The Yang Slinger: Vol. XC

All writers have quirks and bumps and oddities that help pull us through the depths of word hell. Here's the story behind (some of) them ...

“My whole effin life is a writing superstition.”

— Mark Kriegel

I am writing this entry from a mall food court.

And I am writing this entry from a mall food court because yesterday, while sitting at the local Peet’s Coffee, I churned out 2,165 words of my Tupac manuscript—but it felt as if it should have been more.

So here I am, in a mall food court, looking for inspiration.

Looking for words.

Looking for salvation.

Looking for … the BBQ chicken pizza at the Blaze kiosk.

And it’s weird, isn’t it? The way it all can come and go, materialize and vanish, based upon factors and circumstances that make no real sense. Although we, America’s (sports) writers, earn a living out of describing streaks and superstitions and oddball antics, sometimes it feels as if we’re gazing into a funhouse mirror, glancing at ourselves with crooked eyebrows.

Or, put differently:

Why, if I write well in a Pittsburgh Pirates on a Monday, do I wear the same Pittsburgh Pirates hat on a Tuesday?

Why, if a certain Bic pen inspires me, do I keep it by my side?

Why, if my baggy Sacramento Kings shorts feel “right,” do I wear them again and again—cleanliness be damned?

Why do I need to be sucking on a See’s vanilla lollipop to really kick ass?

And what, in God’s name, does any of this have to do with finishing a book?

It’s been a while since I put out an APB for this Substack—and this week I felt inspired. It came several days ago, when I began thinking about the hellscape positioning of being two months into writing a manuscript, with three months to go. It’s a Vietnam-esque quagmire. You feel accomplished but stuck, liberated but trapped, psyched but hapless, hyped up and beaten down. To be halfway into book writing is to experience a level of self-loathing best grasped by puppy porn addicts and gamblers. You want to get out. You need to get out.

But, fuckity fuck, you can’t.

Hence, with no escape, we writers turn to desperation. The circumstance doesn’t have to be a book deadline, or even a particularly lengthy article. It can be 1,000 words. Hell, 300 words. If you do this long enough, you know what it feels like to have your feet embedded in cement blocks.

Which, oftentimes, leads to craziness.

For me, personally, it’s all about location-location-location. Last week, I discovered a new coffee shop roughly 15 minutes away. So I drove there early one morning, plopped down my shit, left eight hours later with 1,500 written words. I returned the next day—another 1,500. Then the next day—1,250. But then, for some unknown reason, the fairy dust morphed into construction dirt. The coffee didn’t taste as sweet. The music was more irksome than soothing. On the fourth day, I lasted an hour or so before taking off.

The juju vanished.

And, thanks to this Substack, I’ve learned I’m not alone in being batshit bonkers. To be clear, this is not a matter of mere superstition—though it can be. It’s more about … I dunno, feeling a certain way. Feeling as if one can actually write.

My go-to brethren of deliration these days tends to be Mike Vaccaro, the New York Sports sports columnist/Pearlman Substack regular/in-his-own-head lifer. Most of the writers I spoke with for this entry offered one of two quirky things they might do in the name of completing an assignment. Mike, however, gave me a motherfucking list. And it’s the Nikola Jokić of writers doubling as crack fiends …

1) I have felt from the start that I write better with a dateline. I mean that’s crazy but it’s how I feel. That’s obviously not a problem when I’m on the road. But even when I’m at home in my house  every column starts this way: “NEW YORK —“ and then once I get my rhythm going I make sure to erase it.

2) I don’t always wear my wedding ring (it has needed to be refitted for years now since I lost some weight) but when I think of it I always slip it on before I write. I just like the way it looks when I’m typing when I have the ring on and every little bit helps. .

3) When I’m writing longer than a column length I always — always — close the computer and take a walk/drive/glass of water/can of beer every thousand words. Even if it’s just for 10 or 15 minutes. I find that even when i think I’m “on a roll” and feel like pumping out more the quality is much better when I hit the brakes. 

4) This one is weird because I can write free and easy in an ear-splitting building on deadline, or in a frantic newsroom; I cannot type even one word if there’s music playing.  I’ve tried to fix that. But inevitably I’ll have a sentence that goes, ‘Brunson has been heroic for much of this season, take a sad song and make it better.’”

The reason I love this is because (sigh) I feel … every … single … sentiment. I, too, always start articles with datelines—even when there won’t be a dateline. Just because “it looks right.” I, too, mess around with my wedding band half the time I’m typing (though I don’t remove it, and therefore must question Mike’s 24/7 devotion to Leigh 🙂). I, too, need mental breaks that involve literal escapes from my domain. And, I too, have music issues.

Now, unlike Mike, I can write with tunes playing. I mean, we coffee shop regulars have no choice. But if someone starts talking on their cell phone, and I need to drown it out, piping in music via the ol’ Pods is no option. It fucks up my brain and scatters everything into 1,000 different pieces. Maybe it’s age, but I lack the focus.

And, in many respects, that word—focus—is the most fascinating part of this breakdown. We can write sans shoes, sans hair, sans certain levels of sleep. The house across the street may well be on fire as we do our best work. But minus focus, well, it’s a winless battle. So we do whatever we can to find it. Dan Forer, the Emmy Award-winning producer, director and writer, only works in a room that’s dim-to-dark-to-black. “It’s like wearing blinders,” he says. “The darkness allows, no forces me to focus on the screen. The words come to life in my head and the story/comes alive. I actually see and, more importantly, feel what I am writing.” Tyler Dunne of the Go Long Substack is required to listen to Bon Iver Radio or Ocie Elliott Radio on Spotify while writing. “Just calms the brain so much,” he says. Mirin Fader, the author and Ringer staffer, needs to be sipping coffee or tea (“I can’t write without them!”). Chris Ballard, the author and former Sports Illustrated fighter pilot, shuts everything down. “I turn off the wifi on my laptop, hit do not disturb on the phone, and set a timer for 45 minutes,” he says. “At the end, I get up and move around a bit, maybe get some fresh air for five minutes. Rinse and repeat a couple sessions if possible.” USA Today’s Rick Jervis (author of this upcoming book) needs to put pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard) in the morning’s opening peep—”with my first cup of coffee.” Luca Evans of the Orange County Register seeks out the perfect pen jam (“… until I find something that matches the mood of what I’m immediately writing”). Leigh Montville, the Mt. Rushmore Boston Globe/SI scribe, requires “the self inoculation of a half-gallon of Diet Pepsi.

“I also like to keep my pants on.”

The queen of the phenomenon may well be Jemele Hill, writer of 100 million words, who maintains she not only requires background sound to get her through—but prefers that the background sound arrive via a nearby television showing her favorite soap opera, “The Young and the Restless.”

Um …

“It’s perfect white noise,” she says. “But I always somehow know what’s going on. I’ll write for awhile, look up, and think, ‘Sharon really should have told him that wasn’t his baby.’ And then go back to my work.”

Noise and drinks matter.

But so do the actual mannerisms and rituals of writing itself. As Vaccaro noted earlier, he cannot start a piece without a literal dateline. That is, again, sorta kooky. But it’s not too kooky and not too distant from other approaches. In a sense, I think it relates to the way you can hear, oh, Lionel Richie’s “Three Times a Lady” and hate it, but I can hear Lionel Richie’s “Three Times a Lady” and love it. We all come to this with our own makeups, and therefore the thing that triggers my creativity is unrelated to the thing that triggers yours.

As a result, we all seem nuts.

For example, when Tyler Kepner, baseball writer for The Athletic, wakes up in the morning, he logs the box score line of every Major League pitcher … via pen and paper. “It forces me to spend at least a few seconds with a box score of every MLB game in a season,” he says, “and the act of physically writing down each starting pitcher’s line helps me internalize how each of them is doing at all times.” Around the same time Tyler is tracking Cole v. Kershaw, the author/CNN contributor Amy Bass spent many years not showering. Which, eh, is hardly the best thing. But, in her case, well, there was no other way. “If I showered, it was over,” she said. “I’d leave the house immediately and writing was done for the day.”

Jack McCallum, my ol’ SI colleague and author of a ton of books, will never quit for the night without writing the next day’s first sentence—“so I don’t sit there and say, ‘uh, what now?’” I don’t quite go that far, but I share the approach of the Ringer’s terrific Howard Beck, who needs a lede to exist before he can proceed to paragraphs two, three and four. “I know some folks can start in the middle and write some sections of the story, but I can’t do anything until the lede is written,” he says. “And even then, I’ll often keep scrolling back up to tweak the lede/first few grafs, bouncing between the top and the lower sections.”

When Mike Organ, the veteran Tennessean sports writer, completes a story, he refuses to send it on for editing until he reads it over with the mindset of his journalistic competitors. “The more upset I get in that role, the better it makes me feel about the job I’ve done,” he says. “Kinda perverted, I know.”

If there is a rival for Vaccaro’s widespread lunacy, it has to be Wayne Coffey, the former New York Daily News feature writer and kingpin of an outstanding Substack, Coffey Grounds. “I have a bunch of them …” Wayne began.

And joshing, he is not …

“For one thing, I am obsessed with graph-lined notebooks,” he says. “I also like to wear clothing that is appropriate to the topic I am writing about. It isnt always possible, but sometimes it’s easy. When I was working [on a book] with R.A. Dickey, I would wear an RA-Diculous Mets T-shirt. While researching ‘The Boys of Winter,’ I stopped in a thrift store and found a pair of warmup pants that said K&B Drive-In, a famous local chicken place. I wore those pants constantly. I still have them …”

I must pause to note that Wayne sent me an image of the pants, because he (rightly) presumed I’d be skeptical of anyone keeping crusty K&B Drive-In pants …

At the least, he took them off for a day. That’s what we in media refer to as progress.

Wayne continued.

“When Chad Pennington first became the Jets starter, I went to his home in Tennessee. When I went to see his high school coach, i saw these red tee shirts with ‘Can’t Win With 67.43 Percent.’ That was how many players showed up for offseason conditioning—and the team had a terrible year. That was my writing shirt for years to remind myself never to mail it in.”

A couple of decades ago, while filing a playoff game story from Madison Square Garden, Ian O’Connor of the New York Daily News felt a fan’s hands begin to massage his shoulders. Then, a whisper into his ear—“Are you going to put in your story that Chevy Chase gave you a massage?”

Standing behind him was Chevy Chase.

Ian filed his piece.

He also filed his piece when, inside Cameron Indoor Stadium, a Duke student leaned over his shoulder and challenged the angle to his lede. He’s filed in snow, in rain, in wind, in sleet. He’s filed when he’s happy, when he’s sad, when he’s depressed.

Give Ian a deadline, he will make it.

But …

“When I’m writing at home, God forbid if the guy five houses down is power-washing his siding, or if a loved one enters my upstairs office to ask when I plan on feeding and walking our beagle,” he says. “I crave peace and quiet when wearing the author or columnist hat at home, even though I’ve done most of my best work at relatively high speeds in chaotic environments. It’s an annoying truth to any noisemaker within striking distance of my desktop.”

And, deep down that’s the whole enchilada. It’s debatable whether we writers bring much value to society. It’s debatable whether the world will shrug when our profession inevitably vanishes for good. It’s debatable whether we’re smart, whether we’re wise, whether we’re important.

What is irrefutable, however, is that we are creative. We do these jobs because—one way or another—we grab words and phrases from midair and place them into oh-so-important documents that will come and go like a morning fart.

More than anything, that makes us different.

Blissfully, wackily different.

Ask Jeff Pearlman a fucking question(s)

From Motownsilly: You said in a TikTok video that your dream sports book is the 1984 Padres. But why not my 1984 Detroit Tigers, the team that actually won the World Series?: So here’s the thing—just because a team wins a World Series doesn’t mean it would make a great book. Those Tigers were fantastic, and they certainly had some noteworthy figures (Gibson, Sparky, Bárbaro Garbey, Scott Earl, etc). But the Padres remain one of the greatest oddball collections in modern sports. Their second baseman was bi-sexual. Their ace was a hard-right crazy John Bircher. Their manager was loathed. Their first baseman hated their third baseman—and vice versa. Their shortstop flipped off the fans.

Oh, and Tony Gwynn!

The Quaz Five with … Adrienne Lewin

Adrienne Lewin is the editor of Diversity in Action magazine as well as one of my all-time favorite humans and former University of Delaware classmate. You can follow her on Xitter here …

1. You’re the editor of Diversity in Action magazine. Lately “diversity” has become a weird American buzzword. What does it mean to you?: The magazine focuses both on diverse students and professionals working in STEAM fields as well as diversity of thought, experience and perspective. We highlight those often underrepresented in these fields, including individuals who identify as people of color, those with disabilities, veterans, active military personnel, women and members of the LGBTQ+ community. To me, diversity, equity and inclusion means that everyone should be able to be fully who they are in the workplace or in school, without hesitation or ramifications. 

2. We worked together at the Delaware student newspaper, The Review. We both aspired to be journalists. So, 30 years after graduating, has the career met your expectations?: Overall, yes, I've worked at daily newspapers, magazines, the websites of major national news organizations like FOX News, ABC News and the TODAY Show. I've covered everything from the fluffiest fluff to breaking news and national politics. I still love meeting new people and telling their stories. But I never could have imagined then that the majority of my career would involve the internet.

3. You started your journey at a daily newspaper, the Delaware County Daily and Sunday Times. Entertain my younger subscribers—what was newspaper life like in the dark ages of 1994?: Well young newshounds, the paper where I got my start was founded in 1876 and is still going, albeit in a pared-down, skeleton-staffed, layoff-depleted version of a newsroom and daily paper. In the early '90s, we had a library with archived issues and files upon files of stories and photos used for reference on a daily basis. Reporters worked the phones - corded landlines - in a newsroom where people smoked and wrote on mammoth desktop computers with black screens and blocky green text. The Internet existed but we only had one computer with access, housed in the editor-in-chief's office, that we had to take turns using, and the lone search engine was AltaVista (Google it to see what that was). Pages were designed digitally but we still measured inches and sized images using a pica pole - now a collector's item on eBay. There was a production staff who pasted up the pages by hand. And our most popular section was "Sound Off" - an answering machine where people would call and rant about whatever they wanted and we'd print some of them in the paper. 

4. What was the craziest assignment of your career? What do you remember about it?: I'm finding it impossible to think of the craziest assignment over 30 years of them, meeting lots of famous and infamous people ... I've done arguably crazy things like showing up alone to a murder scene in the city of Chester while working a 4 to midnight shift. There have been really fun ones like attending the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show and interviewing actor Michael McKean for his perspective from his "Best in Show" role. I guess a memorable one was when FOX sent me to Dartmouth in 1999 for a town hall debate at the start of the 2000 presidential election campaign. There were other events involving the wide pool of candidates, and I hung out at a diner with Bill Bradley who was running against Al Gore. I also arrived at a stop right as John McCain emerged from his Straight Talk Express. He was far from a household name at the time and just kind of stood there waiting for his handlers. Seeing no other reporters around, I went up and started a conversation with him, asking for comments on something in the current news cycle, and got some exclusive stuff that editors were pleased about before the rest of the press pool descended on us. The story that has stuck with me the most is from my first job. I did a series about domestic violence and the family court system. My main subject was a young mom of four who had escaped her abusive marriage and put her life back together. She later ran off to California with another man who ended up murdering her. I still think of her and wonder what happened to her children. 

5. You spent a few years as a reporter for Adweek. And I always wondered—covering ad agencies, etc. Interesting or dull? And why?: It was actually a very cool time. I covered internet advertising from 1998-1999, a brand new frontier in the ad world that was still being figured out. Startups were hot until they crashed within a year; traditional agencies' digital divisions tried to learn how their work translated online, and no one knew yet how to measure success. So that in itself was exciting, as were the new ideas and new technologies that emerged. I remember getting early access to this thing called Google and our staff played around with it, marveling at how accurate and quickly it would deliver information. Plus, writing for a trade magazine was like working a beat only it was accepted - and expected - that you would be pals with those you covered in order to score exclusives before our rivals. So that meant lots of socializing, and digital startups at the time had lavish budgets spent on lunches at exclusive New York City restaurants and launch parties with Prince as the musical entertainment. It was a good run.

Bonus [rank in order—favorite to least]: The Scrounge, Donovan McNabb, Ween, Matt Konkle, Coke Zero, your favorite shoes, eggnog, the old Vet, the first snowfall of winter, Daniel Jones, Sbarro: Coke Zero, elixir of the gods; Donovan McNabb, go Birds!; Matt Konkle, great guy from The Review; the old Vet and my family's seats just below the insane 700 level; The Scrounge with the greasiest pizza and burgers on the planet; Ween, instant flashback to college; eggnog if it's mostly rum; my favorite shoes, a nice espadrille wedge; Sbarro, Michael Scott's "favorite New York pizza joint;" Daniel Jones, or should I rank him higher for being so bad?; the first snowfall of winter, harbinger of cold, dark, gloomy months. 

A random old article worth revisiting …

On July 18, 1982, Michael Davis of the Chicago Sun-Times sat down with J.R. Richard, the former Astros pitcher trying to come back after a stroke derailed his career. Sadly, he never returned to the Bigs, and shortly thereafter was homeless and living under a bridge.

The Madness of Tyler Kepner’s Grid …

So unless you’ve been living beneath a pebble beneath a rock beneath a big hunk of cheese, you’re aware of Immaculate Grid, the daily game that’s drawn thousands of nerdy sports fans (guilty!) to its ranks. And while the NBA grid, NFL grid, NHL grid and WNBA grid are all fun, this game is at its best when it comes to baseball—where the names are endless and the transactions ceaseless.

Over the past few weeks I’ve often discussed the grid with Tyler Kepner, the Athletic baseball writer. And now, for kicks, every week I feature one of Tyler’s bonkers grid results. He’s the ultimate baseball geek (I say this with great affection), and his outputs blow my mind.

So …

Tyler thoughts …

• Bubba Trammell was an original Devil Ray who had a big pinch-hit in Game 1 of the World Series for the Mets in 2000. They traded him to SD that offseason. He later went AWOL from the Yankees and never played again.

• Roberto Hernandez was an All-Star closer, very solid for a long time. Traded to the Giants down the stretch in 1997, then went to the expansion Devil Rays.

• Russ Johnson was a utility infielder for Tampa Bay who played briefly for the Yankees when I covered them.

• Freddie Toliver pitched for the Phillies when I was a kid.

• Joe Price pitched a great game for the Giants in the 1987 NLCS. I remember him because he was warming up right in front of me when I had tickets behind the Red Sox bullpen at Fenway one day.

• Brad Gulden was a backup catcher who had the grim task of replacing Thurman Munson on the Yankees’ roster after Munson’s plane crash in August 1979.

• A 1988 Randy Byers Donruss card (“Randall Byers”) came up in a box of random common cards I keep in my home office

• Jim Thorpe, of course, is one of the greatest athletes of all-time. He played for the Giants under John McGraw, who actually started him in a WS game but removed him for a pinch-hitter in the top of the first when the other team changed pitchers.

• Joe Lefebvre platooned in right field with Sixto Lezcano for my beloved 1983 Phillies, who won the NL pennant. Lefebvre started his career with the Yankees.

This week’s college writer you should follow on Twitter …

Joey LeMaster, Illinois State

A sports reporter for The Vidette, LeMaster covered the increasingly fascinating saga of Redbirds pitcher Paige McLeod, who tossed her second no-hitter of the season.

Wrote LeMaster …

One can follow Joey on Twitter here.

Bravo, kid.

Journalism musings for the week …

Musing 1: The shittiness of Gannett should never shock anyone, but … well, this is pretty awful. Sarah Leach, group editor of the Holland Sentinel and two dozen other newspapers, was canned by the corporate monolith after she (rightly) complained that the company wasn’t hiring promised employees. Melissa Nann Burke broke it down in this Detroit News piece.

Musing 2: This is four years old, so—technically—I’m four years too late. But on Aug. 9, 2000, the writer Ed Brayton ended his fight against cancer by writing the beautiful/crushing SAYING GOODBYE FOR THE LAST TIME. Wrote Brayton: “My greatest hope is that after I’m gone the world continues to become more fair, just and equal. What else could we possibly hope for and work for? I urge you all to keep fighting the good fight for those core values.”

Musing 3: Much has been made of the commencement speech given by Chiefs kicker Harrison Butker to the graduates of Benedictine College. So I’ll just add this: You’re Benedictine College. You’ve been around since 1971. And the best—the absolute best—speaker you can find to offer life lessons to those entering the real world is a 28-year-old kicker? Seriously? Were John Hall and Uwe von Schamann unavailable?

Musing 4: Tremendous piece from Jeremy Schwartz of Texas Tribune on Courtney Gore, a former hard-right school board member who has come to realize (oh!) it’s all just an “effort by wealthy conservative donors to undermine public education in Texas and install a voucher system in which public money flows to private and religious schools.” Who could have known?

Read FORMER FAR-RIGHT HARD-LINER SAYS PRO-VOUCHER BILLIONAIRES ARE USING SCHOOL BOARD RACES TO SOW DISTRUST IN PUBLIC EDUCATION to both A. Learn more. B. Feel like screaming into a paper cup.

Musing 5: How am I only now learning of Pop-Up Magazine?

Musing 6: If you’re wondering whether rainbows and unicorns rule the world, and love will save the day … here’s Greg Abbott, Texas’ sinister governor, pardoning a man named Daniel Perry who (after posting all sorts of racist shit online) shot and killed a protester at a BLM rally. Perry drove his car into a crowd of marchers—before shooting and killing one point blank. He texted a friend: “I will only shoot the [protestors] in front and push the pedal to the metal.”

Musing 7: Weird to see people dumping on Caitlin Clark after her unbalanced WNBA debut. The young woman scored 20 on a bad team and the entire arena watching her. Her nine points in her home debut was nothing glorious, but … she’s playing against the best of the best. She’ll be OK.

Musing 8: Funny piece from LADbible’s Olivia Burke, headlined WOMAN PANICS AFTER 7,500 TABS SHE KEPT OPEN FOR TWO YEARS CRASHED. Wrote Burke: “When it comes to keeping tabs open while browsing the internet, there isn't much of a middle ground. You're either someone who simply can't stand the clutter of having multiple websites open at once, or you're more than happy to hoard hundreds of browser windows 'just in case' they might come in handy one day. But this woman has really taken the biscuit with her obsession with keeping tabs open, as she proudly acquired a whopping 7,500 open web pages on Firefox over a more than two-year period.”

Musing 9: If you’re not checking out Michael J. Lewis’ Wide World of Stuff, you 100 percent should. There’s always something new and funky and fun (like, cough, the above musing. Which I found because of him).

Musing 10: A very disturbing story from the New York Times’ Jodi Cantor on Samuel Alito, the Supreme Court justice, having an upside down American flag hanging outside his house. The lede: “After the 2020 presidential election, as some Trump supporters falsely claimed that President Biden had stolen the office, many of them displayed a startling symbol outside their homes, on their cars and in online posts: an upside-down American flag. One of the homes flying an inverted flag during that time was the residence of Supreme Court Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., in Alexandria, Va., according to photographs and interviews with neighbors.” WTF?

Musing 11: Jared Moskowitz continues to entertain.

Musing 12: I was very enthralled by HOW DO YOU MEND A BROKEN HEART? ANN AND NANCY WILSON KNOW from the Washington Post’s Geoff Edgers.

Musing 13: The new Two Writers Slinging Yang stars Curry Kirkpatrick, former Sports Illustrated and ESPN the Magazine scribe.

Quote of the Week …