated than that. You know, he wasn't a particularly nice guy, particularly when he was younger, particularly before the press got to him.
00:10:48
Speaker
and created this character. He was an interesting guy. He wasn't a mean guy. There was no guile to him, but he was totally self-absorbed, totally selfish, completely oblivious to the needs of others.
00:11:03
Speaker
He had a very interesting character because no one ever really seemed to blame him for it. It wasn't like he ever had an angle. He was just oblivious to everybody else. And that's just kind of a very interesting character trait with him that may really have something to do with why he was as successful as he was, too, because he just didn't really care about what anybody else thought. So when he started to hit a different way, well, nobody was going to tell him different. He didn't care anyway.
00:11:31
Speaker
And something I really appreciated through this book and I thought was a really good strategy was through the first quarter to the first third, you evoke a lot of the European theater of World War I. And I wonder why that was important for you to sort of call into or provide that backdrop of World War I over the battles that were going on
Impact of WWI on Baseball
00:11:55
Speaker
in baseball.
00:11:55
Speaker
Well, it impacted everything in the game for one reason. I mean, the 1918 season was almost canceled and ended up being truncated because of the war after 1919. So there was that aspect that actually affected the game, and it also affected the materials that the game used. One of the reasons the lively ball came into existence was because during World War I,
00:12:22
Speaker
the highest quality wool and the highest quality horse hide was all taken by the military. That left baseball manufacturers to work with lower quality products. To counteract that, they tried to wind the balls tighter because the poorer quality wool was not as resilient and the ball was even better than ever. And then after the war, when better quality wool came in, better quality horse hides,
00:12:50
Speaker
they never changed the winding of the baseball. So all of a sudden they were winding the balls tighter, but with higher quality wood. And voila, all of a sudden you had a lively ball. It was an accident, but it took place during this time period. It coincided with Ruth's rise. And it's something that he inadvertently was the first to take advantage of. So the war impacted everything. And then just in a general sense too,
00:13:17
Speaker
is World War I transformed American society dramatically. It became far more technological. There were airplanes. We were connected to Europe. It just changed society dramatically and set the stage for the Roaring Twenties. So you went from the Victorian era to the Roaring Twenties.
00:13:36
Speaker
in a snap of a finger just a few years. Yeah, what a horrible, horrible, almost needless war that was. Well, of course. And then on the heels of it, you had the Spanish-American flu, which talked out millions of people. So it was tragedy upon tragedy. And then this new game that was completely different. That wasn't this boring station to station scientific baseball, but was this dramatic,
00:14:07
Speaker
Game where all of a sudden balls were flying out of the ballpark at least one day group was about
00:14:13
Speaker
And when you, there's a sentence you quote in the book. I wonder what you thought when you found this sentence. I'm just going to read it here. It's referring to Ruth. He's like, he bends metal in his hands as if they were switches and has a hand grip, a hard grip that crushes. I wonder what, like, if you let out a howl from the mark of creation. Well, when you find a
00:14:38
Speaker
a period sports writer who does your work for you. You like that. And it's really fun because, you know, the sports writing back then was far different, much more colorful, a lot more hyperbole, sometimes stilted, sometimes really forced. But if you pick and choose correctly, it can be really, really colorful. And with Ruth, I mean, it was everybody had to weigh in. Everybody had to take their shot at him
00:15:08
Speaker
you know, he was, you know, everybody had to write about him, everybody had to describe him. So that's why you get all these new nicknames from the Bambino to the Sultan of Swat to my favorite one, the infant Swatagy. You know, because, you know, you had 10 papers in Boston, almost and 10 in New York, and, you know, every city had six or eight daily newspapers, and they're all writing about Babe Ruth when he comes to the town, they're all trying to write something different.
00:15:34
Speaker
So you get this massive deluge of verbiage that just runs all over the place. So if you can be judicious, you can find some real gems in there. I'm blanking on the name of the author, but have you read the book Catcher?
00:15:53
Speaker
Oh, no, I don't believe I have. You would certainly dig it. Well, it basically chronicles the rise of the catcher up until about the era just before Ruth. And back then, in that era, the catcher was sort of the idolized hero of the game. Like, I think even Stephen Crane. But in fact, there's that great little poem. We wore no masks.
00:16:16
Speaker
We know what war, no glove upon our hands, no mask upon our face. We find out we fought the ball with courage and with grace. Right. And also a teen, you know, before Ruth, he was really the first
00:16:41
Speaker
player that people were fans of. They've been fans of teams before, their hometown team, and a few players had been somewhat transcendent. Christy Matheson, Walter Johnson, Ty Cobb to an extent, but Ruth was, it didn't matter what team he played for. People came out to see him and it didn't matter if he played for the Red Sox or the Yankees or anybody else. They came to see him and the team was second.
00:17:09
Speaker
That really hadn't happened before. And that's something that we see even today. I mean, you know, people will criticize the NBA because it's a league that's just built on stars. The team doesn't matter as much as the star does. You're a LeBron fan. You're a Curry fan. You know, who they play for is almost immaterial.
00:17:29
Speaker
And through reading the book, I put blocks around words that I love. And I'm kind of a word nerd like that. And I came across like Somnambulism, Pinurious, Trebuchet, and I was just like, well, these are just such cool words. And I wonder like, do you consider yourself kind of a word nerd and you just roll these things over on your tongue and in your head?
00:17:54
Speaker
No, but when you find a good one that fits, but isn't too remote, it sounds right. You got to use it, you know, you know, I don't try to make it challenging. I mean, you're not going to have to, uh, uh,
00:18:08
Speaker
have a dictionary or a thesaurus to read this. I think the key when you use a word that's a little obscure or not used very often is all context. You have to make sure that even if the reader isn't that familiar with the word, they can instantly infer what it means.
00:18:27
Speaker
And then also you kind of think, well, people have to have some kind of vocabulary. You don't want to simplify things too much. And, you know, and this is, you know, much of this book tells, like I said, it's a complicated story. It's not just a straight line. The Curse of the Bambino cartoon version of this. It's a much more complicated, nuanced story. So there is a challenge when you're doing that. You want to be really precise.
Beyond the Curse: Babe Ruth's Complex Narrative
00:18:54
Speaker
Um, and that's a really difficult thing to do because often you're, you know, the real world is not as straight line as the thumbnail description. So you're juggling a lot of different elements at the same time and you have to try to be really, really, really precise.
00:19:09
Speaker
Yeah, with a lot of these words, like I was, you know, how some people get songs in their head, like I get words in my head. So like for hours on end, I was just like going around work, just going like Somnambulism, Somnambulism. It just had this great. Which kind of fit what I was doing at the time, in some ways. There's, I wonder like in your baseball playing days, did you ever hit home runs or were you more of a singles hitter?
00:19:39
Speaker
Um, you know, when I was, when I was, yeah, I was a power hitter, but I didn't often place, you know, play at places that had fences. And I actually didn't hit my first actual over the fence home run. I hit ones where I'd had to run them out. I didn't hit an actual over the fence home run until I was playing over 30 baseball. I was about 38. And, um, I hit it over the fence where we were playing.
00:20:06
Speaker
And, uh, I'll never forget there was this kid that went to like all of our games who was, you know, kind of mentally challenged and he got the baseball for me. And that was great. And then the one thing I remember, I ended up hitting a few more. And the one thing I remember about when you actually hit a home run is how
00:20:26
Speaker
quickly the ball becomes small when it leaves your back. One, of course you don't really feel it because you hit it in the perfect spot. And the next thing you see is the ball is really tiny and really far away. And you know that you've got it. And I think that's just, I mean, that's an amazing feeling. And it only happened to me maybe a half a dozen times or something.
00:20:54
Speaker
But you know when you get it and the ball gets small so fast and there's nothing quite like it. There's nothing like looking and seeing an outfield or turning back.
00:21:07
Speaker
Yeah, because I got the sense that you had a connection to it because I centered, I pulled out a passage here that, you know, Ruth fell in love with the home run and then you go on to say like, there's something to be said for that. Hitting a baseball square and then watching it go over the fence is almost transcendent. Once experienced, it's never forgotten.
00:21:26
Speaker
Oh, yeah. I mean, when I did it, man, I watched. I was like, I've been waiting a long time for this. And, and when I hit it, I was like, wow, that's actually going to do it. And I watched it. You know, if I, if I'd have been pitching against me that game, I probably would have stuck it in my ear the next time. Cause I, I was a happy guy. Um, you know, you know, the crazy thing though, when I did it too, is, uh,
00:21:53
Speaker
I hit a home run and then when I came up the next time, the guy who was ahead of me in the order, he hit a home run and I was at bat and the first pitch from the pitcher after the other guy had hit a home run went behind my head and I thought he was throwing at me. But the next thing I knew was I heard him screaming and his
00:22:22
Speaker
upper arm had shattered when he thrown that pitch, broke into 16 pieces. And he collapsed. He collapsed on the mound. I mean, I heard the bones break. And it was like, whoa. So I'll never forget that. He broke his arm, apparently, pitching when he'd been much younger.
00:22:53
Speaker
well one of the one of the things i think your book does best is uh... it informs us that they bruce wasn't the sure thing and i was wondering that must have been very fun for you to explore in this book that he had that flukey season and then he was a very hit-and-miss type hitter we are in the uh... i think most people think that all the group of this picture started hit home run but all of a sudden it was great home run hitter and it was like this happened like that
00:23:15
Speaker
It just gave out, blew up all at once.
00:23:21
Speaker
Whereas what I do show over the book it was it took place that transition took place over a couple of years and And it was very sporadic He would have some some short time periods where he would hit home runs and show a lot of power And then he'd have these long droughts where he wouldn't hit very well at all and you know, it's it's like he he figured it out, but he didn't figure out how to do it consistently for a while and
00:23:50
Speaker
And it took him some time to get there. It was a learning curve. It wasn't this miracle. He was actually swinging the bat in a different way. He wasn't trying to push at the ball. He wasn't trying to take a level swing. He was cutting loose. He was using an uppercut. No one had really done that before. So he had to kind of teach himself how to do it.
00:24:17
Speaker
And that's what you see happening over this two-year period from the spring training of 1918 through the end of the 1919 season, where he's then made that transition where he is primarily an outfielder and a hitter. But it wasn't a straight line. In 1919, he got off to such a terrible start that
00:24:42
Speaker
you can actually blame him for the Red Sox not repeating as American League pennant winners in 1918 or in 1919 as they've done in 1918 because Ruth got off to such a terrible start. He put him in a huge hole and they never got out of it despite the fact that he went on to hit a record number of home runs that year. It was too late. They didn't matter at that point. Yeah, because you said that many of his home runs were just kind of meaningless garbage time type home runs. It looks good on paper but it didn't mean anything.
00:25:11
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, everybody, you know, it's a cliche that they say, oh, if there had been an MVP award in 1919, Babe Ruth would have won it because he had all these home runs and it's well.
00:25:21
Speaker
maybe, but it was like he wasn't particularly valuable to his team because by the time he got hot that year, they were already out of the panic rates. It didn't matter to the Red Sox fortunes that year. It mattered in terms of their coffers in the front office. I mean, they made some money off of him, but it wasn't, you know, he didn't do
00:25:45
Speaker
what people expected them to do. He did not lead them, you know, despite having the greatest offensive season ever, he didn't lead them to the penitent. And I had a history teacher in high school. He would always say that times change, technology changes, but people don't. And there's this great letter that you cite from Harry Frazee, how do you pronounce Harry? His name.
00:26:11
Speaker
So the owner of the Red Sox at the time. And there's this one paragraph towards the end of his letter that says, Harmony had departed when Ruth began to swell. And I doubt if we could have kept out for the second division this year with Ruth in the lineup. After all, the baseball fans pay to see games won and championships achieved. They soon tire of circus attractions. And this is just what Ruth has become. And didn't that ring like when LeBron left Cleveland, like these whiny owners sometimes? I just I love that you pulled that out and how timely that is.
00:26:40
Speaker
For Zee, in a sense, for Zee was right. But he also didn't recognize what was taking place, was that the individual attraction was becoming more important than the team. But like no one really got that. The only person that might have got it a little bit was Jacob Rupert, the owner of the Yankees. He knew he needed
00:27:06
Speaker
to compete in New York. How do you compete in New York? Well, A, the Yankees had to win because they were going up against the Giants. But the second thing was they needed an attraction. They needed a star. They needed a draw. Because the biggest draw in New York at that time in baseball was the Giants manager, John McGraw. You know, Christy Matheson's career was over. John McGraw was the dominating figure in New York baseball at the time, but he was a manager. And Ruth,
00:27:37
Speaker
New York always responded to Ruth. He always played well there when he was with the Red Sox.
00:27:42
Speaker
And Rupert saw this, and it came along at the perfect time because guess what? He was a beer brewer. Prohibition was coming in. He had to find a way to make money off of baseball. And the Yankees had been a losing proposition to that point. So he really had no choice but to try to make baseball his primary business. And how do you do that? Well, you need an attraction. You need to win, and you need to have a star. And in Ruth, he got both.
00:28:12
Speaker
And if the A thread throughout a lot of the book is this ascension of Ruth, the B thread in a lot of ways was this war of the insurrectors on Ben Johnson and everything. I was wondering like how did Ruth in a lot of ways was like the Franz Ferdinand assassination that ignited a lot of this stuff in a lot of ways. Yeah, Ruth ends up kind of being a pawn in that because
00:28:34
Speaker
You know, when Harry Frisie bought the Red Sox, it was controversial. He wasn't welcomed into the league by Van Johnson, who had founded the American League and still ran it like a puppet master, and in fact owned portions of various teams and sometimes arranged trades behind people's backs and things like this. And Frisie had not been invited to join, but bought in anyway.
00:29:00
Speaker
Johnson and many other people in baseball at the time thought he was Jewish because of his theater connection, so that didn't help him. And then, you know, in the 1918 season, because of the war, Van Johnson overreacted. He almost caused the entire season to be canceled. And as it was, it was shortened, but only because of the intercession of Harry Pazee, who got
00:29:27
Speaker
the War Department to allow baseball to continue its season because they were going to shut it down. And that created animosity between the two. Frisie thought that Johnson was incompetent. Johnson thought that Frisie was impertinent, you know, not deferential. And from that time forward, Johnson's goal was to get Frisie out of baseball. Frisie's goal was to hang on to the Red Sox and
00:29:54
Speaker
It sets up this dynamic that the sale of Ruth sort of solves Um that ends up working for a lot of different people for a lot of different reasons It allowed harry percy to keep his ball club It allowed him to to take control of fenway park, which actually allowed him to keep his ball club allowed him to pay off some debt allowed him to to to
00:30:18
Speaker
Strengthen this alliance with Jacob Rupert who was supporting him in his battle against Johnson and it weakened Johnson at the same time So it was kind of a win-win for everybody But it wasn't in any way shape or form so he could
00:30:34
Speaker
create the musical No, No, Net, Net. Well, it feels, it doesn't read complicated, but it feels like it must have been challenging for you to maneuver those parts, especially for that part of the book that deals with the actual sale of Babe Ruth. What was that like? It is because I'm trying to make something intelligible. And I'm trying to make something intelligible that is actually told nowhere else in its entirety.
00:31:03
Speaker
Because if you're reading period reports of these political battles in the league, and what Johnson is saying, what Frisie is saying, every source you're looking at takes a side. The sporting news, for instance, is the mouthpiece for the baseball establishment.
00:31:23
Speaker
And various newspapers line up, either behind Johnson, or behind Percy, or behind Rupert, in various ways, shapes, or forms. So you're wading through these accounts, each of which is twisted and compromised in its own way. And you're trying to find what the truth is in there, and then lay that out as simply as you can while stripping away all the bias.
00:31:50
Speaker
That exists in everything else. So it's it's it's a real challenge That's the most difficult part of a book like this is and you also know you're running counter to Something that everybody thinks they know And you also have to so you have to kind of parry uh that misinformation at the same time um, so you just try to do it as clearly and precisely as you can and you
00:32:18
Speaker
you hope you make it interesting enough that the readers follow along with you because, but I always tell everybody, you know, when you're working on anything like this, the truth always tells the best story. You know, and it's just up to you to find out what the truth is and then present it in an intelligible way. And that is the best story.
00:32:41
Speaker
And Ring Lardner, he wrote a very late, as you say, like the acerbic in a cynical Ring Lardner, he wrote, you know, this is towards the end, he said like, the home run the public wants to see, then give them home runs. And because he was referring to the live ball era and they were kind of pandering to the fans in that sense. And that really just resonates into the future with like the steroid era and everything.
00:33:07
Speaker
The home run had become ubiquitous, but now we need to see it go very, very far. Yeah, I mean, nothing new under the sun in a lot of ways. Yeah. You see your defenders of baseball tradition railing against the changes in the game. You see other people saying, oh, forget that. This new game is great. What are you talking about? And it's interesting, because guys like Lardner were like, oh, this isn't baseball.
00:33:35
Speaker
It's like, you know basketball before the three-pointer, you know the game I grew up with like Basketball today is a radically totally different game So it is with baseball before the home run was a totally different game and one that wasn't like wasn't that successful it had kind of You know attended to kind of flattened baseball wasn't growing anymore Hey quiet
00:34:02
Speaker
But it wasn't growing anymore and the dead ball game was kind of dreary and slow and people weren't responding to it. But after World War II, the younger generation, the home run was magic. And I wonder why you think Babe Ruth as a figure still endures 100 years after, almost 100 years after the sale.
Babe Ruth: The American Icon
00:34:31
Speaker
Well, I think there's a couple reasons for that. I mean, and one of them is that Ruth was kind of the everyman for his era. I mean, he was this, you know, urban urchin, street urchin, who brought himself up from nothing, who, you know, came from nothing and became the most famous person in America. That's an inherently American story.
00:34:53
Speaker
That fits right into the American mythos, the self-made man, you make yourself. And it's the immigrant story, too. I mean, he wasn't an immigrant, but his parents were German. And, you know, they kind of became, you know, he becomes more than, you know, he's German, right, right after World War I. And he's like the most popular guy in the country. That's amazing. He was able to overcome his ethnicity.
00:35:23
Speaker
And I think that has a huge I think another part that that that has it is that he did have this like over the top Enormous personality this big moon face that was cartoonish that wasn't threatening That he seemed like he was having a lot of fun And he came to in an era where people started to have fun and you can't deny the fact It's like that the guy just changed, you know, he was the greatest player ever
00:35:50
Speaker
You know, I don't think you can even argue with it because he had success both as a pitcher and a hitter. No one else did that. No one else even remotely approached his success at those two positions. You know, that's the kind of, he's kind of the first man of baseball. He is really the first modern player because by ushering in the lively ball era,
00:36:15
Speaker
That's the model the game is still played in today, nearly 100 years later. He seems so aware that he was changing the game too, didn't he? Yeah, I think he did. I mean, he was, you know, he was into it.
00:36:31
Speaker
Big time. He knew, boy, I'm hitting home runs. I'm getting a lot of attention. I'm getting a lot of money. Chicks dig the long ball. Chicks dig the long ball. They dig me. Everybody wants to have a drink with me. Everybody wants to take me out to dinner. This is great. I grew up with nothing. I grew up with nothing. I was in an orphanage for most of my childhood. Now, look at this. Everything is available to me.
00:36:59
Speaker
And he took advantage of it. This was great. This is the American dream, right? I mean, no one I think kind of was better at embracing the American dream than Babe Ruth. You know, he didn't say no to anything. He said yes to it all. And there's something, you know, and there's something, you know, oddly innocent about that too. He just, you know, Babe Ruth never said no, but he sure loved to say yes.
00:37:28
Speaker
Alright, I've just got a few kind of rapid fire questions, but that don't necessarily require rapid answers, if that makes any sense. And I'll be respectful of your time so you can kind of relax your vocal cords for your radio interview in a little bit. So if you had to send one social network to the gallows, which would it be?
00:37:49
Speaker
Oh, that might be Twitter. And who are your sort of literary spirit animals or books that turn that you turn to for assurance, comfort, just entertainment, things you love?
Literary Influences and Writing Journey
00:38:02
Speaker
Wow. It's a very eclectic list. It would be, you know, one of my favorite books ever is Jack Kerouac on the road. I also
00:38:14
Speaker
I'm always drawn to this collection of the French writer Antonin Arteau, who wrote all sorts of just incredibly wild and crazy stuff. But there's an essay that he wrote that I return to again and again that's called No More Masterpieces, in which he describes how by trying to create something that's perfect, you often
00:38:41
Speaker
Lucidly speaking, you kind of miss out on a lot of other creativity. There's a lot of poetry I return to, work by James Wright, Rilke, people like that. You know, those are the things I return to time and time and time again. I mean, if I have to pick 10 books to go away with, I'm probably going to pick eight that I already have and I've already read 10 times.
00:39:11
Speaker
But they're just, you know, there's a great book about writing called The Poetics of the New American Poetry that even if you're doing nonfiction is just full of wonderful ideas. It's very inspirational. You know, that's the kind of stuff that I'm drawn to. I do read other things, nonfiction and stuff like that. But, you know, but I'm more drawn, quite frankly, to poetry and literary essays
00:39:42
Speaker
You know, I mean, I was brought into this writing world through encountering the work of the poet Langston Hughes. And everything I've read since then is kind of on this chain that started with Langston Hughes. And he led me to other writers. And they led me to other writers. And that led me on this kind of journey through 20th century American literature from the 1930s to, you know, through the present.
00:40:12
Speaker
And then, you know, then I start going backwards and read other people in translation and stuff like that. I mean, you know, I like Sappho. It's all over the place with what I read. I don't read, you know, just sports books, you know? I tell everybody, God, the last thing you should do is just read sports. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Read everything else. Read everything else. So where were you at age 30 in life?
Advice to Younger Self and Mentorship
00:40:40
Speaker
Where was I at age 30 in life? At age 30, which would have been, what, 88, I was working at the Boston Public Library. I had just gotten my library degree. I was living on my own in Boston, in Roxbury, having a great time, going to see rock and roll a couple of nights a week, hanging out in bars, way too much, talking way too much, smoking way too many cigarettes.
00:41:09
Speaker
Having a hell of a time, you know, I had a group that got together at my house every week where we would, every week or two where we would read something we'd written for each other because we all wanted to be writers. And I had that thing going. I was just starting to freelance. I was placing stories in Boston magazine and a few other places around magazines at that time that I wasn't writing any books.
00:41:39
Speaker
I was just coming to conclusion that, hey, maybe I could make a living doing this. Not that I didn't like what I was doing working at the library where I did hardly anything you would think I did, but I thought, wow, this is something I might be able to really do and move forward with. What advice would you give that 30-year-old Glen Stout?
00:42:03
Speaker
shouldn't have smoked so much. I don't smoke anymore. My guy back then I was a chimney. I mean, I wish I'd have, I look back now and I think, you know, I kind of wasted a lot of time in a sense sitting in bars drinking and smoking. But at the same time, you know, that's also kind of really valuable. You need that interaction with other people. You have to be out in the world and engaged in the world and doing things
00:42:32
Speaker
like that. I mean, there's a great line from AJ Lively, the New Yorker writer who is best known for most people for the writing he did about boxing. And at one point, he's complaining about this new generation of sports writers that were coming into New York in the 1950s. And he said, you know, now it's all nine to five and home to wife and baby when you should be sitting in some saloon soaking up information.
00:43:01
Speaker
And I spent the better part of a decade soaking up a lot of information, having a great time. I find out later that the bar across the street is where David Foster Wallace was probably hanging out at the same time. I never quite encountered him or anything like that, but I had a lot of experiences. Let's put it that way. Yeah, because art can't imitate life unless you have a life.
00:43:30
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, Boston at that time was not the Boston it is now, which is so expensive, you can't live there. Then it was cheap and dirty and grungy. And, you know, I lived in a crummy neighborhood where all the yuppies would run to their cars because they were afraid of the people that lived in the neighborhood. And, you know, I was just kind of oblivious to the whole thing. I just wander around everywhere all the time, no matter what. And I worked at the Boston Public Library, which was this kind of like
00:44:00
Speaker
United Nations at the time of people from all over the place and a lot of people who are interested in books like me who are still my friends today and you know rock and roll scene was great in Boston and it was cheap and you could still live cheap. I mean that was a time when there were still interesting cities you could live cheap. Which there are now. Not very many. What did you learn over the years having known David Halberstam?
00:44:30
Speaker
Well, I mean, David Halberstam was, I met him at the library when he was researching summer 49. And I kind of developed this reputation at that point that, you know, I knew how to find stuff, particularly sports stuff. So when he came there, somebody put him in touch with me. And he was so incredibly generous because at that point, I'd intersected with a number of other sports writers and writers.
00:44:56
Speaker
And they tended to treat you like hired help. They wanted you to find stuff for them and spoon feed it to them and say, thank you very much. And David Halberstam, who was much bigger than any of them in stature, treated me as a peer and an equal right from the start. And that was who he was. He took me seriously.
00:45:20
Speaker
That was incredible. And that was about that time period, about 1988, sometime in the time period. Probably a little bit before then, because I think summer of 49 came out in 89, so I might have been a year or two before then. But that was hugely important. I mean, here's this guy who's, you know, done everything there is to do in journalism just about. And he's treating you like you're a peer. He would like find something. He would get excited and would show it to you. And, you know, several years later, when the Best American came up,
00:45:50
Speaker
I said, I think we should have David Halberstam be the first guest editor. And they kind of rolled their eyes. I said, well, I know. And then they really rolled their eyes. Because I'm walking around with hair down in my ass, looking like a reject from a biker gang. And they called him up. And he remembered me. And he said, oh, if Glenn stops doing it, I'm in. Just like that.
00:46:19
Speaker
I wouldn't ever say I was close to him after that. I never bothered him unless I really needed something or had occasion to. But without fail, he was always kind and generous over any dealings I had with him from that time forward. And who are some of the writers that you're reading these days that, or maybe even some from a couple years past, that aren't getting necessarily the attention that you think they deserve?
Admiration for Contemporary Writers and Conclusion
00:46:47
Speaker
Boy, I've been so locked in on other projects. I haven't done a lot of outside reading, except with the writers I've been working with myself. And I think some of them are just terrific. Michael Graff, Jeremy Collins, Eva Holland, who I know you've spoken to a lot of these people, and so many of the other writers that I've worked with.
00:47:13
Speaker
you know, in this last project, which no longer exists, there are people that other people are going to be reading for the next 10, 15, 20 years. I'm really excited to see what they're going to do next. I enjoy looking up their bylines for what's coming next for all of them. That's what I'm excited about. Great. And lastly, you know, where can people find you online?
00:47:43
Speaker
glenstout.net. That's where all my stuff is. You know, you want to find out what I've done or what I'm doing. That's where it all is. You know, I'm on Facebook with, I've got a group for the best American sports writing. I'll probably try to set up a selling of the babe page this weekend. Try to get that going. But glenstout.net, you know, anybody can get in touch with me. My email address is out there. And if anybody really wants to
00:48:13
Speaker
talk to me. That's the best way to do it. I might not answer all your questions, but I'll probably talk to you. Well, fantastic. Well, Glenn, it's always a pleasure speaking with you, and I thank you for carving out some time of your morning here to talk about the babe and some other things here. Okay, thanks. Thanks a lot, Brandon. I always enjoy these. All right, you got it. I'll talk later. Okay, man.
00:48:35
Speaker
That's a wrap folks. This episode was conducted by, edited by, and produced by me. Special thanks to Glenn Stout for his time, and to you, the listener, for being a part of the CNF Podcast Tribe. Thank you.