So I’ve given some very mild thought lately to writing a baseball book. This is 1.5% inspired by the notion that I may have something interesting to say about baseball that will hold up for more than 500 words and 98.5% inspired by the realization that the half dozen memoirs and detective novels I’ve started and not gotten past page 50 are never, ever going to be published.
I’ve thought quite a bit about what sort of topic to cover. I wish I had seen this post from Luke Epplin at the Daily Beast called “The Idiot’s Guide to Writing a Baseball Book” before I wasted all that time, though. Because I think he may be on to something:
You basically declare your year the best ever, link it with any number of social changes going on, gloop on the nostalgia and, voila, you got yourself a book.
Which, even though Epplin couches it somewhat cynically, ain’t a bad recipe to be honest. Cait Murphy’s “Crazy ’08" was a fantastic book. So too was Dan Epstein’s “Big Hair and Plastic Grass” about the 1970s. I suppose there would be diminishing returns if people started to write about truly boring years in an effort to make them seem important -- 1992 was a fine year, but really, not much awesome happened -- or if people went over beaten-to-death years from the so-called Golden Era. But think about how much you know about, say, the 1914 season. If someone did a mashup of that and, I dunno, Shaw’s “Heartbreak House” I’d be all over it like white on rice.
Anyway, I’m not going to write a book like that. Takes too much research and I have the attention span and attention-to-detail of a gnat. But Epplin does have a point about the template. There are actually a handful of baseball book templates, I’ve found, that tend to get published, covering a great number of baseball books we all read and enjoy. The year thing happens to just be one of ‘em.
