Craig Wright – Helena, MT
The root of the story series began in the late 1950s with the baseball stories my grandfather shared with me from the history of the game. I found them fascinating, enjoyable, and my love of baseball grew and expanded beyond the game I played and followed to include its history.
A little more than twenty years later I started sharing my grandfather’s stories, and similar ones I had learned on my own, with my good friend Eric Nadel, the longtime broadcaster for the games of the Texas Rangers. In 1984 we created a pre-game radio show based on the stories called A Page from Baseball’s Past. Eric was the producer and voice of the show, and I researched and wrote the scripts.
The show was a hit with the listeners and radio advertisers. I was surprised to receive a letter from the President of the American League, Dr. Bobby Brown, sharing how much he enjoyed the show. Some program directors in some other cities took notice and purchased our tapes or bought the scripts to have them read by their own local talent. At various times in the coming years the stories were a pre-game show for the Baltimore Orioles, Detroit Tigers, and San Francisco Giants. They were also part of the sports programming in a few markets outside of the major leagues.
But nowhere was it more of a staple than with the games of the Texas Rangers, a testament to the popularity of Nadel and the great job he did with the stories. It ended up being one of the longest running pre-game radio shows in the history of the game. It was on the air for 26 years. I estimate that these simple, charming stories warmed up the listening audience for roughly 6000 major league games.
In 2008, in the waning years of the radio version, I was semi-retired, settled in Montana, and launched a subscription text version of the story series, something I had been itching to try for a long time, but never before had the time for it. In this format the stories could include pictures, charts, and they could vary more in length to fit the best telling of each story. And the new version filled a need I often had heard from fans of the radio show, that they wished they could hear the stories in the off-season, when they most needed — as one put it — “a baseball fix.”
People ask me what I do in winter when there’s no baseball. I’ll tell you what I do. I stare out the window and wait for spring. – Rogers Hornsby
The story series had already been going through a significant change, but it was a subtle one that generally went unnoticed. For roughly the first dozen years of the radio show, I was like most of the baseball storytellers. I was focused almost exclusively on telling entertaining stories. I would not knowingly tell a story or detail that I knew was false, but I also wasn’t motivated to do much rigorous research either. I figured it wasn’t that important given what most people, including myself, thought the show was about. And with a demanding career where I routinely worked 80 hours a week, I didn’t have a lot of time for what was simply a hobby for me that made a few bucks.
My attitude began to shift as I reflected on what it was that I had liked about my grandfather’s stories. Part of the charm for me was that they were not just stories, they were about something that was real. And while I didn’t fully grasp at the time what I was taking in through listening to those stories, I was able to look back and see I had been very gently learning the history of the game. These decades later I came to see there was an obligation to work harder to get things right when telling stories that relate to real events, real people, and when in between the lines of your entertaining stories, you are also teaching history. I knew I personally didn’t like it when I would later learn one of my grandfather’s stories was wrong or had errors in it. I didn’t blame him. His resources were very limited, and often he was sharing stories that were just commonly told in his day and arrived already mistaken or corrupted. But I could do better and resolved to do exactly that. I started working harder on researching my new stories, and when an old one came up in the rotation, I would totally take a fresh look at it, and often radically revised it to fit what I learned was true — or had the higher probability of being true.
This change in my attitude toward the story series was a boon to the text version. Realizing I was not just entertaining the audience but also infusing them with the history of the game, I started adding stories that dealt more directly with the evolution of the game. And lo and behold, the audience loved those additional stories and often requested more along that line. I remember one reader writing he was curious about when the fielders stopped leaving their gloves on the field. I thought I would just determine when it was and write him back. But in that research, I discovered there was a related story that would encapsulate that wee bit of history and was worthy of being part of the story series. It was well-received, and the audience effortlessly learned another point of baseball history.
If history were taught in the form of stories, it would never be forgotten. – Rudyard Kipling
As my view of the story series expanded and I did more research for each story, I would learn little nuggets that would distract from the main story, but I could include them in the text version in what I called “Research Notes.” That feature of the text version became hugely popular and mentioned many times in positive feedback.
The text version of the story series is undeniably a bit more scholarly than the old radio shows, but I never lost sight of the goal of the stories being good stories. They had to be interesting, entertaining, and a digestible morsel rather than lengthy exposition. And of course, the series has to capture the joy of the game. No matter how serious and business-like the professional game can be, at the heart of it is a game, one that it is meant to be enjoyed. If you teach the history of the game without that essence, it is a false history.
The text version of the story series lasted a little more than sixteen years, ending only when aging and health issues made it the wise and right thing to do.
Perhaps the most interesting lesson I learned in doing the story series is that sometimes you have to try to tell a story before you give up on the idea. I’ve had many inklings for a possible story where my initial thought was that there wasn’t enough there for a story suitable to the series. But I’d play with the idea and sometimes just start working on it the same way I would with another story idea that clearly belonged. Lots of times in giving a questionable idea a try, I would come to see it wasn’t working out and abandon it. But sometimes I would be surprised to discover in the effort that there was something there — that I could craft not just a worthy story, but sometimes a really good one.
One day a reader noted that the 50th anniversary of the funeral of Jackie Robinson was coming up, and he wondered if I could do a story about that. I was both attracted to the idea but also incredibly skeptical. How could there be enough there for a story? And a funeral? I’d never done a story with a funeral at the center. But I gave it a go, and I began to see the way to make it a compelling story. The more I worked, the stronger it got. I realized it was going to be a good one, and by the time I was done, I literally wondered if I would ever do a better one.
You don’t know until you try.
For a long time, when asked which was my personal favorite, I could not name one because there were so many that were special to me. I’d dodge the question by giving several favorites in different categories of stories. But after I wrote Farewell Jackie Robinson, I had my answer. That story has remained my personal favorite of all the stories I’ve done, and I still marvel that it was one of those ideas that began with the doubt that there was even a story there.