Archive for the 'Sports'

Jeff Cohen

Abner Doubleday did not invent the game of baseball. He also did not publish books. That was Frank Doubleday.

I know; you're surprised. But on a recent trip (immediately post-storm, when refugees were leaving New Jersey to find electrical power) to Gettysburg, PA, it was revealed to me that Doubleday was in fact at the battle of Gettysburg, but his only connection to America's budding national pastime was that he tried to requisition some baseball bats and other equipment for former slaves under his command, and was denied. Apparently even that far back, African Americans were being banned from playing baseball.

This comes as no shock. I knew Doubleday was only the mythical inventor of the game, that it was a sort of bastardization of a game called Rounders from England, mixed with Cricket, or something like that. But hey, America did what it does, which is to take stuff from other places and make it our own. 

So consider the differences in the English language (particularly American English) if the game of baseball had not been invented, by Doubleday or anybody else. We would have lost the expressions:

Throw a curve ball at you;

Out of left field;

Doubleheader;

Swing for the fences;

Go for the no-hitter;

Waiting on deck;

Warming up in the bullpen;

Going, going, gone (with a possible exception for auctions);

Pinch hit for;

Take one for the team;

I could go on.

Then, there are the expressions that one hears during a baseball game and wishes would go away:

"He left his feet making that catch";

"First basemens";

"Tonight's starting lineups, brought to you by Lexus";

"Our good friends at the Fox News Channel";

What it really means when they say:

"He's struggling a little lately" (He couldn't hit a beach ball at this point);

"He had a really good swing at that one" (He missed);

"That was a great piece of hitting" (He accidentally hit one safely when he was trying to hit a home run);

"He's a veteran presence" (He's old);

"That got a piece of the catcher" (The catcher may never be able to have children now);

"The umpire has a wide strike zone tonight" (The umpire has early dinner reservations);

"The manager is getting his money's worth in this argument" (He's trying to get thrown out of the game);

"The team is in rebuilding mode" (You're lucky if they stay out of last place);

"We'll be seeing you tomorrow night" (You'll be seeing us tomorrow night, if you choose to watch).

Can you tell I'm going through baseball withdrawal? 

Pitchers and catchers report in 88 days.

Josh Getzler

So it's 11:34 and I'm in danger of missing another week's blog day. This time it was not a Jewish holiday and not a conference and not a literary reading, but a Crosby Stills and Nash concert. I was skeptical when we bought ticket--the last time we saw them was 10 years ago, when my wife was pregnant with child #3(who got a great in utero contact high), and they were OLD. But terrific. And we left happy and satisfied that we'd gotten to see them, kind of like when we saw Tony Gwynn in the last year he played for the Padres and we'd shlepped out to Shea to see him just so we could say we saw him. But I digress.

So CSN (without Young, or Tony Gwynn for that matter) was back, at the Beacon Theater (very appropriate now, and Winchester Cathedral was perfect there, just saying), and they are now at least seven years past OLD. And they were fabulous. OK, so after nine months of touring (this is the last set of shows) Stills is finished and could barely croak out Love the One You're With. But the surprise MVP was David Crosby, who could have been MVP for being able to stand at this point. But he has a voice like an angel (still), and was thin(ner) and fit(ter), and the group wisely centered the playlist around his proggy stuff. So we got Guinevere and Winchester and Deja Vu and Stills could play guitar and all the happy fogies like us got to sit back and relax.

As we were leaving we both realized that the upshot was this: We spend so much time listening to top 40 these days because of our kids, it was nice to go to an old school rock concert with black t-shirts and guitars and Hammond organs and singers who allowed themselves to be ragged.

Of course, we're also kind of excited that next week brings us Ke$ha's new album. (Don't be a hater, now!)

Josh Getzler

One of my clients, thriller writer Eric Seder, came in to the HSG office today to say hi. Conversation, as it does, wandered to baseball.

Eric wanted to know if any of the players on the minor league teams I ran in Staten Island were obviously going to make it to the majors, even when they were newbies in single-A. I replied that there had been a couple on our teams—Chien-Ming Wang and Brett Gardner, for two who just seemed to have “it.”

“How about Melky Cabrera?” Eric asked, speaking of the former Yankee outfielder who was the MVP of the all star game this year, then a month later was suspended for the rest of the regular season when he tested positive for HGH.

I said that while he was the best player by far on a pretty much unwatchable Staten Island Yankees squad in 2003, we were all pretty surprised that he’d made it to the majors in a very quick two and a half years.

“Did you know he was juicing? Were you surprised?”

Those are actually very different questions, I said. I didn’t know he was taking HGH, that’s for sure. Yet, when he first made the Show as quickly as he did, then became a star (and seemingly quite a bit bigger, physically), it didn’t completely shock me that he had taken a shortcut.

The past couple of weeks has seen the uncovering of what seems to be an epidemic of literary “sock puppetting” and pay-per-review scandals, where authors are found to have created false identities on (mostly) Amazon in order to write glowing reviews of their own books to improve their rankings; or paid writers for hire to write raves for them (often without having read the book). John Locke, who’s sold more than a million books independently, was found to have paid for hundreds of reviews. While there was a certain amount of tsking and general outrage, it was nothing compared to this weekend. Then it came out that RJ Ellory, best-selling traditionally-published crime fiction writer and winner of best-book of the year in 2010 in the UK, not only created sock puppet IDs on Amazon to pump himself up, but also to slam and one-star books by many authors competing with him.

There was an avalanche of rebuke, and Ellory apologized for his “poor judgment.”It seems clear, however, that he’s just among the first to get caught, but certainly won’t be the last. It places into doubt the validity of reader reviews on Amazon etc, however, and it certainly feels like their records ought to have an asterisk next to them—kind of like Barry Bonds’s home run mark or Melky Cabrera’s all star game MVP award.

I think that much of the review-manipulation story relates pretty nicely to the Melky Cabrera juicing scandal—talented participants in a highly competitive field use dishonest methods to get ahead of their counterparts. But where the comparison breaks down, and where a lot of the outrage over Ellory in particular comes in, is in the fact that he used his false identities not just to build himself up, but very specifically to break his opponents down. So often when people talk about steroid users they say “well, he was dishonest, and what he did was dangerous—but only to himself. He’s not harming anyone else in the process.” (I know, that’s not really true, but the argument deals with future direct medical consequences of injecting yourself with hormones or rubbing on the Cream and the Clear.)

Ellroy, on the other hand, both raised himself up and brought down, say, Mark Billingham, and that goes over the line. I’m not saying he would have been excused. But the community would not have been so thoroughly angry with him for it had he “only” self-promoted. The author Keith Raffel posted the following on Facebook today, and I think it speaks for so many of us:

“I’m reluctant to pile on, but have you been following the scandal of authors anonymously praising their own books in reviews on Amazon, while savaging books by their colleagues? I can at least understand the impulse behind the former, but the latter seems particularly reprehensible. Sigh.”

Post script to the coda: I was just reading this to my wife, who said “Why are you being so even-handed? I just got back from my first day of school and all we heard about in the faculty meeting was how rigorous ethics must be. Why are you being so understanding of the people who do this, even when they are “merely” self-promoting. It messes it up for everyone and makes people who are working their butts off to make it think that the only way they can succeed is by cheating. It was true in baseball and it’s true here, and it’s true in high school. It’s just not OK.” 

Jeff Cohen

Under the "it's hot out" umbrella:

Believe it or not, I found a copy of the Man From U.N.C.L.E. novel I was discussing last week, on eBay of all places. It's called "The Affair of the Gentle Saboteur," and while my memory of the writing wasn't as accurate as I'd hoped, I can now quote the passages I was citing in the last post:

Page 31: (Taking place not in a cab but in a tobacco shop) "Hot," Waverly said grumpily. "Beastly hot, this town."

"Awfully hot, sir,This isn't our best season of the year in Washington, is it?"

"July--definitely not. Quite an inferno out there."

So not quite as long an exchange as I'd thought, but wait! Two pages later, Waverly DOES get into a cab, and the following action-packed exchange takes place:

"Hot," the cab driver said.

"Yes," Waverly said.

"July in Washington--but the hottest," the cab driver said.

"Hot," Waverly said, puffing contentedly.

(Do you get the feeling it was a little warm when the guy was writing this?)

I paid $8 including shipping. That's the kind of sacrifice I'll make for you, dear reader.

But that's not why I asked you here today:

A few days ago, the MLB Network (home for those of us who are obsessed with what once was our National Pastime, leading me to wonder if, say, Indonesia has a National Pastime?) aired a special in which Bob Costas spent a half hour interviewing Jerry Seinfeld specifically on the Abbott & Costello classic "Who's On First?". If you haven't seen the special, I recommend it. Costas really isn't the guy for this interview, but he's the closest MLB has. But Seinfeld is EXACTLY the guy to talk to about this. He's a comedian who really studies the craft and can talk about it for hours.

It's rare that I feel a rush of ego--life is good at reminding you that you're not that big a deal--but every once in a while when I see really intelligent comedians discussing the craft, I think, "I could hang with those guys. I can speak that language. I understand funny, and how it works." All of which might be true, but there's one big difference that bursts my ego balloon before it really gets a chance to inflate.

There ain't no way I could ever do stand-up comedy.

Keep in mind, I write funny on purpose. I see how it works when someone truly gifted has an audience in the palm of his/her hand. I get the rhythm, and I know comedy is closer to music than literature. I even have a good deal of experience speaking in front of "crowds". I have no terror of public speaking.

But I couldn't begin to write myself more than twelve seconds of material, let alone the hour or more the really big comedians have to create on a regular basis. Build a joke and then build it more and then hope that after you build it even more than that, not only will you not forget what you have to say, but that you'll say it the right way, and the audience will be in the right mood to get it (and that no dishes will be dropped during a punchline or a heckler drowning out the necessary set-up)? Um... thanks, but no. I'll be here in the audience, trying to think of something to write in a book. 

I don't think there's a job as hard as being consistently funny armed with nothing but your mind and a microphone (sometimes just your mind). I really don't. President of the United States? Look at some of the dolts who've held that position, and you have to conclude that the world might be worse off for them, but it's still spinning. Nuclear physicist? Yeah, that's tough, but you know what? Those people are really well educated in their craft. A comedian has to be self-taught. How many genius comics can you name who came out of the odd Learning Annex course on stand-up?

Geniuses of comedy like Seinfeld, Bill Cosby, Robin Williams and the current rage Louis C.K. take the gifts they're given genetically and they figure out what to do with them. And do it better than everybody else. 

I was talking recently to a friend I had not seen in quite some time, and one of the things she said was, "You should do stand-up! You're funny, and you know how to talk in front of an audience." And I hope I'm not being obnoxious in saying that's not the first time it's been said to me.

Like the other times, I shook the suggestion off, perhaps more vehemently than was expected. "I'm not nearly brave enough," I said, which is true. Because I'm sure I couldn't do it well.

So I'll stand in the back, appreciate the art and the craft, and I'll write my books. And maybe some day I'll be in a room with one or more of those great comic minds, and we'll have a good talk about how it all works. 

That's really the most I could ever hope for, and I'm fine with that.

By the way, today is "Buy Books For Steve" day, trying to help an author without health insurance pay for his bone marrow transplant. Please take a look here and buy something if you can, or just donate.

Jeff Cohen

She turned to face him, livid with rage. "You're a beast!" she cried. "You tried to run me over with your car!" (It was the 17th time someone had been run over with a car in a book whose title begins with the letter "M" that year.)

Don't run someone over with your car, but if you do, make it a Volvo. Volvo's crash test ratings show it's the safest vehicle on the road. So while we never recommend you hit innocent bystanders, rest assured that you'll survive the attempt if you're driving a Volvo.

"Don't be so sanctimonious," he answered. "I had to protect myself. After all, you knew that I had a history of drunk driving, and I couldn't let you walk around with that knowledge."

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She raised an eyebrow, calculating. "You still can't afford it, can you?" she asked, her voice trembling only slightly.

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"No," he said flatly. "I can't." He reached into his pocket and pulled out--

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--a cigarette case, from which he extracted two filter tips, and offered her one. "Marlboro?" he asked. (The Elias Book Bureau reports that smoking in murder mysteries has declined by 38 percent in the past two years.)

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And the typeface in this book is brought to you by our good friends at Toyota. Toyota: Moving Forward.

"I don't smoke," she lied. He shrugged and lit the cigarette in his hand, then put the other back in the case. "What are you planning to do now?"

He smiled, and her blood ran cold.

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"If I told you," he said with no hint of sympathy, "that would ruin the surprise."

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She grabbed the letter opener on the desk and lunged toward him, intending to stab him in the heart, but he caught the movement and stopped her hand inches from his chest. Then he pushed her back, disarming her and dropping her onto the freshly vacuumed Persian rug.

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And the acknowledgements at the end of the book are courtesy of our very good friends at the Fox News Channel. Fox News. Even we can't say "fair and balanced" with a straight face anymore.

"Don't be absurd," he told her. "That was far too crude a gesture. When I decide to deal with you, rest assured the attack will have more subtlety and the pain will go on for a long, long time."

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She was still weeping quietly when he turned on his heel and left the room.

So that ends this chapter. We'll be back with the next chapter, right after this, in the latest mystery novel you've already bought, driven by Jeep.

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