“We talked to him about our concerns and he totally ameliorated our concerns by telling us basically how he was going to go about it,” manager Joe Maddon said. “And it’s not about getting anybody, not about writing about anybody in a nonfiction way or being specific.”
Instead, Hayhurst uses an interesting style: making up most names, blurring details and blending characters to create composites (or alleged composites) to provide amusing, entertaining and revealing anecdotes about life in the minors, using them to tell the story of his life (including some deeply personal passages) rather than the team.
Hayhurst is writing a second book and has a contract for a third. Now that he has some major league time under his belt -- and hopefully will get more this year -- it’s going to be a bit harder for him to blur the lines. Bill James and Rob Neyer launched a fun little pastime among the baseball geek set with their concept of “tracers” (i.e. going back and fact-checking baseball anecdotes) -- and it will be fun to run some tracers on Hayhurst’s future work. At some point he’ll have some fun story about “Donald Prince” that everyone will know is about David Price because Prince/Price had the same line against the Red Sox that evening before the bar brawl, and the game will be up. Which is part of the territory given his increasingly high profile.
I just hope that players today are a little more reasonable than they were back in Jim Bouton’s day, some of whom are still mad at the guy. Which seems nuts given how benign some of Bouton’s revelations seem given the passage of time, but that’s how these things go.