by Brian Thornton
It's mid-May, and we are five weeks into baseball season. Last night I was thinking about what I wanted to write for this week's blog entry while watching my hometown Seattle Mariners extend their longest winning streak of the season–four games–at the expense of the San Diego Padres, and it occurred to me that baseball and writing have a lot in common. Such as:
You can't be afraid of striking out.
In baseball a lifetime batting average that reflects getting a base-hit three times out of every ten at-bats is a hallmark of a successful career. This is also true of success in fiction writing. Most books published by "traditional publishers" these days rarely, if ever earn out. Most make their author nothing beyond their initial advance.
Every once in a while you'll hit a home-run.
When books do take off, earn out for their authors, they can be career-makers. And they don't have to be pretty (Fifty Shades of Grey, for example), they just have to leave the yard.
You're only as good as your last game.
Even E. L. James has had to get past striking the home-run pose, move on, run the bases, and figure out what she'll do next. You can't rest on your laurels (unless that last game was the final game of the world series, with you bringing in the winning run…).
The art of the pitch.
Baseball is a
sport that emphasizes the importance of mastering the "fundamentals" of
the game through constant repetition: fielding drills, batting practice,
etc. Writing is much the same. Most "overnight sensations" have worked
at the craft for decades. So write everyday as if you were working on
the cut-off move on a throw from the outfield, and do it every day over,
and over…
And have fun out there!
Yes, like playing ball, writing at its best, is an awful lot of fun. Otherwise why would we bother with such a maddening process and so many arcane arcane rules?
See you in two weeks!
Showing posts with label baseball. Show all posts
Showing posts with label baseball. Show all posts
14 May 2015
Play Ball!
by DoolinDalton
Labels:
baseball,
Brian Thornton,
writing
Location:
Renton, WA, USA
12 March 2013
Gone South (Again) -- Play Ball!
by Dale Andrews
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Space Coast Stadium, Viera, Florida -- Spring Training Home to the Washington Nationals |
One of the things about posting articles for over one and a half years on SleuthSayers is that my annual habits begin to reveal themselves. Nowhere is this more evident than during the winter months. As I have written before, my wife and I, as we approached retirement, most looked forward to escaping the east coast during the months of January and February. We are blessed with the fact that our elder adult son lives with us and his slightly younger brother lives close by, so there is no problem each winter with leaving the cats and the house behind along with the weather.
This year, like last year, we escaped for ten days in the Caribbean in January, and were under sail on the Island Windjammer ship Sagitta when my birthday rolled around. Then we were back in the District of Columbia or two weeks before leaving for the Gulf Shores of Alabama, where we encamped for 5 weeks in a condo overlooking the beach and the Gulf. We have spent most of a short twelve days back in the D.C, survived a final winter snow false alarm, and are now poised, once again, on the brink of our final winter trip – to watch the Washington Nationals in Spring Training in Viera, Florida.
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Our Smart Car exits the Autotrain (to general laughter) |
As great as the prior winter escapes were, in many ways this one is my favorite. Instead of driving our larger “road car” south, as we did when we travelled to and from the Gulf Shore, on this trip we drive our convertible two-seater Smart car the 20 miles to Lorton, Virginia, and then board the Autotrain for an overnight trip to Sanford, Florida, about 50 miles from the cottage we rent across the street from the beach at Cocoa Beach, Florida. We will be there for one week, then catch a few days in Orlando re-acquainting ourselves with “the Mouse,” and head back to D.C. at the end of March, hoping to have finessed our way through winter once again.
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Our rental cottage at Cocoa Beach |
All of this is background to explain how our household, and much of Washington, has embraced the return of baseball to the Nation’s capitol. As Laura Ingalls Wilder observed, joy is always best when it follows sorrow. Our thirst was quenched following a very long drought.
Last year in an analogous post I recounted some recommended readings that embrace the national pastime and that are great preparation, read in early spring, for what is to come with the boys of summer. This year I thought I would add at least two more gems to the list, each by well-known authors who also apparently can’t get baseball out of their minds this time of year.


Time to pack. I am off to Florida. Play ball!
(Next week acclaimed mystery writer Terence Faherty joins SleuthSayers, alternating Tuesdays with me. Terry’s accomplishments – including authorship of both the Owen Keane and Scott Elliot series of mysteries and numerous awards—leave my own scant efforts in a pale cloud of literary dust. But at least we have this: Terry and I both love a good pastiche, as anyone who has read Terry's recent short story A Scandal in Bohemia (EQMM, February 2013) knows full well. And this we also share: an understanding that the rules of constrained writing, once mastered, can also be bent. This extends not just to plot, such as in Terry's re-imagined telling of Conan Doyle’s Bohemian Scandal, but to writing styles as well. I noted in my last blog Churchill’s admonition that ending a sentence in a preposition was something “up with which he would not put.” And here is Holmes dismissing the sanctity of the rule in Terry’s Bohemian pastiche:
The wording of your note is out of character with a true free spirit. “A matter up with which he can no longer put,” indeed. Only someone sitting on a particularly rigid stick would go to such lengths to avoid ending a sentence with a preposition.”I am certain we are all looking forward to welcoming Terry to the SleuthSayers ranks!)
Labels:
baseball,
Dale C. Andrews,
Florida,
John Grisham,
Stephen King,
Terence Faherty,
Tom Gordon,
Washington Nationals
Location:
Chevy Chase, Washington, DC
27 March 2012
Gone South III -- Play Ball!
by Dale Andrews
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Space Coast Stadium, Viera Florida -- Spring Training home of the Washington Nationals |
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"Smartie" getting off of the Autotrain. Everyone laughed. |
While we drove to and from Gulf Shores, our Spring Training tradition sends us south on the Autotrain. This allows us to leave our bigger "road trip" car in D.C. and travel instead with our convertible Smart car, which would never otherwise see Florida. (I can’t imagine 900 miles of I-95 in Smartie).

The train is always a blast. -- dining cars, where, as a couple, we invariably sit across from people we have never met, and lounge cars where strangers sip cocktails together while watching the scenery pass. No wonder trains have always been fodder for mysteries. I can’t ride an overnight train without thinking of The Lady Vanishes, Hitchcock’s second-to-last British film. The 1938 movie (based on the largely forgotten book The Wheel Spins by Ethel Lina White), together with Hitchcock’s 1959 American film North by Northwest and Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express all capture the microcosm that is train travel – a self-contained slice of life, detached from the rest of the world by movement. No wonder that trains afford a perfect setting for classic golden age mysteries – how better to contain your story and all of your suspects? While ocean liners are a close second, nothing beats the tightly cabined setting of a train.
So to and from Spring Training I have little trouble conjuring up SleuthSayer thoughts. But what about baseball itself?

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Shoeless Joe and Ty Cobb, 1913 |
A real life episode that has repeatedly found its way into baseball lore followed Shoeless Joe Jackson's appearance before a grand jury empaneled to investigate the conspiracy allegations. On September 29, 1920, The Minneapolis Daily Star, during the course of reporting on the scandal, published the following account:
When Jackson left criminal court building in custody of a sheriff after telling his story to the grand jury, he found several hundred youngsters, aged from 6 to 16, awaiting for a glimpse of their idol. One urchin stepped up to the outfielder, and, grabbing his coat sleeve, said:The line, and the saga of Shoeless Joe, who may or may not have been guilty as charged, reverberated through baseball literature. In Bernard Malamud’s The Natural the central character, Roy Hobbs, is offered a bribe to throw a game and is then confronted by a child who says “Say it isn’t true, Roy.” (The line is only in the book, so don’t look for it in the 1984 Robert Redford film!) The story of Shoeless Joe is also at the heart of the Kevin Costner film Field of Dreams, based on Shoeless Joe by W.P. Kinsella. And, finally, anyone who has seen the movie or stage production of Damn Yankees (a story close to the heart of any Washington, D.C. baseball fan) will remember the refrain “Shoeless Joe from Hannibal Mo.” (Hannibal Mo. had nothing to do with Shoeless Joe, but, hey, a song’s gotta rhyme, right?)
"It ain't true, is it, Joe?"
"Yes, kid, I'm afraid it is," Jackson replied. The boys opened a path for the ball player and stood in silence until he passed out of sight.
"Well, I'd never have thought it," sighed the lad
Well I should stop here and start packing. We are off on one last winter trip to the south. Hopefully when we head back to Washington D.C. it will be spring, because if winter persists it will be me who you will hear lamenting “it ain’t true, is it, Joe?”
Labels:
baseball,
Dale C. Andrews,
Ed Gorgon,
Jon L. Breen,
Shoeless Joe
Location:
Cocoa Beach, FL, USA
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