Regular Joes

By Alan Schwarz

I creaked open the metal door to the Toronto Blue Jays clubhouse as if I had happened upon Al Capone’s hideout. I was in the bowels of Yankee Stadium, age 23 and on my first assignment to cover a Major League Baseball game. I had every reason to think that multimillion-aire ballplayers greeted rookie writers as warmly as they did hanging curveballs.

I looked upon the two dozen men in various states of undress and felt like Admiral Stockdale – Who am I? Why am I here? – but mustered up the gumption to approach Joe Carter, the Toronto slugger who was busily putting on his uniform. He was an enormous man, with a side-of-beef neck, who could surely squish me between his thumb and forefinger. I held my notebook down near my waist and moved forward slowly when he spotted me and struck.

“Hi, I’m Joe Carter,” he smiled, turning to offer his hand. “How
ya doin’?”

After picking up my pad, on the carpet next to my jaw, I proceeded to have one of the more pleasant conversations – about baseball or anything else – of my life. And to be honest, they’ve never really stopped.

Having covered professional baseball for 15 years now, ever since I graduated from Penn, I’m dismayed by the disparity between the public’s perception of players and my own experience. Most fans, generally fed by the press rather than firsthand encounters, would describe the average ballplayer as a brooding, illiterate millionaire who has no idea how lucky he is. After walking into hundreds of locker rooms, asking for and conducting thousands of interviews, my image couldn’t be more different.

There’s Pedro Martinez, recalling his days learning English on the buses of the Pioneer League. There’s Nomar Garciaparra, remembering how he cherished the glove his dad bought him. Talking probability with Greg Maddux, literature with Scott Rolen. Sure, Barry Bonds has been nasty, but at other times he’s been quite thoughtful and engaging. Whatever the often sanctimonious press would have you believe, I have found roughly the same percentage of jerk ballplayers as there are jerk stockbrokers, jerk plumbers and, well, jerk sportswriters. In fact, I’ve seen far more outright rudeness from media folks toward athletes than the other way around. Makes me recall a wonderful Gloria Steinem crack – “Being a writer keeps me from believing everything I read.”

When I tell people of these overwhelmingly pleasant experiences, they are less heartened than, in an odd way, disappointed. They prefer to confirm their personal impression of today’s athletes as being so less laudable than those of the past. This is particularly true in baseball, the most historic and nostalgic of sports. Most enterprises look ahead as their train travels down the timeline; baseball sits backward, looking at where it once was. This is, of course, part of its enduring charm.

The cost is how misrepresented the old days become. Sorry, folks, but Ebbets Field was, in fact, a decomposing dump. Ted Williams and even Joe DiMaggio could be just as surly as Barry Bonds. Willie Mays played stickball with kids only a few times and far less than players today do youth clinics. I get a chuckle out of all those selective eulogies; people who complain about how great the old days were never seem to bitch about air conditioning.

When it comes to the personalities of baseball players, my consistent experience has been that if you treat them with the same respect you’d ask for yourself, you’ll find them pretty darned normal – usually cordial, occasionally grumpy but altogether average folks. Rich, yes, but as welcome to the respon-sibility that brings as most rich folks you’ll find.

My guess is that many of you would have preferred this story if at that first day up in Yankee Stadium, Joe Carter would have bitten my head off, refused my interview and stormed off in a snit. Please don’t be disappointed. I wasn’t and haven’t been since.

Alan Schwarz, C’90, is the senior writer of “Baseball America” magazine, a regular contributor to the Sunday “New York Times” and the author of The Numbers Game: Baseball’s Lifelong Fascination with Statistics.