Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1522: Booking It

Episode Date: April 1, 2020

Ben Lindbergh and Sam Miller talk to Brad Balukjian, author of brand-new baseball book The Wax Pack: On the Open Road in Search of Baseball’s Afterlife, about the long road (figuratively and literally) that led to the book, how he decided to try to track down the players from an old pack of baseball cards, […]

I didn't put mine between my bicycle spokes or leave them at home unattended with my folks. About to save them till I got old. Never tossed, never sold. Flipping, trading, collecting, saving. Waiting, hoping, dreaming, praying. Top to clear, Don Ross Bowman, big league on display. I'm so glad my mom and dad didn't throw mine away Hello and welcome to episode 1522 of Effectively Wild, a baseball podcast from Fangraphs

presented by our Patreon supporters. I'm Ben Lindberg of The Ringer, joined by Sam Miller of ESPN. Hello Sam. Hi Ben. Baseball is not happening right now, but baseball books are. This is prime time for baseball books coming out, and we are about to speak to the author of one of them. It is out today, April 1st. It is called The Wax Pack on the Open Road in Search of Baseball's Afterlife. I read an advanced copy. I blurbed it genuinely. I like the book a lot. And its author is Brad Baluchian, who joins us now. Hello, Brad. Hey, guys. And Ben, you taught me the word. Is it Bildungsroman? Is that how you say it? Wow. Can you read? Let's read Ben's. Does someone

have Ben's blurb in front of them? Because I like to hear this Bildungsroman saturated blurb. This is what my publisher took from what Ben, I don't know if this is the whole thing, Ben, but this is what they put on the back cover. Yeah, I think it is. Beluchian's cross-country cardboard-based Bildungsroman reminds us that baseball's best stories are sometimes told by and about players who've long since left the league.

Oh, wow. There you go. If I had blurbed it, I would have squeezed in picaresque. by, and about players who've long since left the league. Oh, wow. There you go. If I had blurbed it, I would have squeezed in picaresque. A picaresque romp, right? Exactly, yeah. Yeah. So the book is published by University of Nebraska Press,

and later in the episode, I will be talking to the acquiring editor who picked up the book, Rob Taylor, because University of Nebraska Press is just a hotbed of baseball publishing, publishes a lot of great books, and published yours and sort of plucked it off the heap of baseball books out there. People are trying to get them published and can't always, and you had a bit of an odyssey to get this thing in print, which sort of surprises me in that it's a very good book and it deserved to be published, but also sort of doesn't in that there are so many people trying to publish baseball books and a lot of publishers don't think baseball books are all that appealing. So this story, just to

summarize it for everyone, essentially you were kind of at a critical juncture in your life. You were trying to decide where to go and what to do. So in the meantime, you opened up a pack of baseball cards, or in the interest of full disclosure, multiple packs of baseball cards, and you decided to track down all the players you drew and see them in person and find out what they were doing and what they'd been up to since they had retired. This was an old pack of baseball cards, so all these players were long retired. Some stars, some marginal players that you probably haven't heard of, and then you crisscrossed the country to track them down. And it was all about that odyssey and what these players taught you about their lives. So I want to ask you about your own odyssey to getting to this point.

Obviously, this is not an ideal time to have a book come out when bookstores are closed, but you've been pulling out all the stops to promote it, and you've got a lot of big-name blurbers on board. Not even me. I'm surprised you found space for me on this back cover because you've got some other big names on here, but it seems like there's a lot of interest in the book, justified interest. So how and why did it take a while to get this published? And how did it finally get into print? Yeah, it's a great question. So I took the trip in 2015, and obviously it's 2020. So you might wonder, yeah, why is there this long gap there? And so when I took the trip, I didn't have an advance. I didn't have a contract for a book.

I had the idea. I knew what I wanted to do with the story. And so I go on the trip. I drive 11,000 miles in seven weeks. I come back, got piles of notes and interviews to transcribe. And I spent the next, almost probably the next year, a little bit less, basically crafting the proposal to to go out to publishers and we went out in a very limited way to a few publishers you know going to the

big five in New York and tested the waters and they they kind of universally liked the idea but they were like nah it's still not it's not really hitting the right notes and here's some feedback and at that point the book I do think it think I was sort of struggling to find some of the overarching meaning of the book. So I went back and did a massive rewrite and then came back again many months later. And my agent at the time said, you know, I really don't think this is where it should be. Basically, he was pushing me to take myself out of the book. And he thought it needed to be more of a straight baseball book. And I just disagreed. I always felt like, you know, the same way you guys were active characters in your book, The Only Rule,

I felt like in order for this book to work the way I wanted it to, which was to be more than a baseball book, to be this narrative that I think could go beyond baseball, that it needed some kind of connective tissue, some kind of overarching narrative. And I thought that my character was the way to do that. And so I got a lot of pushback, not just from him, but from people in the publishing industry that were saying, you know, well, we really like in a nonfiction when the author takes a back seat, they should just be these, you know, they shouldn't be in the story. I was told, you know, you don't have a platform. No one knows who you are. You don't have, I mean, who cares about you? Why should we, you know? So, I mean, you know, just a lot of,

I mean, and then when we actually went out more broadly later on, I got a different agent and went out more broadly and I got a couple of editors that were really great, I mean, champions of the book. But as you guys know, you kind of have to get universal buy-in from the editorial board to get greenlit on a book deal. And I was basically told, it's great writing, it's a great idea, but we've run all the numbers and we don't think we can sell enough copies in the first number of weeks to justify whatever. So it was very demoralizing after, you know, the rejections piled up and, but I never like, I started to think maybe I'm crazy. Maybe this really isn't that good. Like I, cause I kept believing in the book that I knew I could

do. And so I just, at a point was like, do I just shelve it? But I decided, no, I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to go to a smaller publisher. And that's when I reached out to University of Nebraska and Rob Taylor. And he immediately was like, this is great. Let's do it. So, you know, I actually wrote most of the book in about five months. So it was like once I actually could, I knew I could do it, I was able to sit down and crank it out. So 1986 tops, right? How did you pick the card set? And I guess if you can wet people's appetites, it's not really a spoiler to say who's in the book, right? Because it's all about the journey and the question of whether you're going to track these guys down and whether you will actually

get an audience with them. So if you can name the names of the players that you picked and how you came up with this idea, that might be illuminating. Yeah, sure. So as I talk about in the book, I'm definitely an outlier, a weirdo, different, strange guy in the sense that I never followed the crowd. My favorite things as a kid were never the things that other people liked. And so my favorite baseball players were Marty Barrett and Spike Owen and Don Carmen, Don Carmen being my favorite. And I would actively collect, I don't know if you guys remember, but I would act, back in your collecting days, I'd actively collect the common cards that no

one wanted. And so when I saw the pack, the wax pack, I thought, well, this is a great device for a book because you get the randomness and the thrill of like, whoever's in there, that's who you're going to write about. And I just knew that just by probability, most of the guys would be common guys. And that would give me a chance to write about those players. Like no one would ever read a book about just Don Carmen, but if he's bundled with this bigger kind of high concept thing, then I could do that. So it was sort of like self-indulgent in that way. But in terms of who I got, it was a good mix of the more journeyman guys, Rance Mullenix, Lee Mazzilli, Don Carmen, Randy Reddy, all the way up to sort of semi-stars like a Vince Coleman or a

Gary Templeton. And then you had Doc Gooden and Carlton Fisk as probably the two most famous. Right. So I won't spoil what happens when you try to track these guys down, but there are some heartwarming stories. There are some sad and bittersweet ones. There are some guys who give you great advice and wisdom and welcome you into their homes and just say, why don't we have dinner? And other guys who some of the more marginal players in the book that you drew, I think, have maybe the most interesting stories or sometimes the most interesting things to say, which I found to to be true when doing interviews on the podcast too, is that if you try to get a superstar on the show, A, it's harder to do that. B, they maybe speak in cliches because they constantly have people trying to get interviews with them. They've said everything. They've been asked everything. Whereas the more marginal guys aren't really used to people wanting to talk to them. And so all their material is fresh, right?'t been asked, like you said, they hadn't been asked as much. Their egos, I don't think, didn't get the better of them as much. So I found them much, just more relatable. But I think what really surprised me the most in a,

you know, that really was kind of touching was how open these guys were. Because as you said, baseball players are, you players are famously trained to speak in cliches and not really let their guard down. But what I found was I was able to really get these guys to open up and be really vulnerable about some really personal things. One of the common themes is the strained relationships they have with their fathers. And Rick Sutcliffe talking about his father, who was a professional race car driver, basically walking out on the family when he was a kid and how that made him so angry and in some ways may have made him a better baseball player because he says guys like Drysdale and Koufax

didn't intimidate him at all when he got to Dodger camp as a rookie because nothing could scare him after what his dad did to him. And he put up that hard exterior. Don Carmen, the guy said it was my favorite player. I met him at a zoo in Naples, Florida. And again, it was surreal to, this is a guy that I, you know, I collected his cards. I had plaques made of him. I wrote him a birthday card when I was like nine or 10. And here I am now meeting him as an adult. And within an hour of meeting him, we are, you know, he's telling me about in getting very emotional talking about how his basically his father abused him and how much anger he had from that. So, you know,

those stories really, I thought, were the highlight of the process in terms of getting to these guys to, to open up. Yeah. And if I'm right in my blurb, if this is kind of a coming of age story, did you come of age? Was there something about this experience that taught you something about yourself or about life? Yeah, for sure. I mean, I, you know, I, I always wanted to be careful not to make this contrived or try to like shoehorn some epiphany and, you know, eat, pray, love style. I mean, it's, I wasn't going to find the meaning of life in seven weeks

on the road. Right. But, um, I think what I did, a couple of things that I realized were that one, that we all have a lot more in common with baseball players. And we realized that it kind of demystified the hero thing for me a little bit where, you know, I remember what it was like to see these guys as a hero as a kid for being these, you know, larger than life figures, but then to me to see how much I could relate to them as an adult and like the same things that I struggle with, we all struggle with are things that they're going through or they've gone through. It was a nice thing to take away from the book, to feel in a way closer to these players on a human level, not so much in the context of baseball.

So we've brought you here to play a game about your book, kind of about your book. And so two of the themes of this book, I think, that really came through to me while I was reading it is one, that these players have very long lives after their career, you know, their quote unquote career is over. Like they have entire careers after. And some of those careers are coaching third base for the Astros, but some of them are being a realtor or being a teacher or, you know, doing other things in the game, trying to find their way. And, you know, they're alive for a really long time and they're still interesting humans. And, you know, like a big part of what made your book so charming is that you went out and you asked them about what they'd been doing once, you know, they were no longer on camera. Another theme of your book, I think, I read this at the same time I read Lords of the

Realm. And one of the weird things about Lords of the Realm is that there's all these players that are in it, you know, players, characters from like the late 60s and early 70s during the labor wars, who now they are managers or broadcasters or politicians. about them as players and you're like, oh yeah, I mean, he was clearly destined to be a broadcaster. He was really funny even then, or he was destined to be a politician. He was, you know, really active in the union or he was a leader. He was destined to be a manager. And then he became a manager. And your book has a little bit of that too. A lot of that too, where, where they are at, what are the, what are these guys now? 50, late fifties, a lot of them, where they are in their late 50s, it sort of really does kind of seem consistent with where they were as players in their early 20s or in their 30s to the extent that we knew them. And so we're going to play a game called Let's Pre-Member some guys. And we're going to imagine if you wrote this book in 25 years and you opened up a pack of cards and you looked each of these players up and, you know, you found that one of them was, you know, say a manager.

Who, which active player would we guess that that person would be? Like basically we're saying of active players, who do we think might be a manager? We are going to be very bad at this. We have no way of knowing this. You know, in fact, I would say a third theme of your book is that you don't really know these players when they're under the spotlight. To really get to know them, you kind of have to take them to a diner 30 years later and talk to them when their guard is down and when they're matured and when they've had some time to learn a little bit about themselves. So we don't really know, but I think there are clues or maybe we're going to

find out if there are clues. And so we're going to see if we can have some guesses for who these people are going to be in the future. All right. All right. It sounds fun, but you know, just disclaimer, you know, you got, we have no idea. You have no idea. You're going to be terrible. I will probably, yeah. I'm going to be terrible. Ben is going to be, Ben specifically told me he's going to be terrible at it. That's totally fine. By the way, speaking of this, Victor Martinez, I read today has a horse in the kentucky derby this year assuming there's a kentucky derby ken rosenthal reported this and so if we had had horse owner a professional horse owner what do they call them what do they call a prize horse i don't know uh then victor martinez

a couple years ago would have been the guess so that's how that's the game right who's gonna own a horse in the kentucky derby not one of the categories but here we go of years ago would have been the guess. So that's how that's the game, right? Who's going to own a horse in the Kentucky Derby? Not one of the categories, but here we go. All right. I would have said Johnny Cueto for that one. He's big on the horses on his Instagram. Yeah, but they don't. His horses are not pictures of health. No. Okay. Good point. All right. First one, inspired by Rance Mullenix, who was the first person you visited, who will be a local realtor or else another chamber of commerce style local business owner? So like I'm thinking like Andre Dawson, for instance, owns a funeral home. That's a chamber of commerce type of business, I would say. Realtor, chamber, like a booster for the community.

business i would say uh realtor chamber like a booster for the community uh if you're a uh i would say a state lawyer is a chamber of commerce type business owner car salesman would that count if you own a dealership yeah only if you're active like cj wilson owns dealerships but i don't i mean on the lot you have to be you gotta sell you gotta close if you're not closing deals, to me, it doesn't count. Now, if you own a used car lot, I would say own a garage would count. Car dealership, I think, is a little much. All right, so we're talking hyper-local small business owner, all right? Okay. And this one's a tough one. Okay, so Brad, do you have a pick? I do, I do, yes. Who is it? I would go with Eric Sogard.

Eric Sogard, that's a good pick. Yeah, he's a CPA, right? Yeah, I see him just, I can see him at the holiday party, you know, just kind of by the punch bowl. I don't know, he kind of has that small town charm feel to him. That's a good one. All right, Ben, do you have a guess? Yeah, I'm going to go with Dan Vogelbach. kind of by the punch bowl. I don't know. He kind of has that small town charm feel to him. That's a good one. All right, Ben, do you have a guess?

Yeah, I'm going to go with Dan Vogelbach. I like him as a realtor because, A, he's a first baseman. He's always chatting people up. That's sort of part of the job. Oh, yeah, the mayor. That would prepare you well for that occupation. And he's very much a people person. He kind of crosses barriers in the clubhouse. Apparently, he's best friends with Yusei Kikuchi. Yusei Kikuchi named his son after Daniel Vogelbach, even though there, like all the other players' kids play with Vogelbach when they're at the park. Like he's just the guy everyone gets along with. And he is not a star, which I think

helps. I know he was literally an all-star this past year, but you know, not one with the highest expectations. And Brad, as you pointed out, when I emailed you this list of occupations, it is less likely now that a player would end up being a realtor or some small business owner than it was in the era of the players that you were trying to seek out here, because players are making such major money right now, if they're in the majors for any significant amount of time, that they don't actually have to do this. So it has to be someone who would want to do it, who just wants the socializing and the glad handing. And so I'm going with Daniel Vogelbach. I'm glad you mentioned that, Ben, because I also thought that it would have to be somebody who wanted to do it. And I struggled with this. I'll tell you, my pick is Lance McCullers,

who is way too good for realtor work, unless you think he really wants to be a realtor and so i was i with all of these i had a hard time you know that with this book it's interesting because in a sense this is the first group the first generation of players that got really rich playing baseball and they got rich enough that like carlton Fisk never has to come down from his castle and see you. But also they're a generation before they're getting as rich, you know, super, super rich, right? Like you mentioned Don Carmen as an underdog. And Don Carmen made $1.9 million. The most active pitcher on Don Carmen's comps at baseball reference is travis wood

who retired a couple years ago and he made 22 million dollars and i don't you know besides that there's the fact that players today are you know they're publicly known before they even get drafted they're scout they're rated by the public as prospects throughout their minor league career. They have much more of, to some degree of a national profile because of how much of their existence is supported by fantasy baseball players. local stars. And so I wondered whether the player, whether the experiences that you had with your players would be replicable in 25 years at all, whether there are any commons in Major League Baseball today. So I struggled with that. But that is all to say that, you know, if you think about lottery winners, I think that probably of people who win the lotto, like 70% retire and just are professional hobbyists for the rest of their life. And maybe 15 or 20%, you know, devote themselves to some creative endeavor or philanthropical

endeavor that they really care a lot about. And now they finally have the financial resources to do it. But then I think 10% don't even quit their job. They just keep going in and like stalking the vending machines because they're like, you know, they like, they like work, they like whatever they, there's something about that personality that I can't personally relate to, that most of us, I think, probably can't personally relate to, but they just like being out there in public with a role to play. And to me, Lance McCullers is the first name I thought of. He seems like a person who genuinely likes being around people and would not want to give that up. By the way, one last thing about this. We're assuming that nobody who makes $20 million will want to be a realtor and work for,

I don't know what realtors make. What do realtors make? Successful ones maybe make $130,000 and median ones maybe make $60,000. I'm guessing. We're assuming they wouldn't want to do that, but almost every baseball player, including many super rich ones, take jobs as coaches where they get paid about the same, right? And they work until they retire. So most players even today do not actually retire and go lounge about in repose for the rest of their lives. They actually do get up every day and put on a literal uniform and go to work. That keeps them close to the game, which it does. Right. Yeah, no, it's true. I wasn't sure whether that gives evidence to my theory that there will still be realtors like

Rance Mullenix or not. But anyway, Lance McCullers. All right. I was prepared to talk for that one. The rest I'm just making up. Okay. Okay. All right. Small town mayor. Small town mayor. Well, this is pretty uninformed. Just based on his look, I put down Mike Moustakis. Oh, okay. All right. I'm taking Yadier Molina, which maybe he's setting his sights too low. If it's a small town mayor, he could be mayor of St. Louis if he wanted to.

He could rise to some higher political office probably. wanted to. He could rise to some higher political office probably, but I think I could very easily see him retiring to Puerto Rico. And just, you know, the Molina name is so legendary that if you just put his name on the ballot, he'd probably be elected without having to campaign or do anything. And he might like it. We have seen some players become local politicians after they retire from baseball. Like, well, Raul Mondesi comes to mind, although he also comes to mind for corruption and getting indicted and I think possibly being imprisoned or at least sentenced to a prison sentence. So I don't think that Molina would go that way. But I just think he has the status and could easily do it if he wanted to.

Like I thought about Mike Trout as mayor of Millville, for instance, I could imagine that, but I just don't know if he would want to even be in that very small spotlight. He might just want to go to his local diner without having to worry about politics. But Yadier Molina, I could see it just as sort of a status thing in his hometown. Yeah, I thought about Madison Bumgarner just because A, he is the person most associated with a small town in all of baseball right now. And B, he is the person most associated

with a second job at this point in all of baseball. So it seemed plausible that he would go back and be the king of Madison Bumgarnerville. But I ended up going with steven vote who is from visalia i believe which is up near you brad yeah yeah yeah and that's definitely a small smallish town uh and he is extremely personable extremely social beloved in every clubhouse he's ever stepped in. And beloved really for years after. He just leaves a residue of loveliness in clubhouses. And so he seemed to me to best embody what Sean Casey did when they used to call him the mayor.

And I think I vaguely recall Vogt being talkative from behind the plate when he was catching. But that's only vaguely that I think I remember that. I remember some catcher from that generation of a couple years ago having that reputation. All right. All right. What about a national politician? A big shot.

Yeah, I got Sean Doolittle for that. Me too. I thought about Sean Doolittle for every category on here. I thought, is this where I'm putting Sean Doolittle? Yeah, this is where I put Sean Doolittle. I thought about Chris Bryant or something he came to mind, but Doolittle's just been so outspoken compared to the typical baseball player that I could see it. most uh as the best way for him to affect the world you know like i could see him doing a lot of powerful things and you know voting on uh on judges or whatever i didn't know if that was how he would choose to channel his energy yeah i but it was a good pick i went with brent suitor i have

no idea if brent suitor is interested in politics politics or I do know he's interested in changing the world because he did a video on MLB with MLB about climate change. Yeah. And he went to Harvard. So he grew up in he was born in Chicago and then he grew up in Ohio and then he went to Harvard and then he grew up in Ohio, and then he went to Harvard, and then he went, of course, now he plays in Wisconsin. And I feel like there's a boom right now in presidential candidates who grew up in sort of the middle of the country, went to Harvard, but then after Harvard returned to the middle of the country. So, you know, you've got your Mayor Pete and you've got your Tom Cotton and your Josh Howley. And there's just something about that, like going to Harvard, but then going back

that seems to like, like, like the media loves that. And they consider you an instantly credible politician if you do that journey. And Brent Souter did do that journey. He's also, he's very funny. i believe he's even funny in real life not just for a baseball player but i think he's real funny uh based on the the team movie parodies that the brewers did which i always found him to be the star the the true charismatic star of and which if i'm not mistaken he might have actually had a creative role in in producing i'm going with brent suitor is being truly funny an asset to a national politician

it's debatable it is debatable al franken was i i think a uh yeah minnesota to harvard to minnesota guy bill clinton was a was, what was a Little Rock to Harvard to Little Rock guy. So leaving Harvard and going back to the Midwest seems like a, anyway, he just got drafted.

It's not like he went back to be the mayor. Anyway, see here, national broadcaster. I've got Jamie Moyer. Oh, interesting. I've never Jamie Moyer. Oh, interesting. I've never heard his voice.

No, I'm just kidding. He's not still playing, is he? Oh, he's not even active. You got me. I guess I actually have to cross mine off because I had said CeCe Sabathia, and he's not active, so never mind. Yeah. I feel like I was stumped, so I just said, when in doubt, guess Jamie Moyer.

Yeah. Yeah, I considered Trevor Bauer because he certainly seems eager to be in front of the camera, and he has been on MLB Network. But I went with Chris Archer because he has done the job. He was in some broadcast booths, and he did a very good job. Everyone seemed to really like him, and he seemed to more or less be enjoying himself. So I don't know whether that's still something he'd be interested in long term but if it is I could see that happening and his career as a pitcher has sort of stagnated in a way so maybe that will make him more interested in

wanting to pursue that I had Sabathia but my backup is Justin Verlander. I don't know what percentage of national broadcasters are stars, but it feels like it's a very high percentage, particularly if you're talking about people who have a career as a national broadcaster over the course of a couple decades. So I really limited it to the stars and Verlander seems to have a lot to say and is, you know, broadly un, inoffensive while also being fairly funny. And so he seemed reasonable. Also, stat savvy these days,

which is probably going to be a prerequisite for the next generation. All right. What about a beloved local team specific broadcaster? All right. Well, I had, having watched many games here in the coliseum although he's no longer there i have josh reddick as kind of a like a like a dallas braden type you know you see him on those local sportscasts doing some kind of pranks or

antics or silly little gimmicks and stuff i i would love it because he is very dry and very serious, but you never know whether the seriousness is real or an act. And I could see enjoying years of not quite knowing whether he was intimidating me or doing a bit. Well, and if you're as big a wrestling fan as he is, you've got to have some character in there. That's a great one. I went with Ryan Zimmerman, who's just Mr. National.

He is so closely associated with that franchise, the first draft pick of the franchise, and the walk-off when Nationals Park opened. And I think he is the second longest tenured player with one team after Yadier Molina now. So he's been there forever. I don't have that great a sense of his personality, frankly, and I don't know how interested he would be in the job. But I would think that the Nationals would want to keep him around in some sort of ambassador role.

And so if he has any interest in broadcasting, I would think the job would be his. Mine is very different. I have Yolmer Sanchez, who is... So I was trying to think of who today reminds me of Mike Kruko as a player, as being quite outgoing and also inventive. Did you guys know that Mike Kruko invented the rookie dress-up? No. that Mike Kruko invented the rookie dress up? No, which I think got I mean, I think that got kind of it's got out of his control and became something that I think has had to have a lot of

reins put on it because it became problematic. But he had I think we talked about this Ben one time years ago, like six years ago, I heard I think Kuyper tell the story of how he brought, like, I don't know, I think it was like shoes with goldfish in them and had the like, like platform shoes with goldfish in them or something like that, or funny cowboy boots and had the rookies wear them. So he was, you know, he was, he was inventing things and Yomomer sanchez invented the self-douse walk-off celebration where he runs out and instead of douses the winning run he douses himself which is very funny to watch yomer sanchez also there something that happens way too much to ever be funny is players pretending to be reporters so like you know there's eight reporters interviewing a player

and then a teammate comes up and like pretends to ask a question or holds out a water bottle. And it is like classic, like not original, unfunny baseball player stuff. And Yomar Sanchez, by far the most committed I've ever seen a person be to that bit. And had genuinely had people laughing out loud with his commitment to the bit. So, Yolmer Sanchez. Yeah, I couldn't decide how good to go with this pick. I mean, how good the player should be, because I think it's sort of skewed.

I grew up watching the Yankees and rooting for the Yankees, and the broadcasters at the time and even now were mostly really good players. And the broadcasters at the time and even now were mostly really good players. I mean, there's the odd John Flaherty in there, but you had a little bit before my time, Phil Rizzuto, and then Ken Singleton and Bobby Mercer and Jim Cott and David Cohn and Paul O'Neill. I mean, these are all really great players, in most cases better than Ryan Zimmerman, if not necessarily as closely associated with the franchise. And even across town here with the Mets, I think of Ralph Kiner and Ron Darling and Keith Hernandez, all good to great players. So that may have kind of affected my perceptions here. Whereas if you grew up listening to Jerry Remy or Dwayne Kuyper or whatever, then maybe you kind of think of it as a former marginal player who is beloved but was not really a an icon yeah i definitely do think of it as a marginal player and i could see how it would be very

different depending on what what team you're uh you're talking about all right manager future manager this one gets this one it gets thrown about all the time for active players and so who is an a future manager now? Yeah. I mean, I think this is changing a lot in the game, but for a while, so many catchers were managers. So I had Steven vote for this one. Oh yeah, there you go. And I had Jeff Mathis, who he gets mentioned from time to time as a future manager. And you just figure when you look at his stat lines that he must have managerial qualities

in order to keep his job for this long so yeah it's got to be mathis for me i thought about mathis i have found that mathis has no personal charisma though to me part of what makes him so interesting as a pitch whisperer is that like i said he does not seem like he does not have the brad osmus face you know like he's not talkative he doesn't seem like he would be a leader and so it's hard for me to imagine him giving a speech but it probably would have been hard to imagine ned yost giving a speech if you were a fan in the 80s and yost never had to, I went with Yadier Molina for this might be too good to be a manager, but I just feel like you're looking for, obviously you're looking for,

you know, a catcher is a good starting point and someone who's smart and has a reputation of being smart, uh, is good. But also I felt like Molina just has way too much competitiveness in him to go, you know, to go you know to go quietly to be a what a local mayor it could be yeah so I just felt like he like he's not going

to be satisfied being a roving catching instructor he's not going to be satisfied being a hitting coach he's not going to be satisfied with anything in the world except being a cat being a hitting coach. She's not going to be satisfied with anything in the world except being a manager and getting ejected from seven games a year. Yeah, I can see it. All right. A scowling hermit like Carlton Fisk was in your book. Yeah. I feel like there were more scowling hermits back in that era. I do. Yes, me too.

Thank you! Yes! I had a hard time. I was looking at the list of star players. I'm like, that's a nice guy. I mean, you guys tell me you know these guys maybe personally more, but just from more just the baseball optics of it, I had Madison Bumgarner, but for all I know, he might be like the sweetest guy. I also had Bumgarner.

I thought about Zach Granke, but I didn't know if he was scowling, really. I also had Bumgarner. I thought about Zach Granke, but I didn't know if he was scowling, really. I could certainly see him as a hermit, but he doesn't seem ill-natured, really. And Bumgarner seems like, I mean, I don't know that he is necessarily a bad guy or anything, but he is kind of a red ass. And I would think that if some anonymous person came up to him in 30 years and said, hey, I drew your baseball card. Can I talk to you because I'm writing a book about it? You would say, get off my ranch or whatever. Of course, we have to save this podcast somewhere where we can actually do this experiment in 25 years, right?

Yes, of course. Everything we ever predict is tracked. Yeah. But yeah, I had that same thought because I don't know whether it's because players are so accessible now, you know, with social media and everything that we feel like we know them or they're just sort of forced to speak like you can't really be a hermit anymore because there's just always a microphone in your face and you're kind of a public figure and fans expect to have access to you and maybe players are just used to that so they don't even try to be scowling hermits anymore because it's just not really viable so i don't know if it's that or whether there's just a good crop of stars right now who are really personable and and young and charismatic i feel like the game's gotten so much younger in a way that like you don't have the washed up angry veterans as much. Right. Right. Yeah. I had a hard time as well. And ultimately I chose Zach Granke again. I like you. I'm not sure scowling won't be the right adjective. On the other hand, he does scowl a bit. And I think that when he throws his last pitch, he's just going to walk straight into the cornfield and we're never going to see him again. When he throws his last pitch, he's just going to walk straight into the cornfield and we're never going to see him again. Yes, I agree with that.

Although he might be a scout or something. That's the other thing. It's like he moonlights as a scout now and he seems interested in analytics and player evaluation and all that. So he may want to remain around the game in some capacity. And if he does, then he won't be completely inaccessible. All right. Extremely rich by other means. So basically, who is going to make a fortune after the game? And every once in a while,

you stumble upon one of these stories of a player who has been retired for 35 years and invented a kind of algae that eats carbon dioxide and now is worth like $7 billion. I was reading, what's that book called mint condition is that what it was called the baseball card book from a few years ago and i didn't realize this but one of this uh the upper deck the card company was formed in a card shop named upper deck it was named after the card shop and basically just a couple local guys were talking about how they should make a card and one of them was uh was like a printer and something like a printer and

he said oh well i could make these way glossier and counterfeit cards were a big problem at the time he said well and i could handle that i could you know just do this hologram thing and you you can't uh counterfeit a hologram it just would be way too expensive for a counterfeit card and so while they're planning this some like low level major leaguer i mean not low level because he was in the majors but like a total scrub with like 12 career played appearances or pitching appearances walks in and they're like hey do you want to be part of our baseball card company and he joined and he was one of the first partners in upper deck and he ended up having a very short career and got like incredibly rich off of Upper Deck and eventually sued the company as often happens in books about baseball things. So who will be a entrepreneur or some sort of somehow extremely rich person for non-baseball thing?

I have Trevor Bauer here okay yeah yeah i think bauer would like to think that he'll be this person i don't know if he'll be this person he does emulate ewan musk and maybe he would see that for himself i went for ross stripling friend of the show i suppose in that he's been on. He is a stockbroker and he invests pretty heavily and intelligently seemingly and comes from a family of investors. I think we may have talked to him a little bit about that. And so I figure for all I know, he has already had a lucrative career. Hopefully he was shorting everything recently or else his entire wealth may have just been wiped out. But I believe in his

ability to accrue non-baseball income. Dwayne Buse is the pitcher and he made $200,000 as a baseball player and $17 million with upper deck. Oh wow. I did not have a good answer for this. I couldn't think of a good one. I couldn't even really think of a vision for what would happen, I couldn't think of a good one. I couldn't even really think of a vision for what would happen. But I picked Yasiel Puig because I could just imagine him like I could imagine him owning like a I don't know. I could just imagine him doing something. I think maybe I was too hung up on Ashton Kutcher becoming like a social media mogul. And I thought I could imagine somebody making a lot of money using social media

in a way that I don't understand and Yasiel Puig seemed like a person who I have seen on social media getting lots of likes yeah I could see Puig just like striking oil or something I could oil baron like there's nothing I would put past Yasiel Puig. And I feel like he is a, he is an extremely talented person who is in his own way, really in control of his image. And he feels like he is too restrained by baseball, but once he breaks the shackles of baseball,

he is going to find his, his fortune. Did anyone actually sign him? Not yet. Yeah, okay. All right. And last one, who will be a too active baseball dad? So father of a young athlete who maybe has a little bit too much, you know, a little too much.

He's a little too much. He's a little too much. I took this more, so this could be like the over-eager dad, but I took it more as like just the so nice and so loving dad that he's just always going above and beyond. I picked Matt Boyd for this. Oh, okay. I believe he blurbed your book. He did.

And so when I, not just saying that because he blurbed it, but when I, in my interactions with him, the guy was just so sweet. And I was just thinking, wow, this guy, I could just see him being like at every game and recital forever. Why did he blurb your book? How did that happen? Well, because he's one of Don Carmen's clients. And so Carmen is Scott Boris's is one of his staff psychologists. And I said to

Carmen, are there any current guys you work with that you think would like kind of appreciate this and some of the themes that I'm going with? And he's like, yeah, you know, Matt Boyd is someone who's super reflective and intellectual. He'll really, he'll really like this. So that's how that came about. I went with Todd Frazier, who just seems extremely dad-like. He is a dad, which is one prerequisite for this position. I think he has multiple kids. And I read on Wikipedia that his name now graces the Little League field in his town called Frazier Fieldhouse, which that seems like maybe you'd put pressure on your kids

to be players because it's Fraser Field and you can't embarrass Fraser on his field. And he just, he seems like, I don't know, he's the kind of guy who seems like he would just be calling into like sports talk radio. I don't know. He's just, he's very New York and I could see him being an overactive baseball dad. I was trying to think of someone who is the progeny of an overactive baseball dad on the theory that like father, like son, and that maybe a player would rebel against his dad who had been too active as a baseball dad, but then would find himself falling into the same habits and would look back and think oh no i've just become like my dad but be unable to escape that cycle of baseball dadness but i couldn't really think of anyone because uh colby rasmus is no longer in the league and no one else came immediately so colby rasmus is such a good answer i know but not active so todd frazier uh i i actually cheated i went with non-active although i don't know if he officially retired.

I'm just going with Jose Bautista because Jose Bautista feels, I mean, he was just, he was so good at baseball after essentially like building himself up from the floor. And in the same way that like, you ted williams was was supposed to be an impatient coach because uh he did it so why couldn't everybody else i feel like jose batista would just look at maybe see projects everywhere he goes and be frustrated that uh that other people weren't as uh successful at at it as he was so i I don't know. Yeah. He's pretty active on Twitter too. He's constantly following people. It seems like it might translate.

Yeah. And you know, I mean, you can just imagine, right? Like, okay, so your dad's Jose Bautista and you're like,

you're like, maybe you're like a real hot shot high school pitcher. And every time you pitch to him and he hits a home run, he just like flips that bat yep that's right in your face all right uh we did it that was all of them yeah i wonder whether we'll get even one right between the three of us yeah well 25 years put it on the calendar yeah, alright Okay, well, the book is out Everyone go get it

Again, it's called The Wax Pack On the Open Road in Search of Baseball's Afterlife Usually I say available wherever books are sold And I guess that's still true But books are being sold at fewer places right now However, you can still help out a local bookseller And go to IndieBound at least And order without actually stepping foot somewhere now. However, you can still help out a local bookseller and go to IndieBound at least and

order without actually stepping foot somewhere. And you can find Brad on Twitter at Brad Palookjin. You can find the book on Twitter at WaxpackBook. Your book, by the way, has many more followers than you do personally, which I don't know if that's humbling or just a testament to the book and the concept for the book and the marketing that you've put into this thing that people are already jazzed about it without mostly having read it. And you can also go to waxpackbook.com to get more info about it. So thanks again, Brad, and congrats. And I hope everyone enjoys it as much as I did. Thank you.

And one last thing. It's been really cool. You know, this obviously is a difficult time for everyone. But what's been really neat is to see several baseball writers that come together who have books coming out now to kind of help each other, interview each other on Zoom and co-promote. So we've got a whole group that's come together called the together called the pandemic baseball book club which is pbbclub.com and you have a whole range of books and projects and publishers represented with people that are that are coming out with books right now so it's great to see people supporting each other yeah all right well we'll take a quick break and then I will be back

with the person who helped make this book a reality, Rob Taylor of University of Nebraska Press, who will tell us about the economics of baseball books and how the press picks baseball books and how you can perhaps get a baseball book published yourself. of. And tell us you love us So you don't feel alone So today we had Brad on to talk about The Wax Pack, which, as we mentioned, was published by the University of Nebraska Press. On episode 1459, we had Paul Dixon on to talk about his book about sign-stealing, The Hidden Language of Baseball. That was also published in its updated edition by the University of Nebraska Press.

And on episode 1372, we had Joe Bonomo on to talk about his book about Roger Angel, No Place I Would Rather Be. That was also published by UNP. And in the past several years, so many of the baseball books I've read or have wanted to read have borne the stamp of the University of Nebraska Press. And today I wanted to find out how that came to be the case and a little bit about the economics of baseball books in general. So I'm joined now by someone who would know, Rob Taylor, the Senior Acquisitions Editor

at the University of Nebraska Press. Hey, Rob. Hey, Ben. Thanks so much for that. Thanks for having me on and for having so many authors on to talk about their books. It really, really helps them find readers and appreciate that very much. Well, you make it easy because you have so many baseball authors and they write so many great books that it's hard not to have some of them on. And I guess, can we just go through what

appealed to you about the Wax Pack as kind of a case study in what draws your eye or what makes a book make sense for UNP to publish? Sure. Well, you know, with that book, I think what immediately hit me when Brad reached out and queried me and sent me a proposal was that it was a kind of baseball book that I hadn't seen before conceptually. And that always helps if you're thinking about what's going to make a new baseball book succeed. Has it been done before? What's its potential to find an audience? And I just hadn't seen anything like that. And I thought he had a real vision for just making it clear it was going to be just a one-of-a-kind baseball book with, I think, a lot of natural appeal because he was undertaking this road trip to go find these players, some of whom he had

attachments to when he was younger, and he was going to try to seek them out and talk to them a little bit about baseball, but a lot about their life since. So I think that was probably really the main appeal with that book. And the book, for people who have picked it up and maybe started reading it, I think it really lives up to that appeal. Yeah. So you've been with UNP since, what, 2003? And I guess by then it was already sort of a hotbed of baseball book publishing to an extent, but UNP goes back to the early 40s, right, and was not always that way. So how did that come to be the case? way. So how did that come to be the case? Sure. Yeah. So the press opened in 1941, so almost 80 years ago now. And for its first few decades, it was a pretty traditional

humanities-based university press, and still is to a large degree, publishing Western history and indigenous studies and some related areas. But yes, about late 80s into the early 90s, we had an editor-in-chief who then became a director named Dan Ross. And Dan saw the appeal in publishing about sports. And I think he saw it as a way for the press to kind of build out and expand on the Bison Books list. And I probably should have mentioned that first, because that was established in 1960, the Bison Books imprint, as a way to bring lower-priced books about Western history, Native American history, Western culture, that kind of thing. And they were able to get those books into some

non-traditional outlets, not just bookstores. And that imprint became kind of the press's calling card. And into the 80s and into the 90s, the press reissued a lot of previously published work under that imprint that, say, bigger publishers had let go. And Dan really saw sports as a way to add to the Bison list. And that's when he was able to acquire books like the John McGraw biography, Roger Kahn's books that we reissued, The Celebrant by Eric Ralph Greenberg, Bang the Drunk Slowly, and Mark Harris's other baseball novels. And so that was really the genesis of the baseball list, which then turned into more or less of a sports list. But that started in the mid, early to mid 90s. And then by about the end of the 90s, the press was starting to do its own

front list sports books that had, you know, books that had never been published. You're a nonprofit, right? And reading from your website, you've published more than 6,000 books. Can you give people some sense of the scale of the press compared to maybe some of the big name publishers that they're aware of or how the financials of a university press differ from, say, a big New York publisher? Yeah. So among the university presses, I mean, you can't really compare the revenues to a commercial publisher

because they are publishing so much true scholarly work that's appealing and targeted mainly at scholars first or people in graduate school and getting PhDs. And, you know, it's very targeted, peer-reviewed, scholarly work. And, you know, that's a model that has always not really been built on the bottom line. You know, it's not the kind of publishing that, say, people think of in terms of the New York publishing world. It's a completely different model, and it's one that, especially in an age where library sales have been declining, is a bit tenuous. And that's why a lot of university presses have had to adjust, especially in the last 15 to 20 years, and publish more general interest books and books that can

reach a wider readership because that's a model that economically helps them stay on solid footing as much as they can. And you always hear that baseball is the sport that inspires the most great writing. And I don't know whether that's just baseball writers patting themselves on the back or whether that's actually true. It seems true. Certainly, there's a long tradition of literary fiction and nonfiction about baseball. But I read a 2012 New York Times article about UNP in which you were quoted. And the Hall of Fame librarian said at the time, he estimated that about 300 to 400 baseball books were published a year.

I don't know whether that's still accurate, but if that's the case, how do you think that compares to other sports? And what accounts for the fact that there are so many baseball books, particularly at this time of year? You know, looking back at that article and Jim's quote, you know, if anything, that number could be bigger now because of the wider availability of self-publishing options, you know, which has really only kind of grown since then. And so that number is probably still about right. It could be higher if you could track down every single self-published book. So, well, and I would say, too, there's an old quote. I heard this years ago for the first time. I don't know who said it, but it was something along the lines of, the smaller the ball, the more literary the writing about the sport or something like that. And, you know, maybe to a degree that that could be true.

And, you know, maybe to a degree that that could be true. You know, I think the output of baseball publishing far surpasses any other sport. And, you know, part of that is traced back to, well, it's just been played professionally, you know, longer than any other sport. And so that's probably part of it. You know, other than that, I just, I don't know, in terms of the continued output, it probably is going to still rival or surpass the other sports. And I think that just maybe more people who still love it and follow it, want to write about it than other sports. I, I don't know if there's really a good explanation other than, you know, I mean, that's kind of a surface level explanation, but I think it's still largely true. Yeah. I mean, people talk about baseball's older audience and maybe that has something to do with

it. Maybe older people who tend to love baseball tend to be the ones writing books, especially historical books or reading books or having the time to read books. And so I guess that could have something to do with it. But I have had the experience myself of sending book proposals around. And in my second book, we were pitching some bigger New York publishers and a lot of them said, oh, we like the idea, but baseball books don't sell anymore. We heard that pretty consistently. And I know that other baseball authors have heard that. And fortunately, we found at least a couple editors who disagreed.

And the book sold fairly well for a baseball book. But what creates that perception if there are so many baseball books that are sold every year? Do they actually not sell? And if so, why do they keep getting published? Or why do people think that they don't sell if they do? Yeah, well, I think your experience working with commercial presses shows that for the right projects, and if you find the right editor, they'll still jump on projects. But I do think in terms of the New York commercial side of the business, there has been a drop-off, I think not just in baseball books, but sports

publishing in general. And I don't have anything to go on to back that up other than anecdotally, but I think if you look at the bookshelves, if you go into or when you're able to go into a store or look online, if you're seeing newer sports books from the bigger publishers, they're going to be bigger, maybe celebrity driven or authored books. books that those publishers know unquestionably, they're going to be able to move thousands of copies, hundreds of thousands of copies. And if not, they're, you know, increasingly just probably going to pass on sports. And I don't know why that is either, but that leaves the mid-list publishers and the smaller publishers to have the opportunity to be in this category. And that's where it benefits the smaller independent publishers and the university presses. Yeah, and there are certain books that I've read of yours that I've thought, boy, this is so well-tailored to my interests and my interests specifically

that I wonder how many people out there there are who would be interested in this book. I'm glad it exists, but I don't know if it would have a huge audience. So to what extent does the potential sales of a book factor into your decision? I mean, you are a nonprofit, but you do have to remain viable and continue to operate. So there has to be some sales potential, I imagine. But how do you evaluate that? And do you kind of do like a one for us, one for them kind of thing where you take one that you think will sell and that will maybe help fund a few others that you really like but aren't sure will sell? Yeah, well, when you're looking at a book and when I'm looking at a proposal, and this goes back to what I said earlier about Brad's book, The Wax Pack, either with previous books or if they're a first-time author?

What can they say about, well, here's how I think I can reach my audience. Here are my connections that I think can help the book and really showing a vision for how they can try to help promote on their own. I mean, that's really key to work with a publisher at our scale, you know, whether it's the university presses or the more like the mid list publishers who don't have these giant marketing budgets and have to be a little bit more nimble and more targeted with how they're going to try to reach their readers. And, you know, fortunately, we've published so many baseball books, you know, we're able to identify our readerships for these different kinds of books and how to find them. And we have reliable outlets we can go to, to try to get them publicized or, you know, run an excerpt.

And there are probably fewer of those outlets now than there were five, 10 years ago. But what we find with most of these books, the baseball books that we take on, we feel pretty good about our ability to sell them at a level that works for us and makes them successful. And for us, that's probably a level much, much different than what a traditional commercial publisher is looking at in terms of

the bottom line. Right. Can you give any specifics about what a typical print run would be or what sort of sales you would be looking for to sort of break even on a baseball book? sort of sales you would be looking for to sort of break even on a baseball book? Well, you know, so much depends on the input, you know, the length of a book and, you know, what it's going to cost to typeset it and then print it. So it's kind of hard to quantify that. But what I'll say, you know, just about print runs in general, and again, this is sort of qualified by the notion that, you know, nowadays you don't have to print a giant number of books on your first printing because of the print-on-demand capabilities that are available. And even the bigger publishers utilize these now so that they don't have to have so many books on the warehouse floor. But, you know, for us, a first printing is probably anywhere from 1,500 to 3,000 and maybe sometimes even a little higher,

but that's probably about the range for a lot of them. And again, that's just sort of, that's the first printing and you can always go back for more. And roughly how many proposals for baseball books do you receive in a year and what percentage are you able to give a green light to? are you able to give a green light to? Oh, gosh. You know, I probably get, well, just in terms of baseball, I mean, certainly dozens and into hundreds. I haven't actually thought about that for a while, but I certainly see hundreds. And only a small portion can I really say yes to. I mean, I say yes to about 15 to 20 per year at the most. opening day, but is there an opportunity to space things out a little bit? If everyone is publishing their books within a two-month window, then doesn't that create more competition? Does it

still work out in the long run that you wouldn't want to zig where everyone's zagging and say, well, they're all publishing their baseball books in March to May, so we'll publish ours. We'll space them out a little bit so that we'll have some scarcity on our side. Or is it just that this is the time of year when people typically want to buy baseball books? Well, you're right. And we have tried to deal with that both ways, maybe publishing some May and sometimes into June. But by then, you know, you're halfway into the season. So we usually try to get them out March, April, May, just with the hope that they're getting the full run of the season and the most publicity opportunities, marketing opportunities, and just giving it that longer run. But you're right, that does put you up against every other publisher bringing out baseball books for the spring. And I think it is just kind of a

little bit of a herd mentality with that. But you're probably better off, I think, just getting them out early in the season when people have been waiting a few months and they're ready for the season and they want to engage with it again and read about it. I just feel like that's probably the way to go for now. it. And I just feel like that's probably the way to go for now. And if you had maybe a big biography or autobiography by a player and nothing about that player had been published, you could maybe put it later in the season and it probably would allow it to stand out and get past that first wave. But I think either way, I think it works either way. And another thing that struck me and Travis Sacek when we were working on the MVP machine is that this is a book about how players and teams are trying to optimize performance and

project performance. And it didn't seem to us like the same level of data was brought to bear in book sales, you know, that people were necessarily moneyballing book sales. Because when we were working on that book and we were talking to the publisher about titles or what the cover looks like, that sort of thing, they would say, well, we think this will sell and our sales team thinks this will sell. But it was never really based on anything, at least that we could tell. They didn't say, well, we think this will sell because we did a focus group or we polled the potential audience and they said they like this title better or we know that historically, you know, titles with this number of words sell better or something. I don't know whether it's possible to do that, but does it just go entirely by gut feel when you're evaluating a proposal? You just, you say, well, we think this will work.

There's no way to sort of, I don't know, base it on past performance of books. Not that you would want to, I guess, go entirely data-centric or you'd end up publishing the same things over and over that have succeeded before. But still, it's something I wonder about because you're making these decisions. And it seems like a lot of the time publishers are just kind of going based on what the group internally thinks will sell without necessarily a lot of numbers behind it, at least that were shared with us. Well, and you can, as a publisher, what you're relying on when you've published other books in the category is, yeah, to a large degree, you're relying on books that you've published in that category and how successful they've been. Or maybe they haven't

been successful. And that kind of modeling is really just the starting point. And this is not available to authors unless they want to subscribe to it. And I'm not even sure if you can sign up as an author, but you can get numbers through publishers can subscribe to a book scan and they can get data that informs about sales figures up to a point. And that can help when they're looking at a book that they think is targeted to a similar readership. But I think it is true. A lot of it is sort of gut instinct. And you're looking at all those inputs in terms of where's this going to fit in the category? Who's the author? What's their platform as an author? How are they going to be able to help publicize and sell the book? And that's

probably how it's functioned for decades, than, you know, than it being sort of a analytics-based kind of evaluation. Yeah. It's too bad it can't be, but... And are there certain books in the catalog, certain baseball books that are sort of consistent sellers from year to year? They're just kind of the perennials, the evergreen ones that you can count on for a certain level of interest year after year? Well, yeah. In terms of the backlist of what we've published, there's still a readership that still buys books like The Celebrant and Satchel Pages, Maybe I'll Pitch Forever. Those kinds of things, those books have been in print forever and ever and still keep selling.

And in terms of looking at it more contemporary, I think biographies of players from the somewhat obscure to the well-known are always reliable. Because so many baseball fans and followers want to read about the lives of players and the eras that they played in. And I think the biography still always has potential to sell books about teams in certain eras. If they're able to bring out kind of a time and place and a cultural element, have kinds of books have enduring appeal, you know, and I think there's always going to be an opportunity to keep publishing new work along those lines. Yeah, I've joked with other baseball authors about the fact that it seems like there will eventually be a baseball book about every team that has ever played, because every spring I see books coming out, and it's not necessarily like dynasties

or World Series winners. It's teams that you haven't thought of for years, but someone remembers fondly or thinks is representative of something that was happening in society at the time and has a tie-in to the baseball story. And so there are so many of those that you think that team, that team has a

book now, but people find book length things to say about them and people want to read. And there've been a lot of those, obviously from the forties into the fifties, sixties and seventies, fewer on the eighties and into the nineties. But I, I suspect those are coming because we're, we're, we're far enough removed. And those books are going to be, you know, publishers are going to respond to those books. I know I would if I got the right one. And how has the fact that people are not currently walking into bookstores and buying books affecting you personally and the publishing industry in general? I mean, obviously a lot of sales have migrated online in recent years, but with this pandemic, with some of

the uncertainty in the economy and with the temporary closures of bookstores, I imagine that's not the ideal environment in which to launch new books. So how are you trying to compensate for that? And have you seen any effects that you can measure thus far? Yeah, well, just speaking personally, this time of year is really meaningful to me on a couple of levels. I mean, just like anybody else who follows baseball, I await opening day and it's such a special time of the year. And it's the time of the year when I know all these new books are coming and I have high hopes for them. And also just as an aside for the last couple of years,

I've played baseball in an adult wood bat league. And so that really has kicked up my, it really kicked up my love for the game after not playing for so many years. And so that's off for the foreseeable future too. And so that's just been sort of a personal part of how the absence of it has made it that much harder to deal with. But, you know, with the books, I think there's still, if anything, while baseball is out, and of course we hope it comes back much sooner than later. But books, I think, are one of the few ways right now that people can stay interested

and stay engaged and without the games being played on TV. And so I think for a lot of books, this could be a good thing. It could help sell them. And it's being helped by your podcast and a lot of other podcasts that focus on baseball or books like Justin McGuire's Baseball by the Book and some others. Because I think that's really what people are left with right now who miss baseball. And I think there are a lot of new books that are going to help baseball fans while they wait for it to come back. And are there any particular books that you've acquired or helped acquire during your tenure at UNP that you're particularly proud of, whether they were big hits financially or whether they were just something you thought was really important and were able to give it a home that it couldn't find elsewhere?

really important and were able to give it a home that it couldn't find elsewhere? Sure. Well, if I go back to the very beginning, one of the first books that I acquired was a biography of Trish Speaker by an author named Timothy Gay. And so that book is special to me because it was really the first original new book that I acquired at the Press. And there have been so many along the way that I've been grateful to have the opportunity to acquire and work on. But if I could just name a couple, I mean, one book that was a really big deal for us was Felipe Alou's autobiography, co-authored with Peter Karasotis from a couple of years ago, because that for us was a real move up in terms of the visibility of the author. And that's probably the biggest book that I've acquired so far. And a couple more that I'd like to mention that I've really been grateful for the opportunity to

work on and some other books that are in the pipeline. More recently, we published Jeremy Beer's biography of Oscar Charleston, which we were lucky to win the 2019 Sabre Seymour Medal, which is awarded to best baseball book of the year. A few years back, published a book called Home Team by Rob Garrett, which is a sort of a cultural history of the San Francisco Giants from really the move from New York up to the building of the new ballpark and the sort of the turbulent history of that period. I'm also really excited about just a few months here, we're going to be publishing along with Saber, a partnership with Saber, Saber's 50 at 50, which is a collection of what Saber has chosen as the most representative work by Saber members since Saber's inception.

And we partnered with them on that. And we're really looking forward to bringing that book out in June and early July and building on that relationship that we have with Sabre, both in terms of working with them over the years as both their distributor, but also the relationship that we have with Sabre readers who have been so good about buying and supporting our books over the last 20 plus years. And I guess lastly, because we have a lot of aspiring writers in our audience and people who will occasionally reach out to ask for advice about getting a baseball book published, what are some pieces of advice that you could dispense about how to come up with an idea that would intrigue you or

other publishers and how to put together a proposal, what you're looking for essentially, or some of the mistakes maybe that some aspiring authors make? Well, I would say in terms of what goes into a book proposal, we have guidelines on our website and there are so many books and other resources that go over that. I won't spend too much time on that, but I think it goes back to, if you're trying to write a baseball book, you really just should spend a lot of time on the idea itself and whether or not there are competing books. Is it really book lengths? Are you going to be able to have the material to put it together to make it book lengths? And I see a lot of that.

I see a lot of stuff that comes in and it's not even book length. And some authors don't even know what that is. But I think that you have to have an idea that doesn't have competition. You have to bring something to it in terms of your track record as a writer. What can you show us about how we know you're going to be able to make this book happen and pull it off if you're given a contract? And really don't be in a hurry. That's the other thing I would always advise. I mean, everybody wants to be published next year or the year after. A book is something that you're going to have to invest in for years in order for it to be the best that it can possibly be. And so that's what I would say, too. of the idea and how you know it's going to be able to find an audience who you think have supported similar related books in the category and what you can do as an author to help publicize it. Those are the main three things. And when most people submit a proposal,

have many of them written the book already or written a few chapters. Because I know when I did my books, we really hadn't written much at all. And it was all sort of hopeful and aspirational. And here's what we're going to do. And because of the nature of those books, we couldn't really have written them or any large chunk of them before we actually submitted. But if you're someone who's writing a biography of a long dead player, let's say, or a long ago team, you could, in theory, do some work on that before you actually get a contract if you're able to do that. So do people typically submit long proposals with a lot of the book already completed? And if so, I guess, how big a staff do you have that you're able to actually review all those things? Because I would imagine that there's a lot of reading to do when you're getting as many proposals for baseball books as you are.

Well, it's true that some people submit the barest of proposals, and sometimes that's fine. If they have a good enough idea, and they can get right to it in the pitch letter, and then they can say, well, here's my credentials. Here's who I am. You know, that sometimes is enough. But sometimes I do see not even a sample chapter because the author will say, well, I want to do this. You know, I hope this shows the vision for the book that I'm proposing, but I don't really want to start it until I have a contract. And that makes total sense.

And maybe that's kind of what you were feeling like when you were trying to sell that proposal. And that's fine too. And sometimes I'll get complete manuscripts with almost no proposal. And that's really what you don't want actually, because then you really do have to just sit with probably the first 40 to 50 pages. And sometimes that's not going to really tell you, well, where's this thing going? And that's why a proposal is really the best vehicle, along with a sample chapter or two, if you have it. And if you don't, even a short writing sample that just shows the style that you would plan to use for the book or something close to it, that's completely acceptable too. All right. Well, thank you for doing that work and providing this

service that you provide to the baseball community of getting some of these great books published that are definitely in line with my interests. And I think many of our listeners and maybe would never see the light of day if not for UNP. So we're all glad that you're out there and best of luck weathering this difficult time for book sales. Well, thanks, Ben. And thanks for providing this outlet to not just our authors, but other baseball authors who continue to write about it and continue to tell baseball history while we wait for it to come back. Yes. All right. Thank you, Rob. Thank you, Ben. All right. I wanted to mention that if you're interested in purchasing any of the University of Nebraska books that I just talked about with Rob

or the Wax Pack for that matter, those books are currently 40% off and that sale has been extended just for Effectively Wild listeners listeners so i will link to the page but it's nebraskapress.unl.edu slash baseball hyphen sale you enter the code 6bab2 when you're checking out and you get the 40 discount again check out the episode summary in the show page and the facebook group for that link i should also mention that the wax pack looks pretty good on a bookcase cover is styled as if it is a 1986 Topps card set, kind of creased and with a message about a bubblegum stick. Looks great. I'm envious of how great it looks. I want to thank everyone who has responded thus far to Meg's plea on our recent episode about supporting Fangraphs. Many

of you have purchased Fangraph subscriptions or signed up to support the podcast on Patreon, which you can do at patreon.com slash effectively wild. The following five listeners have already signed up and pledged some small monthly amount to help keep the podcast going and get themselves access to some perks. Sean O'Neill, Ryan Shores, Katie Kelly, William S. Pride, and Bern Samko. Thanks to all of you. You can join our Facebook group at facebook.com slash group slash Effectively Wild. You can rate, review and subscribe to Effectively Wild on

iTunes and other podcast platforms. Keep your questions and comments for me and Sam and Meg coming via email at podcast.fantagraphs.com or via the Patreon messaging system if you are a supporter. Thanks to Dylan Higgins for his editing assistance. Speaking of new books, I have a paperback coming out.

It's the updated edition of The MVP Machine, How Baseball's New Nonconformists Are Using Data to Build Better Players. It comes out on April 7th in handy-dandy paperback form with a new lengthy afterword that was not in the hardcover edition. So check that out if you're looking for more reading material. And we will be back with another episode a little later this week talk to you then I don't know Jack, but I'll stay sincere. Oh, my navigator's here. And Nebraska's so flat that I don't care. I'll never use this map, have a bad day. I don't know Jack, but I'll stay sincere.

Oh, my navigator's here.