None of the recent blockbuster deals were included in this week’s issue, but among the baseball items (fantasy football is on the cover):
Sure, there have been plenty of biographies about the ol’ perfesser, but what about fictional accounts of the daffy Stengel? Try Troy Soos’ historical baseball fiction, Murder at Ebbets Field, one of several in a series of mysteries featuring utility journeyman player Mickey Rawlings. (My profile on Soos appeared in the Summer, 1998 issue of The Mystery Review.)
The Amazon Report on Casey Stengel:
Casey Stengel: Baseball’s Old Professor (Great American Sports Legends)
Forging Genius: The Making of Casey Stengel
Casey at the Bat, The Story of My Life in Baseball
The Gospel According to Casey: Casey Stengel’s Inimitable, Instructional, Historical Baseball Book
From Hour.ca, a Canadian Website, these briefs on:
Sarah Freligh
Sarah Freligh, a former sportswriter with the Philadelphia Inquirer recently published Sort of Gone, a collection of poems centering on the career of a veteran pitcher, both on and off the field.
She took a few minutes to discuss her craft with the bookshelf in an e-mail Q&A:
* * *
Bookshelf: Why did you chose poetry over prose to tell your story?
Freligh: In early 1998, my mother was diagnosed with terminal cancer and I found I couldn’t write fiction to save my own life. I was nearing completion on a novel in stories as well as on eight or nine newer stories, but the prospect of immersing myself in all those words seemed impossible. At the time I was the marketing director at BOA Editions where I was reading all these wonderful poets like Kim Addonizio, Lucille Clifton, and Dorianne Laux. They were writing about the simplest things—feeding the cat on the back porch, for example—and managing to make the experience both inclusive and moving. So I started writing poetry and the early poems in Sort of Gone are what came out.
Bookshelf: Did you consider other formats, or did you always have poetry in mind?
Freligh: It was always intended to be poetry, though you could argue that some of the poems in the book are really short fictions. Also, many of the poems are written from the point of view of a limited omniscient narrator rather than the confessional “I” that drives much contemporary poetry. It’s wasn’t so much a choice as just the way it came out.
Bookshelf: When it comes to the craft of writing, do you constantly edit, go through multiple drafts, or do you find first shot is best shot? Do you agonize over every word, since there are obviously so many permutations?
Freligh: I scribble a lot in notebooks. After a while, when I’ve forgotten what I loved or hated about it, I’ll type it into the computer and then start fooling around. I love the sounds of words, the physicality of words. I fool around for a long time, but it’s not agonizing. It’s a luxury I didn’t have when I was a sportswriter writing on 15-minute deadlines. I would read what I had written the next day and be full of regrets at having to be good enough.
Bookshelf: Was the ballplayer based on an actual pitcher?
Freligh: While the character of Al Stepansky is largely fictional, some of his experiences are real—or “ripped from the headlines,” in the words of Law and Order. The poem “Minor League” is based on a real incident that I heard about secondhand. Some minor league players who lived in the apartment building next to mine had a wild party one night during which a player punched a hole in the living room wall. He was far too drunk to risk a trip to the emergency room, so he “cast his hand in masking tape,” just like the poem says. I don’t know if anyone signed it; that’s the fictional part.
Bookshelf: Tell me about your career as a sportswriter.
Freligh: I started out at a very small daily in Illinois. From there, I went back to graduate school at University of South Carolina where I got a Master’s in Mass Communication. I spent a couple years in Fort Myers, Florida, covering the Miami Dolphins, the Kansas City Royals, who at the time had their spring training complex in Fort Myers, and the Fort Myers Royals of the Florida State League. From there I went to the Philadelphia Inquirer where I covered Penn State football, boxing, Olympic sports, and tennis.
Bookshelf: Do you think that experience helped in this book, or did it make no difference, since the mediums are so different?
Freligh: I think any writing, if it’s going to recreate experience rather than just report on experience, demands that the writer pay attention. Whether you’re writing sports or a sestina, you’re recreating a world for the reader. And it has to be a very particularized, non-generic world, so you better pay attention.
Bookshelf: What is the significance of the title, Sort of Gone?
Freligh: It’s the title of one of the poems, so named because the rather eccentric pitcher in the poem offers up several equivocal observations prefaced by “sort of.” I also think of it as the “sort of” netherworld where a ballplayer finds himself at the end of his career. His body has retired, his mind has not. He’s “sort of gone.”
Bookshelf: Who were your “poetic” and sportswriting influences?
Freligh: Dorianne Laux and Kim Addonizio, whom I’ve already mentioned. Jane Shore. Perhaps the biggest influence was B.H. “Pete” Fairchild. His book, The Art of the Lathe, blew me away and continues to do so. His poem “Body and Soul” is undoubtedly the best baseball poem ever written. In sportswriting, John Ed Bradley. He’s a writer who occasionally writes sports.
* * *
A review of Sort of Gone appears on NPR’s Only a Game Web site.
The LA Times’ columnist Bill Dwyre dredges up a waterhsed moment in baseball: the undoing of Al Campanis before a national audience.
Campanis, Dodgers’ vice president and director of player personnel at the time, was a guest on the program along with Roger Kahn, author of the Classic The Boys of Summer. to mark the 40th anniversary of Robinson’s debut season.
Campanis unraveled while discussing the possibility of African-Americans as major league managers and made a poor choice of words when he said that they didn’t have the “necessities” to do the job. It was generally accepted that he meant to say they didn’t have the experience, which was one of those catch-22 situations: no experience without the job, no job without experience. But Campanis was out of his element and didn’t realize the political incorrectness of his response.
Things got off to a bad start when Campanis rambled for several minutes without answering the specific question put to him by host Ted Koppel about how long it took for the white players to accept him as a teammate, taking the opportunity to praise the difficulties his old friend faced when he first came up.
Judge for yourself:
Koppel was initially outraged, but seemed to drop the storyline when they came back from a commercial. Could it have been that he was ordered to drop it by his producers?
From the Washington Post, this none-too-complimentary review.
Upshot:
…[W]here a prudent historian might see a daunting challenge, this first-time author sees opportunity. His book is a riot of unlikely coincidences, composite characters, and long, maudlin speeches apparently recalled verbatim.
Moore tries to gloss over this problem in his introduction with a note of humility, writing that “the scarcity of information makes it difficult to verify every account in this book, but I am confident the spirit of Gene’s life has been captured within these pages.” But the subject of Moore’s book is baseball, about which there is no scarcity of information. A little basic research would have gone a long way toward undergirding his account.
From the New Haven Review, this lengthy critique by Peter Ephross of this overlooked classic by Eliot Asinof.
An article from the New England-based Seacoastonline.com reports that a film about Ari Alexenberg, a 45-year-old Boston man who played in the first (and perhaps only) season of the Israel Baseball League last year, is in the works.
When Steve Sanger, of Portsmouth-based Sanger Communications, heard of Alexenberg’s story, he knew he had to meet him. It was clear from the beginning that not only was the story compelling enough to make into a movie, but Alexenberg’s personality and obvious passion would translate perfectly to the big screen.
“It’s not just the story. If you’re going to make a film, they’ve got to be great on camera. I met Ari and he told me the story, and I was hooked,” said Sanger. “He’s a great story teller, and he’s terrific on camera.”
In my "day job," I'm the features and sports editor for a weekly New Jersey newspaper. I'm also the editor of the Bibliography Committee Newsletter for the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR).
I did a piece on the award-winning cartoonist and he was nice enough to "immortalize" me.
What I'm reading now:
Heidegger and a Hippo Walk Through Those Pearly Gates: Using Philosophy (and Jokes!) to Explore Life, Death, the Afterlife, and Everything in Between
What I just read:
Paul McCarthey: A Life:, by Peter Ames Carlin
Grade: B. Pleasant enough; no sensational material. McCartney could be a right bastard at times, but aren't we all?
What's next:
L'Époque Glorieuse des Expos, by Alain Usereau
My article on the later biographies of Babe Ruth appears in
My article on the Mets' 1969 post-season appears in
* Marvin Miller shut out of HoF, but by whom?
29 07 2008According to writers Peter Dreier and Kelly Candaele:
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