Baseball

I have been a baseball fan since the middle of the 1955 season. I have written books about baseball. I have a web site dedicated to baseball. I have built whole life adventures around baseball. My wife and I spent the 2000 season living across the street from (what was then called) Pac Bell Park in San Francisco, and I went to every Giant game except five (when a client insisted I be in London to speak…) I wasn’t a Giant fan; I did it because I love baseball and a “walking life” and I realized when I saw where the new SF ballpark would be that one could comfortably live right in the vicinity.

That summer, Barry Bonds, the Giants leftfielder, became the favorite player of my adult life. This was the year before he started hitting home runs like a machine. From my seat in the stands, I admired his batting eye and plate discipline; the fact that he never threw to the wrong base from leftfield; the fact that he only attempted stolen bases in late innings of close games and was almost always successful. Ellis Burks, the Giants rightfielder, was our upstairs neighbor that year. Ellis told us that Bonds was an unbelievably hard worker. The press couldn’t stand Bonds, but that’s because he wasn’t particularly cooperative or friendly with them. As a fan, I couldn’t have cared less. What was there not to like? 

Well, we all know now, don’t we. STEROIDS!!! CHEATER!!! The sporting press has made an industry of ferreting out these miscreants. We know who they are.

I wasn’t a Giant fan, but I am a Yankee fan. ARod is another great favorite. Yes, he’s a recent additon to the steroid dungheap.

And this past week we have Manny Ramirez. I’m getting sick of this. Nobody can tell the truth.

What’s the truth?

The truth is that — whether it was 30% or 50% or 80% — a huge number of players were using PEDs (that’s “performance-enhancing drugs”) for many years. The owners knew it and encouraged it. The players were relaxed about it. The union did nothing because the union’s job is to fight with management and there was nothing to fight about! Management loved it because PEDs create home runs and (when pitchers take them) strikeouts. Home runs and strikeouts put fans in the seats.

So can Bonds or Tejada or Palmeiro or ARod or Clemens or Manny or any of them tell the truth? “Yes, I used these drugs. But, frankly, everybody was using them. I was competing against players who were using them. Nobody seemed to care or mind.”

No, they sure can’t. If they did, everybody — the Commissioner’s office, their ownership, their teammates, and the leadership of their union — would be down on them like a ton of bricks. If there is a “crime” here,  just about everybody’s guilty. So everybody’s much more comfortable letting the unlucky ones be consecutively outed, each one being treated as an isolated example of immorality. The collective hypocrisy — including on the part of the sportswriters who strut their purity — is nauseating. It’s really just pandering to an anti-drug hysteria which, if we give it a chance, might prove to be as passe as a lot of the other mistaken political and social ideas of the past three decades.

From Joe Torre’s current bestseller (I’d cite the page number, but I’m reading it on my iPhone in eReader so that wouldn’t mean anything):

Said one former All-Star and steroid user who competed against those Yankee teams, “Everyone around baseball did what they could possibly do. It was the survival of the fittest.”

…The player said that everybody in the game just understood that attitude was acceptable. “Now whether it was right or wrong, now you’re talking about a moral issue, but there were no rules. You did what you did. It was the wild, wild west.”

How should we regard performances during an era when steroid use was, as a practical matter, allowed and encouraged by the entire baseball establishment? Remember that when Mark McGwire was hitting 70 home runs, he had “andro” in plain view in his locker and it was written about during the season. Lenny Dykstra showed up one at Spring Training one year looking like he’d been inflated with a bicycle pump. Brady Anderson went from a gap hitter to a 50 home run guy in 1996. Suddenly lots of players were hitting 50 or more home runs in a season, which used to be a rare accomplishment.

The era is going to define itself statistically. As the dead ball era did. As the 30s (an era of very high batting averages and low strikeout totals) did. As the stolen base era ushered in by Maury Wills and extending to Rickey Henderson did. But it is really unfair to judge the people of the 1990s and early 2000s by a a standard that was developed when people noticed the size of Barry Bonds’s head in 2003.

If the Truth and Reconciliation Commission concept ever came to baseball on this topic, the list of villains would be far more extensive than the ones whose drug tests were leaked.

May 28 at 11 am at Javits Center: “Stay Ahead of the Shift.” Publishers are chasing their tails trying to figure out how to keep getting paid adequately for content. It will just get harder and harder to do. Use your content to build community. That’s where equity is in the long run. The good news? This shift will take a while. And publishers are well equipped to stay ahead of it.

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This is the first of what will be 3 or 4 posts about the birth and development of BaseballLibrary.com, a sterling Internet 1.0 site still chugging along (barely) deep in the Internet 2.0 era. It shows that a good idea can sustain itself for a long time, even in the face of erratic and sometimes incompetent management (and both the idea and the mismanagement are mostly mine.)  This first post tells the story of the creation of the book The Ballplayers, which was the key building block of Baseball Library. The next installment relates some interesting history about how the model for compensating for content changed in the late 1990s, but this foundation is needed first.

In late 1985, at what was one of the more difficult times of my consulting career, I was invited to a meeting to brainstorm the commercial possibilities for “The World Classics of Golf”, a book club. One person who was supposed to come to the meeting couldn’t make it. “Oh, Rodney’s working on his baseball encyclopedia.”

I pondered that as I walked home. What could that be? And then an idea hit me (although I still don’t know what Rodney’s idea was!).  The Baseball Encyclopedia, then published by Macmillan and also known as Big Mac, was the complete statistical compendium, player by player, of baseball history. And what struck me was that, because of Big Mac and its power, nobody had created a normal, regular, plain vanilla  baseball encyclopedia: one where you could look up a player (or a team or an umpire or a baseball announcer) and read about him.

The idea of creating such a thing fascinated me and felt like something I could do. I had spent more hours of my waking life on baseball than on any other single thing. I knew (and know) a lot. I was also a member of a young organization called SABR, the Society for American Baseball Research, and I knew there were lots of people who knew even more than I did who could be rounded up to help. But I also knew this was a big project and I’d need help to figure it out.

So I went to Jim Charlton, an experienced book packager and a fellow baseball aficionado with the idea. My startlingly naive notion was that Jim would just execute my idea for half the take. Jim probably just didn’t believe that I meant he’d do all the work, so he agreed. And together, we planned out the book that was later called (somewhat misleadingly) The Ballplayers.

At that time, if memory serves, there were about 14,000 people who had been active major leaguers in the 20th century (which is when the “modern era” of baseball begins.) By eliminating hitters who had fewer than 500 at-bats and pitchers with fewer than 100 innings of work, we got the number down to a manageable one, about 5,000. With the addition of some other players (from the 19th century and some who were worthy of inclusion despite having missed the cut-off), teams, leagues, announcers, sportswriters, owners, and umpires, we developed a list of 6,000 individuals who would get bios. By ranking all of them for their historical value (arbitrarily), we divided them into groups so that the most important players would get proportionately longer listings. And that enabled us to estimate the total length of the book, which was around 700,000 words and (we thought this was smart) about 500 photographs.

Thanks largely to Jim’s contacts and sales skills, we sold the book in a mini-auction to Arbor House, an imprint of William Morrow, for $165,000, a pretty huge sum at that time. And then we got to work, paying a small per-entry fee to a long list of writers we recruited, mostly through SABR. We then recruited two recent college graduates, Shep Long and Steve Holtje, to help us coordinate and manage the project. Holtje stayed until the end and became Managing Editor.

But by this time, Jim had figured out that I really was serious about him doing all the work and, for half the money, that wasn’t a very good deal. So we had to renegotiate. I cut the pie and then offered him his choice of slices. We’d split the take 85-15. The one who got the 85 would do all the work and have to pay all the expenses. Jim decided to take the 15. So this project became my baby.

We completed the manuscript on time (with the help of an extended schedule) in the Fall of 1989. John Thorn, a veteran baseball book creator with an extraordinary list of credits, was commissioned to provide the photographs, which he did with his colleague Mark Rucker. And in Spring 1990, The Ballplayers, a 7-pound, 1330-page tome, hit the bookstores with a retail price of $35.

By this time, Morrow had shuttered the Arbor House imprint. The Ballplayers may have been the last book released with that colophon. That meant nobody in the shop had a stake in the book. So they printed 35,000 (probably the number required for the house to break even; that was an even more common practice in those days.) They advanced about 20,000 and ended up selling about 22,000. And by the end of 1993, the book was ready to be remaindered and for the rights to revert to me. 

The work had achieved a little bit of fame: a kind review in Sports Illustrated and an appearance by me to promote it on Good Morning America were the highlights (thanks to an independent publicist I hired; we got almost no PR from our publisher.) It was still the only reference book of its kind. In the meantime, Jim Charlton had created The Baseball Chronology, which was a day-by-day account of baseball history. That was really the only competition to The Ballplayers. It was published by Macmillan which should have given it a better chance. But a couple of years later, it joined The Ballplayers on the remainder table and out of print.

I was aware that we had made a major publishing mistake with The Ballplayers by including the 500 photographs and setting it in a pretty loose design and a big trim size. These things made the book bigger and heavier than it needed to be. A straight-text rendition with smaller type might would have been more portable and could have been priced at $20. But that was water over the dam.

On the other hand, I now owned several hundred thousand words of baseball biography text and the internet era was just beginning. That would create a new opportunity, which will be where we will take up this subject again in a subsequent post.

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This is a post about “no post today”. Or maybe this is a Seinfeld post. Its about nothing.

A particular number of years ago that my friend Lorraine Shanley of Market Partners could tell you and I can’t — but I would say about 15 — she confided that she thought it would be smart for her company to start a newsletter. And I said, “what do you want to do THAT for? A monthly deadline? To go along with all the other deadlines?”

Lorraine was smart enough not to take my advice and she and her partner (and also my friend), Connie Sayre, are still putting out Publishing Trends monthly and it has been a success, financially and otherwise, from about Day One.

So, 15 (or whatever) years later, totally voluntarily — with nobody forcing me, nobody even suggesting it was a good idea! (and the few that were asked actually telling me it was a bad idea) — I gave myself a daily deadline for this self-publishing effort (to go along with all the other deadlines, which rather inconveniently have refused to diminish to make way for the blog.) And I don’t think anybody noticed when I cut back from the six days I posted the first two weeks to the five I have maintained since.

This “no post today” post is the signal that I now consider four a full week. And I might not make a full week every week.

Richard Charkin (also a friend) wrote a daily blog when he was MD at Macmillan in the UK. I told him it blew me away that he could come up with something every day. He saw as his advantage that he could “always talk about a book” they were publishing. Those stories were always there to tell. Charkin stopped blogging when he moved over to Bloomsbury a couple of years ago; I suspect he’s relieved not to have the daily burden any more (even though at Bloomsbury he’s still got plenty of books to talk about.)

The indefatigable Mr. Cader (uh, yeah, we also know each other) was smart enough to build “except when not” into his promise of a daily newsletter when he started Publishers Lunch. My dad (yup, knew him pretty well too) used to get a newsletter called Winners and Sinners that was “published occasionally from the southeast corner of the New York Times newsroom” by a managing editor named Theodore Bernstein (whom I never met).

So, I’m making a very unconventional move when I say that any implied promise of a daily post is now officially withdrawn.

Which isn’t to say I don’t have a list of things I’m working on. It’s just that I am planning ahead to not work on any of them this weekend. (Baseball pool draft all day Saturday and hanging out with friends not in any way connected with publishing — I have some of those too — all day Sunday and I might not be doing any writing…)

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