I Finished Why We Love Baseball!

OK, I just sent a final draft of WHY WE LOVE BASEBALL to the publisher. I can breathe again. Obviously, there will be plenty of things to do from here but the real work should be done now.

Yesterday, the final day, I added something to the introduction that I want to share with you. See, I’m absolutely in love with this book. I’ve loved every one of my books for various reasons, but there’s a joy with this one that, I have to say, is just a little bit different from all the others.

I’ve had a hard time pinpointing the exact reason. I do think this is the happiest book I’ve ever written; every page is about something funny or touching, riveting or surprising. Goosebumps everywhere, I hope. I mean this is a countdown of the most magical moments in baseball history so, yeah, the book should be a thrill ride.

But there’s something else. And what hit me yesterday is that something else is about the library around the corner from our house when I was growing up in Cleveland. I just spent a little time on Google Images trying to find a photograph of the library, but there don’t seem to be any left. It was a small brick building, orange brick in my memory, and I could walk there in less than five minutes, run there in less than three.

I would go to that library all the time, rush right to the tiny sports section, and see if they had added any new sports books. They rarely did. I think that’s one of the reasons my favorite Disney Princess movie has always been “Beauty and the Beast” — there’s a scene at the beginning where Belle goes to what I can only assume is the only bookshop in town.

Bookseller: Ah, Belle.

Belle: Good morning! I’ve come to return the book I borrowed.

Bookseller: Finished already?

Belle: Oh, I couldn’t put it down. Have you got anything new?

Bookseller (laughing): Not since yesterday.

Do you have The Baseball 100?

That was me with sports books. I’d come in all the time, I knew the order of the sports books by heart so I knew instantly if there was a new one. And on those mystical, magical, miraculous days when there was a new sports book in the collection, I would feel a level of happiness almost unmatched in my childhood.

It didn’t matter the sport, either. I vividly remember the day that Bernie Parent’s book Bernie! just appeared on the shelf. I had never heard of him, didn’t know he was a goaltender, didn’t know a single thing about hockey. But I pulled the book from the shelf and looked at the weird cover — it was a photo of Parent in full goalie gear, including the mask, with the words “BERNIE!” above his head three times — and then saw the amazing quote at the bottom:

“Only The Lord Saves More than Bernie”*

And I almost fainted in excitement. I raced to the table to check it out because I was convinced that if I didn’t, a cavalry of Clevelanders would bum-rush this little public library branch shouting, “I am in desperate need of the Bernie Parent biography from three years ago. You have a copy of that?”

*I loved that quote so, so much. I didn’t realize then that the whole “The Lord saves” thing was fairly prominent in hockey quotes; the best version of it might be “Jesus saves and Esposito scored on the rebound.”

Still one of my favorite-ever books.

Anyway, that’s the level of excitement I felt anytime a new book showed up. A.J. Foyt! Pele! Billie Jean King! Tiny Archibald! It didn’t matter. Just give me anything on sports. Once there was a paperback featuring four quarterbacks: Brian Sipe (my hero!), Joe Ferguson, Steve Bartkowski and Ron Jaworski. I pretty much lost my mind that day.

And on the rarest of occasions, there would be a new baseball book on the shelves … and those days were the greatest of all. Baseball? Are you kidding me? The day the book Guidry appeared on the shelf is like one of the 10 best days of my life, barely behind my wedding day and our daughters being born.

I hadn’t thought about all that for a long time.

And then, on the last day of writing WHY WE LOVE BASEBALL, it hit me: That’s EXACTLY the feeling I have had writing this book, that precise brew of anticipation and exhilaration and delight. Every single day, I was chasing something wonderful in baseball, something I didn’t know, someone to give me a fresh perspective.

How did I get so lucky as to write a book like this? How did it happen? You might know that Dave Winfield was an absolutely fantastic college pitcher. What does he think about Shohei? Could he have done it?

So I just asked him.

What was it like watching that incredible Ozzie Smith play live, the one where he was diving to his left and the ball hit a rock, kicked to Smith’s right and he grabbed it barehanded and made the throw? Well, you know who was there watching? Dale Murphy!

So I just asked him.

Could Dave Winfield have also pitched in the big leagues? I asked him. (Chris Trotman/Getty Images)

Every chapter for me was like that, a little adventure into the past. Sometimes the journey took me through old newspaper clippings, sometimes it led me to someone who was there, sometimes it led me deep into a video, sometimes it took me all the way to Cooperstown, where everything just smells and tastes like baseball.

The book is still seven and a half months from publication, so I don’t want to reveal too much. There’s time for that later, and anyway, surprises are a big part of this book. I think even for the most passionate and obsessive of fans, there will be lots of surprises. There sure were for me.

But I do want to say that what I figured out on the last day is that this is the book I dreamed of finding on the shelf was I was 10 years old and going to the little library around the corner.