Writing the book is one thing. Once you’ve convinced a publisher that you have a good idea, one worth pursuing at book-length, you get after it. It might be a five-days-a-week thing, it might be more, maybe less.
Generally, you work with an editor — I had a great one in Ken Samelson — who looks over what you wrote, makes suggestions or corrections and generally keeps you on the right track.
Once you’re done and the book is published, the next part is promotion, something that many writers, including yours truly, don’t have a whole lot of training about. You send emails, make phone calls, get copies of the book in the hands of people who might read it and write about it or maybe even talk about it on the radio.
Fortunately for me, my old friend Rick Ballou, who left Tallahassee’s airwaves for a prestigious ESPN Radio gig in football-mad Jacksonville some years ago, was kind enough to invite me onto his “Into The Night” show on 92.5 FM recently and did a masterful job asking about “Diamond Duels.”
As an author, the first thing you hope for is your interviewer has actually read the book. I wasn’t worried about that with Rick; he knows his stuff and he wants to know more. There are a lot of radio guys who know it all, they don’t need additional information. Rick likes asking questions, finding things out, bringing something new to his listeners.
When you’ve spent a good deal of your life asking questions, I guess turnabout is fair play. The first interview I did regarding something I’d written was for my first baseball book, “Last Time Out,” which, in its first incarnation, dealt with the final MLB game of 25 of baseball’s greatest players. My interviewer was an African-American educator from Maine, so I correctly guessed he’d ask me about Jackie Robinson, Hank Aaron and Willie Mays. I made sure to bone up on those chapters and the interview went smoothly. He knew his audience, he assumed what they’d be particularly interested in and went from there.
The story I think he missed from “Last Time Out” it might be Dizzy Dean, who had to retire prematurely because of an arm injury, started broadcasting St. Louis Cardinal games, drew a following, then the station demoted him to doing St. Louis Browns’ games, since they’d hired Harry Karay on the main station. Dizzy was pissed, the Browns were horrible and he spent much of the season criticizing the pitching staff, suggesting he could go down there right now and do better.
With the final game of the season that afternoon, Dizzy was summoned to the owner’s office that morning, handed a contract for $1 and told he was starting. “OK, big mouth. Here’s your chance.” And though about 30 pounds overweight — finding a uniform that’d fit was a challenge - Dizzy went out and threw four scoreless innings. That was a cool story I’d never heard until I did the research for “Last Time Out.”
As Rick noted in our interview, a lot of research went into “Diamond Duels.” One unique trait about it was how much fun doing the research was. Having followed baseball closely since I was a kid, cutting out Post baseball cards from boxes of cereals, I knew almost all the names, their triumphs and failures.
What I didn’t know until I started researching using the wonderful online site Stathead was the specifics. And just about nobody else knew them either. Or if they did, I’d never read them anywhere and I can’t even count the number of baseball books I’ve read. So as Rick said, it was a surprise on almost every page.
Stan Musial faced Warren Spahn 356 times, almost a whole season? What?
Whitey Ford only started 42 games in his long career against the arch-rival Boston Red Sox when he had 73 against the damn Chicago White Sox? What?
A guy who went 4-25 one season, somebody I’d never heard of, Ben Cantwell, held the great Rogers Hornsby to a .130 career batting average?
It was discovery after discovery. Even though I’m certainly not a “numbers” guy as any of my former math teachers can attest, baseball numbers do tell a story. That’s what Rick understood and what we got after in the interview.
I’ll be doing another book signing at Books A Million on Saturday, April 26th from 2 p.m. to 4 so if you’re around and are interested in baseball, how the game’s all-time greats did in ways you probably never thought about — the great Willie Stargell just 2-for-23 with 10 K’s against Sandy Koufax, Frank Thomas just 2-for-24 with 11 K’s against Pedro Martinez, Hank Aaron with 14 homers off Dodger lefty Claude Osteen (and 17 against Don Drysdale — think the Dodger pitching coaches were upset about that?) — you’ll find it in “Diamond Duels.”
When my publisher called me to check on my progress, I was having such a great time, I didn’t even look at my word count. I would have kept on going. “You’re done,” he told me, laughing. “Wrap it up. It sounds great.” Hope you think so, too.
In case you missed Rick’s interview, here it is. He did a fabulous job. Like I said, we go back…
Here’s the really cool display at the Books A Million preparing for April 26. See you then!
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