Jimmying Square Pegs Into Round Holes

his week Spring Training ended and managers and general managers around baseball had to decide who to keep with the big club, who to send down and who to "designate for assignment", baseball's euphemism for getting canned.

The Yankees' Justin Maxwell, 28, hit .310 this spring, but because of the number of outfielders the Yanks already have, he got cut. Francisco Cervelli, 26, the Yankees' backup catcher the last few years got sent down to AAA after the club traded for another catcher who's older, has less experience and isn't as familiar with the club (probably as an insurance policy against the smattering of concussions that Cervelli's had the last few years). And then the Washington Nationals sent down John Lannan to AAA after being their Opening Day starter the last two years and having a good spring. Who knows what that was all about?

One of the hardest parts about writing is tossing out material. Last summer I outlined 10-12 pieces for a collection of baseball short stories. Each story had its own angle and its own cast of characters.  I liked all of it. Now that I've decided to make the collection of short stories into The Boston Squeeze, the brief history of a team, I have to admit that some of the stories and their characters won't make the cut.

I've been racking my brain how to make them all fit, but it just ends up being like jimmying square pegs into round holes. Sure, I could break out some sandpaper or a chisel, but they'll still wobble. They're not a good fit.

But like Cervelli, I know where to reach them when I need them. And hopefully they'll be back with the club soon.

Seeing-Eye Single

ormer baseball commissioner and Yale professor Bart Giamatti once wrote in his essay, "The Green Fields of the Mind":

Whatever the reason, it seemed to me that I was investing more and more in baseball, making the game do more of the work that keeps time fat and slow and lazy. I was counting on the game's deep patterns, three strikes, three outs, three times three innings, and its deepest impulse, to go out and back, to leave and to return home, to set the order of the day and to organize the daylight.

The last couple seasons I've indulged in baseball the way some indulge in drink adopting the quotidian schedule of my team and its players in lieu of my own. This past summer, though, I started to chart a different course. No, I did not stop following or playing baseball. That's heresy. Rather, I started started writing a collection of baseball short stories.

Why spend the off-season doing what I did every off-season (Reading DeLillo's Pafko at the Wall, watching The Bad News Bears and waiting for pitchers and catchers to report) when I could create my own?

That's part of the reason for the collection. In truth, I find that I only write about something when I find there to be something seriously off-kilter about it. I wrote Any Color You Want in 2007-08 because I thought it priceless that the U.S. continued to send Peace Corps volunteers out into the world, but that we couldn't take care of ourselves (and wouldn't take help from others). I wrote Hooey Savvy because despite all the talk about the financial crises, people are still afraid or uncertain about how to talk about money, never mind teach kids about it.

So what's out of whack about baseball? Like any religion or family, baseball has its traditions. Whether we know the origins of those traditions is another matter. Whether we follow those traditions is yet another. Those are two angles I look at.

Otherwise, the language, history, and culture of baseball lends well to stretching out metaphors. Once upon a time writers used symbols and metaphors to avoid political persecution. Today, it seems, symbols and metaphors (indirect speech) are the spoonfuls of honey that we coat our crushed up pills in. I can rewrite E.B. White's essay Here Is New York and deride the quaint 18 inches of privacy of his extinct city (to a chorus of Bronx cheers) or I can write a comedy about a ten year-old blogger of a minor league team who is called out by the players (to a chuckle or two) and make the same point. I prefer the haha route.

Plus, I'd like to have the book have its own corresponding set of baseball cards for all the characters in it. If nothing else, that'll force me to focus on giving my characters detail.

In my previous work, I've swung for the fences with big ideas. This is more of a seeing-eye single before I go back to the home run derby later this year.

Progress Update: The fourth draft of my kids book on financial education, Hooey Savvy, is done. And yes, it is more memorable than it was a draft ago. 27 stories, 80 plus songs, 120 pages. I've passed it on to some teachers and folks who know far more about economics than I for their feedback. Now I need to read up on the competition. I'd also like to hit the road to conduct interviews in areas with average low credit scores to learn what failed and what education is or isn't doing to remedy the situation.

Back in the Groove

ow that a number of concerns are out of the way, I only have one distraction from writing: baseball. Every year I brace myself for a serious writing hiatus as my mind wanders to the playing field and every year I find a way to make progress nevertheless. Hopefully this year will yield more of the same.

To that end, I picked up The BFL the other day and put pen back to paper. It felt good. Very good. It didn't take long for the story to come back to me, nor for my interest and excitement for the story to do the same.

I have also restarted my research into Chinese language. I picked up The Stories Behind 100 Chinese Idioms at the library and should finish it in the next few days. I'll share some of my favorite idioms and the stories behind them in future posts.

Double Sessions

I reckon I can edit pritnear all 19 chapters before leaving Dearborn. This'll mean one a day, but probably more like editing double sessions. I prefer to read through a chapter first making notes as I go (eg, add description here, what's another example of this there, etc...) and then to go back and fill in the blanks. At one point or another I typically hit a wall which is where reading or baseball comes in to provide a break so splitting the editing into two sessions a day should work well.

As I edit I've set out some goals:

1) Smooth transitions: Make sure you get from one word to another, one sentence to another, one paragraph to another and one chapter to another smoothly. Don't leave the reader behind without any bread crumbs.

2) Physicality: A complement to conversational humor is physical humor. Physical description also gives the reader a better feel for the characters. Lastly, it breaks up conversation which may move too quickly without it and with it may help build up a sequence.

3) Know your characters: Few of us know everything about those in our lives, but we know a few key things. This is an area where I need to do a better job. Plus, the more you know about a character, the more flexibility you have for humor, action and conversation.

4) Keep it tight: Every field of work and every couple have their own jargon. So does this book. The book's jargon touches on cars, U.S. history, Eddie Murphy films, baseball and Arab culture. What I can't do is extend references or allusions too far beyond that already wide swath otherwise I'll lose readers' interest, frustrate them and ask them to do too much work. While I enjoy reading good books more than once (mining them for more because I probably missed something the first time), the reader's reward should not come in the second or third reading. A reward should come the first time around.

Make no mistake, I refuse to "dumb down" this book. I refuse. Standards are already low enough out there.

They say football, we say soccer, let's call the whole thing off

United Staters: Why hasn't soccer caught on here the way it has around the world? Is it the players' hairdos?

Rest of the World: What makes football the beautiful game? Why's the game so special to you?

On deck: Baseball.

Going Good In That Gentle Night

I've lived in a brownstone in Harlem for the last five years now. Shortly after moving to this neighborhood from the Bronx I witnessed a few street jazz musicians performing their version of the Police's "Every Breath You Take." I walked by thinking this would be a normal occurrence. Haven't seen or heard 'em since.

I also thought I'd spend more time on the stoop of my building. That too hasn't happened...until tonight. I'm a night pastry baker. I typically hit the sack between 4 and 5 AM. So with chapter 2 awaiting comment, the recent heatwave broken and a few hours to kill, I outlined chapter 3 tonight on the stoop accompanied by a cheap cigar.

The next chapter introduces the first local that the main characters will become close with; a young female reporter who's tired of covering uber-local news while a presidential campaign sweeps the rest of the nation. That is, of course, not including local baseball which she'll introduce to them firsthand.

I don't typically write much in the summer because of baseball, but with games usually over by 11pm, a cool breeze running the length of my block after midnight, a bowl of ice cream never too far away and a handful of stogies to go, I reckon the stoop will call again.