Pinstripe Alley - The Pinstriped Bible is Looking for a Few Good Men and WomenBig boi dinger enthusiastshttps://cdn.vox-cdn.com/community_logos/51961/pinstripe_alley_minimal.png2012-12-28T21:31:07-05:00http://www.pinstripealley.com/rss/stream/35298932012-12-28T21:31:07-05:002012-12-28T21:31:07-05:00On Writing, Paddles, and Silences
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<p>What I lost and where I lost it, and what you might lose before you have it.</p> <p>Having a dramatic life, filled with emotional highs and lows, elating and painful events, does not necessarily fuel good writing -- at least, not if you don't have the time to let the sensations reverberate in the correct parts of your mind.</p>
<p>My teenage and early adult years were filled with explosive disruption. Speaking with a friend recently, I was trying to describe the mad intensity of that time. There was no way to encapsulate all of the mad mood swings that accompanied life then. I thought of the swirling eddies of words that came from the girl on the toadstool, writing words on the wall of a bedroom not hers, then tearing at the paint until there was nothing left but scars; arriving at a party you hadn't been told was an orgy and wondering how to tell one guest from another as they writhed around each other making pink balloon animals; borscht with beat poets in the East Village and on the way there a man selling stolen formalwear on the sidewalks -- Hey, man, tuxedo, ten dollars? Just <i>try it on, man! </i>- then being told that Dylan had just left because you couldn't find parking; rescuing a young woman supposedly kidnapped, only to realize much later that she hadn't been, her saying, "I looked at you and saw someone else" -- that someone else being someone bad -- and relating tales of dark priests prophesying dire futures, saying she might heal everyone she touched -- or was it hurt? She couldn't remember, but thought it was maybe the former.</p>
<p>I was twice condemned to Hell by zealots before I was 21 and went there each time, finding it's a nice place to live, but you wouldn't want to visit. I fell in love with a girl who dressed only in rags; when she moved the layers swirled and cut the air like swords. I dropped out of school to live with her because we had the same favorite film and ended alone in an unknown city, strangers I met showing me more kindness than she ever would again. Coming home, I lay on the floor for days thinking of the time a friend had invited me on a double date, not bothering to tell me until I arrived at the movie theater that I would be going alone. I thought of a quiet girl of whom I asked questions, her saying, "No one has ever cared what I thought about things before." When we parted, her eyes were aglow with something beautiful, a realization of self. She never spoke to me again. Then there was the large-breasted woman who was obsessed with international fishing rights. She never spoke to me again either; that was okay. I hear she's changed and is into charitable giving. I'm afraid to make further inquiries.</p>
<p>I lived every day in extremes of passion and pain. You can survive like that at that age, and the friction created by the switchbacks in the road, the tectonic plates of rebirth and self-destruction pushing against each other, fueled songs, stories, novels, plays, screenplays. I had had the technical abilities for a long time, but those days and nights made me a writer in the sense of having something to say and giving me the need to say it. When confronted with the incomprehensible, you can either <a href="http://www.casualobservermusic.net/2010/04/mark-twain-rides-an-elephant/">run away or write it down</a>. I wrote it down.</p>
<p>None of those experiences was directly applicable to baseball, but you are the sum of your history, and much about those days found its way into my baseball writing. I've never been as passionate about sports as many of my colleagues, but I was passionate about so many other things, including the <i>way </i>that we talked about a game, that elements of the mad years entered my sportswriting, animated it, and thereby did I find success.</p>
<p>Late in my twenties, I found a safe harbor from the upheavals of those years, sanctuary. I shouted "No more!" to a sparkling night sky, banished the insanity, and whitewashed the wall. I got myself a wife and a family and lived quietly.</p>
<p align="center">***</p>
<p>Sanctuary seems like a good idea, but it's not, not if you want to stay vital creatively. Now, as throughout this series, I have to add a caveat: I'm not talking about baseball analysis. If all you want to do is blog reactions to transactions, the <a class="sbn-auto-link" href="https://www.pinstripealley.com/">Yankees</a> will be signing <span>Matt Diaz</span> at least once a year for the rest of your life, so you can paint by numbers for as long as you like. That's not what I'm on about. Rather, I am referring to the life-energy and experience that provides the fuel for originality.</p>
<p>In 1966, Stephen Sondheim made a television musical out of "Evening Primrose," a short horror story about a writer (played in the film by Tony Perkins) who drops out of society to live secretly in the Macy's flagship store in Manhattan. In<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JBLhWeceLGA"> the first song</a>, he is elated by his decision:</p>
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<p><i>He steps out of the kiosk and starts wandering through the deserted store, past the wine coolers, French telephones, dog collars, ceramic bookends and into the yawning cavern of the store.</i></p>
<p>Look at it:<br>Beautiful:<br>What a place to live,<br>What a place to write!<br>I shall be inspired.<br>I shall turn out elegies and sonnets,<br>Verses by the ton.<br>At last I have a home,<br>And nobody will know,<br>No one in the world, <br>Nobody will know I am here.<br>I am free.</p>
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<p>It doesn't work that way, not when you're older. If you ever wonder why your favorite writer or songwriter (be he or she in a band or a solo performer) declines in quality as he gets older, it's because he or she is safe, has found sanctuary. When you're young, you live in the turbulent world I described above, not one identical to mine, of course, but yours. Brightly colored emotions flow into your work. Later, as the days grow quieter, or you do, your spirit calming, you have to find something to replace the demons and poets and orgies. Many never do. The quietude of sanctuary -- and sanctuary may be a synonym for age, but I don't think the change is as inevitable as that -- has cut them off from their muse.</p>
<p>Now, I am not saying that there is no such thing as pure invention, that all good writing is generated by autobiography. That's plainly not true, as I'll explain in a moment. However, for all but the most gifted at imagining, whether writers of fiction or non-fiction, there is something lost in the way of verisimilitude when the power provided by experience is replaced by craft. That is, a different kind of experience takes over; having written so many stories, songs, or even trade evaluations, you have come to understand the mechanics of creation, and therefore can do a passable imitation of inspiration even if the real thing is nowhere in the vicinity.</p>
<p>The difference between inspiration and craft can be seen in the gap between Paul McCartney in the Beatles and in his solo career, or Mark Twain in <i>Tom Sawyer </i>and <i>Tom Sawyer Abroad</i>, or, if you prefer baseball, between the early editions of the <i>Bill James Baseball Abstract </i>and the<i> </i>later ones, or between the <i>Abstract</i> and <i>The Bill James Player Ratings Book</i>. It's the difference between giving birth to something and assembling it from parts.</p>
<p align="center">***</p>
<p align="center"> </p>
<p>Since about mid-2011 I have been trying to shake loose from my sanctuary. It wasn't done for the sake of writing, it wasn't all done consciously, and I'm still unsure if I was motivated by the death instinct or the life instinct, if the point was to get one's head above the surface of the 40-year-old's day-to-day life and breathe uncompromised air or to just open one's mouth and inhale regardless of the water rushing in. Some of it may have been the product of the typical midlife crisis, and some the product of a failing constitution -- I have been battling cancer and other illnesses since I was 30, and the war to stay alive changes you in that you are so busy trying to save yourself that you might wake up one day and find that you're no longer worth saving, having given over so much of your time, energy, and initiative to pills and therapies and men in white coats that there is no part of you left. "We had to destroy the village in order to save it," a soldier supposedly said during the Vietnam War. That <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mgQ79JOT_4I">can apply to a person as well</a>.</p>
<p>Over the last 18 months I have taken many risks, not all of them smart. Some of them paid off very nicely. I have a better job than I started out with and many new friends, some of whom quickly became part of my inner circle and I hope will be there forever. I have also lost a few people I would rather not have lost and learned some things about others I would rather not have known. I once wrote (borrowing from an ancient Greek aphorism) that the hand that has hurt you might be the one that heals. This year I have found that the reverse is also true. I have been injured quite badly at times, and, I am ashamed to admit, I have inflicted pain as well. Even if much of my share was unintentional (I would like to believe I am a good person), I have to take responsibility for it -- no one deserves to be a casualty of your personal earthquake.</p>
<p>In short, I have returned to the days of the tattered cloak, the sleeping on floors in the wrong cities, of sitting at strangers' tables with a notebook. You would think that the old formula would mean the old results: take one writer, add trauma, shake. Result: compelling, vibrant material. It turns out it doesn't work that way.</p>
<p>The reason for that, I think, is there is not enough time to rest with what you have lived through when you are an adult living in an adult world of jobs and a family. When you're 18 or 20 you have gaps in time, hours you're not going to class, not working. There is no anxious drum drum drum of the next thing being due, no boss at office door, the only deadline perhaps some distant term paper you'll do the night before. Emotion takes up residence in those spaces and ferments. Creativity lives in the silences. With too crowded a life you lose something essential. Pain no longer begets prose; pain just begets pain.</p>
<p>This is something I should have realized more than a year ago. My first appearance at SB Nation came while I was still working for Baseball Prospectus, part of a home and away series Rob Neyer and I played; he did a guest piece there, I did one here. Here is how mine began (I would supply you with a link, but the piece seems to no longer exist in the archives):</p>
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<p>I come to you today as a writer on the edge of a nervous breakdown. Well, over the edge of one, actually. I am deeply in the midst of a nervous breakdown, passing bent mile marker 50 out of 100, 1000, or 1,000,000 on the shivering highway. I am 40 years old, consumed with work I don't necessarily want to be doing, and obsessed with the idea that I should chuck it all and do the work that I want to do, except that I don't trust myself to do it even if I had the opportunity. Worse, I am torn by the inherently conflicting ideas that I am running out of time to do the things I am not talented enough to accomplish.</p>
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<p>You can date my kicking at the walls of sanctuary from roughly that moment (the piece ran in late July 2011). I went on:</p>
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<p>I think I had abilities to exploit at one point. I wrote one book, then stopped to manage book projects for others. That seemed like a good idea at the time, but seven years have gone by and I won't be getting that time back. I have been 12 years in the business of writing about baseball, and I have made a small name for myself, but I don't think it will be getting any bigger. I can't stop to think about it, because this blog needs another entry written, that one needs another entry edited. I am no longer my own master.*</p>
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<p>The ending, then, is like "The Wizard of Oz." "Oh, Dorothy. You had the power to be a miserable asshole at home all along!" If the goal was to live dangerously (more accurate: stupidly) so I could write, I needn't have bothered. That <i>wasn't</i> the goal -- as I explained earlier, there was no goal. It just happened. Yet, it would have been nice to have at least receive that much in return for the price paid.</p>
<p>*<i>When the piece was published, one of my then-bosses was offended. "You just said you hate your job," he said. "No, no, no, no," I said. "I love my job. I hate </i>myself."</p>
<p>As such, what I hope to impart to you is the same thing I knew 18 months ago but was incapable of truly absorbing: you won't be getting the time back. In chapter 9, verse 4 of the Book of John, a section of a bestseller of which you might have heard, it says, "I must work the works of him that sent me, while it is day: the night cometh when no man can work." The 19<sup>th</sup> century Scottish essayist Thomas Carlyle took that thought and spun it into a writer's creed. "Produce! Produce! Were it but the pittifullest infinitesimal fraction of a product, produce it, in God's name! ‘T is the utmost thou has in thee; out with it, then. Up, up! Whatsoever they hand findeth to do, do it with thy whole might. Work while it is called Today; for the night cometh wherein no man can work." I have used this quote many times, have tried and failed to live by it. May it serve you better than it has served me.</p>
<p>Justified by his own philosophy, Carlyle went on to produce 30 volumes of bad essays. Nevertheless, his point is still good. Many people like to claim that they are writers, or say that they would <i>like</i> to write, but they never put anything on paper. The only way to be a writer, to know you are a writer, is to write. The career of many a Mark Twain has died aborning because of a fatal disconnect of the imagination, pen, and work ethic -- or simply fear. The day job is too good, the risk too great. Tomorrow, I will try it tomorrow. I promise you, your number of tomorrows is limited and dwindling by the day, hour, and minute.</p>
<p>There are many nights that descend in the course of a lifetime. One is named sanctuary and it is the death of something important, even if it may make you, in other areas of your life, happier overall. Some would call sanctuary maturation, or the taking on of responsibility, the end of your inner Peter Pan. In many cases they would be correct, but not for the writer. Cherish the dramatic days of your youth, cherish the fertile darkness that will soon be forever dispelled. And if the noise of life does come for you, if the waters of complacency threaten you with a fatal calm, grab your oar and paddle like hell for the next silence.</p>
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https://www.pinstripealley.com/2012/12/28/3813448/the-pb-writer-search-contd-on-writing-paddles-and-silencesSteven Goldman2012-12-21T21:09:39-05:002012-12-21T21:09:39-05:00The PB Writer Search: Sex with Camels
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<p>Your cranky and ill host is still sorting submissions, so we pause for this ribald discussion of even-toed ungulates. </p> <p><i>Family-friendly warning: there is a cussword a few paragraphs down relating to the generational act. Proceed at your own risk. </i></p>
<p>Before getting into today's sermon, an update on the quest for new PB contributors: the response was good, so the reading has been slow. I've also been dealing with fun with doctors -- if you are a long-time reader of mine and/or end up working with me for any length of time, you will quickly learn that as a cancer survivor with a couple of other a la carte conditions that hinder me all too frequently, I am starting to challenge Bret Saberhagen for career days on the disabled list. Inexplicably, people still want to work with me. I guess they wanted to work with Saberhagen too.</p>
<p>Perhaps an infusion of "platelet-rich plasma" into my typing fingers might do as well for me as it did for Bartolo Colon, or seemed to do for him up until the point it was revealed that he was on children's Tylenol or whatever it was he got suspended for.</p>
<p>I don't keep up with all the fashionable player-drugs. I've got enough of my own, thanks.</p>
<p>I am going to get back to reading all of your entries, I promise, but before I do, a word or two about exposition. Exposition is background. It's the chewy factual stuff that you put in a column as the underpinning of whatever case you're making. (You <i>are </i>making a case, right? You <i>are</i> telling a story? You're not just a tourist, are you? As they used to say during the gas and tire-rationing days of World War II, is this trip really necessary?) In a book or a movie, it's the information that grounds the status quo of the story or supplies some basic facts that allow the story to go forward. </p>
<p>Exposition is a real challenge to get through for both the writer and the reader for several reasons, primary among them that it's often <i>boring </i>due to being overly dense. Humphrey Bogart famously said something like, "If I ever have to give exposition, I pray that in the back of the shot they have two camels fucking." In Bogart's "Casablanca," the exposition is all of that nonsense about General Weygand and the hidden letters of transit, and yes, it's tedious. There are no camels bonking, although Paul Henreid sort of looks like camel. </p>
<p>Exposition in a baseball story can be deadly. Although space on the internet is infinite, your story length isn't. Long-form stories seem to be in vogue now, but we can only test a reader's patience so much, particularly when we're not giving them story, humor, or analysis, but just recitation. By recitation I mean <i>litany. </i>Think <i>Genesis</i>:</p>
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<p><i>And Adam lived an hundred and thirty years, and begat a son in his own likeness, after his image; and called his name Seth:</i></p>
<p><i>And the days of Adam after he had begotten Seth were eight hundred years: and he begat sons and daughters:</i></p>
<p><i>And all the days that Adam lived were nine hundred and thirty years: and he died.</i></p>
<p><i>And Seth lived an hundred and five years, and begat Enos:</i></p>
<p><i>And Seth lived after he begat Enos eight hundred and seven years, and begat sons and daughters:</i></p>
<p><i>And all the days of Seth were nine hundred and twelve years: and he died.</i></p>
<p><i>And Enos lived ninety years, and begat Cainan:</i></p>
<p><i>And Enos lived after he begat Cainan eight hundred and fifteen years, and begat sons and daughters:</i></p>
<p><i>And all the days of Enos were nine hundred and five years: and he died.</i></p>
<p><i>And Cainan lived seventy years, and begat Mahalaleel: </i></p>
<p><i>And Cainan lived after he begat Mahalaleel eight hundred and forty years, and begat sons and daughters:</i></p>
<p><i>And all the days of Cainan were nine hundred and ten years: and he died.</i></p>
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<p>Onward it goes, up through Shem, Ham, Japheth, George Washington, Aimee Semple McPherson, Sacco and Vanzetti, the Marx Brothers, and Noel Coward. It's interesting, I suppose, but one does get the point after the <a href="http://youtu.be/bnC2byaKAOY">first few begats</a>. As baseball analysts, we tend to do this with statistics, for example over-explaining:</p>
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<p>Last season, Jerollo Andujar played well (.280/.335/.429) though not as well as he had the year before (.301/.365/.445 with 12 home runs, one hit by pitch, and a Monte Christo sandwich), and certainly not as well as Bobby Stockman (.323/.380/.501, but only .221/.290/.301 against left-handers on Tuesdays).</p>
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<p>As Mark Twain wrote, one of the writer's jobs is to "eschew surplusage." The interpolated stats serve as speed-bumps and potholes, slowing the reader, and only some of them, if any, may be necessary. Specifically, only the information germane to your argument needs to be present in your story. You see similarly bumpy roads in, say, a piece that is about Ozzie Smith, but not necessarily about the six-player trade that sent him from the Padres to the Cardinals in 1981, yet nevertheless pauses to list all six players.</p>
<p>There is something about the analytical baseball mindset that seems to require that one has to show all of his or her work, sometimes without discrimination, but there is a thin line between educating the public and pedantry. The line between pedantry and just being a bore is even thinner. There are some basic things that we can just stipulate as true, and if the supporting fact is not illustrative from a storytelling point of view, leave it out. The great thing about the writing on the Internet is that Mike Trout's triple-slash line is always a link away; we don't have to include it if we don't need to. More importantly, if you don't, you have let some air into the piece, allowed room for dissent, even if that dissent is easily met with a recourse to the facts.</p>
<p>As writers, our mission is to educate and entertain. We make a mistake if we overvalue one at the expense of the other. We are storytellers, not priests of an arcane religion that must pontificate to the cowed masses. We serve the story first, the church of being know-it-alls second -- or not at all.</p>
<p>As a corollary to this rule of priorities, I would suggest that there are times we need to give our audience more credit than we do. When I started, back before man discovered fire, there were still many baseball fans that had not heard of Bill James, sabermetrics, wins above peanut butter, and so on, and so it was necessary to state first principles again and again. Then<i> </i>came <i>Moneyball</i>. Suddenly the concepts we work with began to achieve mainstream penetration. Today's most boneheaded baseball reader comes equipped with a more advanced knowledge of the game than most general managers had just 20 years ago; we may need to hit them over the head less often with the story of pitcher wins and RBI. This too can save space and keep your story moving.</p>
<p>(In this particular instance, I may be conjuring a straw man; it is my sense that this is still happening, but I haven't taken the time to document it. This is what the old <i>Village Voice </i>record reviewer Robert Christgau called "<a href="http://www.robertchristgau.com/xg/bk-cg80/dnce.php">distinctions not cost-effective</a>," which I always took to mean, "There might be something here or there might not, but it's not worth my time to try to figure it out." Digression necessitated by thinking of Christgau: I never cease to admire the way he managed to transmogrify <a href="http://www.robertchristgau.com/get_artist.php?name=George+Harrison">George Harrison's 1974 album "Dark Horse</a>" into "Hoarse Dork" as a description of the singer.)</p>
<p>This is all a very long-winded way of saying "Don't be boring -- and lists are boring. Time is fleeting and attention ebbs quickly, so avoid unnecessary interruptions and get to the point. This is, more than anything a matter of choosing what information you need to include and retaining only that which is most essential." In short, holding the reader's attention is not a matter of brevity, but of economy. A piece can be long and still have economy. The converse is also true: a piece can be short and yet still be riddled with fat.</p>
<p>Thus endeth today's cranky sermon inspired by too many years of reading baseball commentary that too often lapsed into a dirge-like recapitulation of things we already knew or didn't need to know at that particular moment, pieces which left me crying out, from the deepest, most vulnerable part of my soul, please, oh, please -- send in the camels!</p>
https://www.pinstripealley.com/2012/12/21/3793992/pinstriped-bible-writer-search-contd-sex-with-camelsSteven Goldman2012-12-14T05:26:44-05:002012-12-14T05:26:44-05:00PB Talent Search: Tell Stories, Not Baseball
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<p>As of early this morning, I have received just under 30 writing samples in answer to my request for new blood for this here blog. This weekend I will begin reading through them and responding. There is no deadline; this particular drive has open enrollment. Still, I hope to make some first-round draft picks as soon as Monday.</p>
<p>I have been impressed by how many responses have come from college students, both under- and post-grad. When I was in college on the banks of the Raritan (so long ago that the whole of Rutgers University fit into <a href="http://www.libraries.rutgers.edu/rul/libs/scua/university_archives/images-historic_ru_paths/Schank_Observatory.jpg">this one building</a>), the opportunity to grow up in public was limited to student publications and therefore competitive; the Berlin Wall had been swept away, but the barriers to entry for a budding writer were still high.</p>
<p>As one of those aspiring writers, I used to spend a lot of time with writers' markets, listings of publications that were willing to accept pitches from un-agented strangers. In doing so, I stumbled across <i>The North Atlantic Salmon Fishing Quarterly</i>, a magazine willing to accept "fiction, non-fiction, and erotica about or relating to North Atlantic salmon fishing." I am still, lo these many years later, puzzled by that last category. "Dear North Atlantic Salmon Fishing Quarterly: I never thought I would have a reason to write you, but ..." I mean, who knew you could sexualize salmon? "I thought it was going to be yet another lonely Saturday night for me. I had set my oars and turned for home when the most beautiful salmon I had ever seen jumped into my boat. It had the biggest scales ..."</p>
<p>I raise the story of the NASFQ pointedly. Like all the other publishers then (I beg your pardon) fishing for content, NASFQ did not want to know <i>me</i>, just if I could create something within the categories that interested them. None of the publishers did. They didn't care if I could make words march one after the other. They didn't care what I looked like (always a good thing), my interests, even my educational background. If I hadn't been a man but a hippo with a preternatural ability to type (it has been suggested), they wouldn't have been the least bit interested. Publications aren't people and don't care about people. They care about <i>stories.</i></p>
<p>You can't put people on pages without making a bloody mess. As a person, I care about people. As an editor, I try to remember that I'm a person who cares about people, but the main goal is stories. That's why writers who don't deliver clean copy, who miss deadlines, who are erratic in their level of quality, don't last long even if they are wonderful people, the brother or sister you never had. The publication is relentless and must be fed, and in the end, patience and sympathy must give way to the demands of white space that must be filled.</p>
<p>As such -- and this is something I wish I had understood better when I was an aspiring writer as well as something that I wish people who are not writers understood better now -- when looking to find a platform, a place to write, don't say who you are, say <i>what you want to do</i>. What kind of stories do you want to tell? A news organization may hire writers, journalists who have an ability to report. That is different from what I'm talking about. Any publication that aspires to more than reportage and reaction, that reaches for creativity, does not hire people, it hires stories.</p>
<p>If you dream of being a baseball writer of a certain kind, one more in a long line who tells us that John Smith's .382 on-base percentage is better than Richard Smith's .375 OBP (it's not, not in any meaningful way), I pity you; an imagination-impoverished field needs not one more pedant before it ruptures like a diseased appendix. I tried to say this last time, and having not yet read the samples I've received, I don't know if I <i>need </i>to say it again, but I will: if the hierarchy of your dreams is ranked so that you want to write first and write <i>about baseball</i> second, then come to me and I will support you as long as I have the means to do so. Bring me ideas. Bring me stories.</p>
<p>The baseball part will take care of itself.</p>
https://www.pinstripealley.com/2012/12/14/3765854/the-pb-talent-drive-tell-stories-not-baseballSteven Goldman2012-12-11T11:24:24-05:002012-12-11T11:24:24-05:00The PB Wants You!
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<p>Hoping for new voices and new ideas.</p> <p><i>Where you goin' with your shoes undone<br>Throwin' rocks, makin' a fun of everyone<br>Little man, you make a big mistake<br>Unless you change your way<br>-</i>Randy Newman, "Change Your Way"</p>
<p>The Pinstriped Bible is looking for a few good men and women. I've had reason to think quite a bit about baseball coverage on the web for a good 15 years now, and I've been revisiting the subject with special intensity lately for reasons that I hope will become clear elsewhere a few months from now (keep your fingers crossed). I have to confess that having surveyed the vast forest of zeroes and ones that is baseball commentary on the Internet, I am bored. <span>James Shields</span> is traded for <span>Wil Myers</span>, 10,000 fingers strike 100,000 keys, and opinions take flight like so many bloated geese halfway to being pâté from the moment of conception, all weighed down by the same sabermetric-orthodox approach that we all have imbibed practically from birth by now -- like BPA.</p>
<p>The quality of execution might vary, but the conclusions will be pretty damned close because we're proceeding from the same precepts. There is plenty of it out there, thanks, and the beach doesn't need more sand, as we've got more than we can usefully dispose of in a thousand lifetimes.</p>
<p>I started the Pinstriped Bible as more of a column than a blog back in the 1990s, when just having a weekly or daily presence on the web was sufficient, a novelty in itself. I went on like that for a long time. More recently, I sought the help of good friends and colleagues such as Jay Jaffe and Cliff Corcoran (the latter of whom I am fortunate enough to still work with as a Designated Columnist). Finally, I came here, where I was lucky enough to inherit a talented group of young writers such as Andrew Mearns and Tanya Bondurant. After so many years as a sole proprietor, it is of great comfort to be part of a team. But, having said that ...</p>
<p>... It's not enough. It's time to grow again.</p>
<p>The Pinstriped Bible and I are looking for some new writers, new voices for the site. It's an opportunity to write about your favorite team, or baseball in general, in what I hope is a stress-free environment where you can hone your craft and have some fun in the process. I cannot pay you, not now, but I hope to repay you tenfold in opportunity in the short term, and in the long term, well, anything can happen.</p>
<p>Samples can be <a href="mailto:steven.goldman@sbnation.com">sent to me here</a>. A few notes:</p>
<ul type="disc">
<li>The minimum starting point for any piece of publishable writing is that it be clean, accurate, and on time. If you can't be a reliable part of a rotation, if you can't be troubled to make sure you spelled "Jeter" correctly, this probably isn't the field for you. A veneer of professionalism isn't everything, but it's a necessary and unavoidable beginning.<br><br>
</li>
<li>I don't sweat length; a story should be exactly as long as it needs to be to do what it's trying to do. That said, economy of expression is important and this probably isn't the time to wheel out your version of <i>Moby Dick </i>with Joe Girardi as Captain Ahab ... although that might be fun to read once we know each other better.<br>
</li>
</ul>
<p>One last qualification, more important than any other: I am looking for something new. As I said at the outset, the same old analysis is a commodity product. I would be happy to publish a few more voices in that line, but more than anything else, I am looking for something <i>new</i>. If you <i>don't </i>want to write the kinds of things that Rob Neyer and Baseball Prospectus have been doing for 100 years, that <i>I </i>have been doing for 100 years, I want to hear from you as much or more than I do those who want to write what used to be the rebellious thing but is now commonplace and conformist. You want to do videos, a comic strip, Brian Cashman as the star of a Wagnerian opera, stories that talk about more than WAR and wOBA, I want to know you and I want to publish you.</p>
<p>A new season is coming. Pitchers and catchers report in just over 60 days. In a lot of ways it's going to be a very different season for the <a href="https://www.pinstripealley.com/" class="sbn-auto-link">Yankees</a>. I want it to be a different season for the Pinstriped Bible as well. I hope you will be part of it. I look forward to hearing from you.</p>
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<ul type="disc"></ul>
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https://www.pinstripealley.com/2012/12/11/3754762/the-pinstriped-bible-is-looking-for-a-few-good-men-and-womenSteven Goldman