The Futility Infielder

After finishing Jane Leavy's bio on Sandy Koufax within seven days of the baseball season's end, I'm now tearing through Pat Jordan's A Nice Tuesday. Twice this week, I've had my nose so deep into that book that I've gotten on subway trains traveling the wrong direction. I can recall doing that only twice in my nearly nine years in Manhattan, and now 150 pages of Jordan have doubled that total (though a new work venue is partially responsible). It's a fantastic book thus far; Jordan's devotion to and comparison of the processes of pitching and writing resonates with me. I've got a similar theory up my sleeve which relates graphic design and pitching, and I was lucky enough to present my theory to Jim Bouton when I met him three years ago. That's a story for another day, one I'm itching to get to.

Alex Belth appears to be spending his offseason much as I am, rummaging thorugh some dusty old classics in his library of baseball books. Today he put up a couple of excerpts from Pulitzer Prize-winning sportswriter Red Smith in Jerome Holtzman's No Cheering in the Press Box. The quotes reminded me of perhaps my favorite quote about writing of all time, also by Smith, "The Shakespeare of the Press Box":

"Writing is easy. You just open a vein and bleed."

The beauty of that quote is that it contains a duality with which any writer can identify. Sometimes writing comes so easily, so naturally it's like a heartbeat, something you don't have to think about -- it just happens. Words flow from your brain to your fingertips to the page as if driven directly by your pulse. And sometimes writing is much harder -- messy, even, requiring a brazen courage to inflict pain on yourself before you can connect with the deeper and more elemental truth of what you're communicating.

Rereading the piece on Don Mattingly that I wrote yesterday, I'm frustrated by my own efforts. Not because I want to take back anything that I've written but because the story itself, my evolution from Yankee-hating Dodger fan to Yankee-rooting Dodger fan, is so much bigger than a blog entry. For all of the writing I've done here over the past two years, it's a story I've never gotten down to my satisfaction. But it's one I've been yearning to expand upon, especially since spending the better part of a week in the woods while reading Roger Kahn's The Boys of Summer.

The irony is that I've been trying to nail the topic since even before I started this site. The genesis of this unholy mess is a continuing education class in "Personal Journalism" I took at The New School in the fall of 1998. One of the pieces I wrote for that class, "Confessions of a Yankee Fan," was not only my first attempt to grapple with the internal and external conflicts that this evolution produced but also the first formal piece I'd ever written about baseball. Several times, I've entertained and discarded the idea of putting that article up on this site; it's awkward in spots, dated, and a bit embarrasing -- like pictures from a high-school yearbook. Who wants that on display?

But reading that five-year-old piece tonight for the first time in a couple of years, I've softened my view of its flaws, enough so to carve out a space for it here. The topic is still one I want to revisit in a longer form, but this tells the basic story well enough to keep me from having to reinvent the wheel. With my writing skills much rawer than they are now, I know that I bled all over the pages of that piece, sweating every word choice, polishing every sentence until I felt confident enough to present the piece to my teacher, my class, and the same handful of friends who've been been my partners in Yankee-rooting crime along the way. There are a few hanging curveballs in there, phrases I'd like to have back before they get hammered 400 feet. But this is a part of my story, and I'm proud to include it here.

• • •

This afternoon I received a nice phone call from Christian Ruzich. We'd never actually spoken before, but he called to thank me for the column I wrote earlier this week and to assure me that he's doing about as well as could be expected under the circumstances; mostly he's thankful that he, his wife, and his pets are safe. Ruz told me that he's truly been touched by the outpouring of support he's received from people in this online community, people who for the most part he'd never met before. But like Alex put it, that support is just a reflection of what a good guy he is, and what his work and his presence in this here blogosphere means to us.

Ruz told me he'd sold off about 3/4 of his library of baseball books before moving to his now-destroyed home, and joked about losing a CD collection that took him 15 years to build. Thinking of that sends chills down my spine as I stare at my two carousels of CDs so large that my girlfriend refers to them as the twin towers. But I guess that's the point -- no pun intended, it hits home pretty quickly what Ruz must be going through.