Volume 4, Issue 62: Jose Oquendo

"He's been a part of baseball his entire life, yet he's still like a kid out there."

Pre-order The Time Has Come, my novel that comes out May 16. I think you will like it. All pre-orders with proof of purchase enter the contest we unveiled last month. Hi.

My editor’s name was Mike Helfsnider, and he seemed like the most established, coolest grown-up dude I’d ever met, even though when I look back it now, he was probably, like, 20. I wanted his approval desperately. He was the associate sports editor at the Daily Illini, the student newspaper at the University of Illinois. I’d been writing for the newspaper since my very first day on my campus; minutes after my parents dropped me off at my dorm, I got on a bus and rode to the DI to try to write for them. (It was a Sunday. The door was locked. I came back the next day.) In what will probably not be a surprise to you, I bombarded them quickly with my persistence, my productivity and my relentlessness—by the time the first semester of my freshman year ended, I was writing two movie reviews a week and covering the women’s tennis team.

But Mike, who was always wearing hemp necklaces and had named his fantasy baseball team the “Leesville Leafsmokers,” was about to give me the biggest break of my nascent, very short career. The DI had three reporters covering the Illinois football team—along with men’s basketball, football was the absolute pinnacle of the sports desk; people would work at the paper four, even five years to even hope for the chance to land that beat—and one of them had to head back home to the Chicago suburbs for the weekend and would have to miss the game. “Wanna fill in?” Mike told me. “We just need you to get quotes from Minnesota’s coach after the game, it’ll be really easy. But you get a press pass and everything.”

I tried to play it cool and not, like, kiss him right there like I wanted to. I just thanked him and told him I wouldn’t let him down. I remember him chuckling at that. It must feel weird to have someone treat you like a serious boss when you’re 20.

It was snowing like crazy that Saturday morning, and I showed up at Memorial Stadium hours before the game started, hours, even, before the press box opened. Once they finally let me in, I took the elevator up and found my seat, with a special card on it that said “WILL LEITCH — DAILY ILLINI.” I stared at that card for a long time. I then looked out onto the field. There I was, in a cathedral of college football, a capacity 75,000 building I’d grown up thinking was the loudest, most massive structure that could possibly exist. The state of Illinois, my state, had its outline on the 50-yard line, and “FIGHTING ILLINI” was painted in one endzone. I was here. I was being paid to be here. If those kids back in Mattoon could see me now. My parents will be so proud.

I could not screw this up, so I made sure to be ready. I put my notebook down in my seat—I wouldn’t get my first laptop until 2005, 12 years later—and mapped out the route from the press box down to the Minnesota locker room and back. I ran through it a few times to make sure I had it down cold, and by the time I was confident enough to sit down in my seat, the game was about to start and the press box was now full.

That might have been what I was looking forward to most: The people. Imagine what a football press box must be like! Everybody up there gets to write about sports—for their job! They get to go to games for free. They get to talk to athletes, to ask them questions, to get to know them. Their pictures and bylines are in the newspaper. Shoot, they even get free food up there. They get paid to write about sports. What a life! Those people must be the happiest people in the world!

I was sitting next to some guy from the Decatur Herald & Review, and I turned to introduce myself.

“Hi, I’m Will! This is my first game!”

The man, who seemed about 70 to me at the time but was probably about 35, grunted a little and didn’t even look up from his notepad. I turned to my left, where a writer for the St. Paul Pioneer-Press was grousing to a colleague about how the cheeseburger the Illini support staff had made for him was cold.

“I don’t know how the hell we’re going to get out of here tonight with all this snow,” the guy next to him said. “We’re gonna be stuck in this cowtown forever.”

As I sat and watched the game, which turned out to be a pretty incredible one, it dawned on me, to my horror, that the happy place I’d imagined to be filled with joyous sports enthusiasts, celebrating their chosen profession and all the glories that come with it, was actually a hotbox of misery, a gaggle of middle-aged men (and they were all men) who thought the athletes were stupid, the games were taking too long, the food was lousy, the press box was too cold and, more than anything, that all of this was just so stupid and pointless. These men were not celebrating sports; these men, I discovered, hated sports.

At one point in their lives, they had to have loved sports—as fans, as children, as ambitious college kids just like me. That’s why they wanted to work in sports in the first place. But then they got too close, learned how the sausage was made, stopped thinking of sports as a joyous diversion, an incredible spectacle, and could only see it as a job. As a lousy job.

I spent the rest of the game despondent. Was this my future? If I stayed in the press box long enough, was I going to turn into them? The Illini ended up pulling off an unlikely comeback victory, in a game that is still talked about in Champaign to this day.

But I took no joy in it. I just sat there, clasping my hands together tightly to make sure I didn’t get excited or applaud, trying not to make a sound. There is, after all, no cheering in the press box. There was nothing cheerful in there. That press box and those men did something that I wouldn’t have thought possible: They made me, for a few hours, not like sports. After the game, I got my quotes from the Minnesota coach, read them over the phone to my DI editor and walked back to my dorm.

My roommate asked me how it went.

“I don’t know what I’m going to do with my life,” I said. “But I know one thing for sure: I am not going to write about sports for a living.”

*********************

I tell that story a lot when I am talking to journalism students or doing promotional stuff for the book, sometimes as a cautionary tale but usually as a way to explain the founding of Deadspin back in 2005 and how my more “traditional” journalism career prepared me to launch something seemingly (but not really) outside those established parameters. The point of the story is not that those sportswriters were cynical jerks. The point of the story is that, on that day in a freezing press box in Champaign, Illinois, I decided that no matter what happened in my life, I would make sure that nothing made me stop loving sports.

It is difficult, after all, to find things that you love, so when you have one, you have to hang onto it: You can’t lose it for nothing. And I do love sports. They provide me simplicity in a way nothing else in life does: As I’ve said many, many times before (so often that I’m getting a little sick of hearing myself say it), when your team wins you are happy, and when it loses you are sad, and there isn’t anything else in life that’s like that. Sports are a way to relax, sports are a way to stress, sports are a way to scream in joy, sports are a way to wail in pain. I’ve long thought that sports provide a valuable public service in that they allow us a safe, generally harmless way to get out emotions that might seem unacceptable or even painful in any other context. When life is hard, when life is scary, when it feels like the walls are closing in, I have found sports to be my invaluable escape. I understand them—their rules, their rituals, their histories, their eccentricities, their connection to my life, their connection to all of ours. They have been a part of my life longer than anything this side of my parents. They are, essentially, my family.

And I was never going to lose something like that to a job. So when I started Deadspin, I made a vow to myself: I will write about sports in a way that makes sure I still love sports. This requires certain strategies. I try not to spend too much time in locker rooms, or press boxes, if I don’t have to. I work hard, not always successfully but always sincerely, to separate the players (and owners of the teams) I cheer for and the people they may be when they are outside the stadium. I am completely biased, and open and honest about my biases, toward the teams I root for: The quickest route to making me stop caring about sports would be take away my love for the Cardinals, the Illini, the Knicks, the Dawgs, Arsenal, Atlanta United, all of them. I try to remain skeptical about the business of sport but fully, whole-heartedly optimistic and swooning about the games themselves. I try not to be overly nostalgic about sports, to never believe that sports were somehow better when I was a kid than they are now. (They’re not. You were just kids. Your kids love sports right now just as much as you did.) Mostly: I remain passionate about sports. I have learned how to hold onto my love for these sports while still writing about them with seriousness and purpose. To be honest, it didn’t turn out to be that difficult. If you can’t write about something you love, then what can you write about?

Baseball started this week, on Thursday, Opening Day. I love sports, but I deeply love baseball, which is one of the reasons I think I’m pretty good at writing about it. It never feels like a job to watch baseball, to think about baseball, to talk about baseball, to put words to my thoughts about baseball. My entire life isn’t baseball, which is probably another reason I can still love it: If baseball is your entire life, you can’t use baseball as an escape—and being used as an escape is one of baseball’s greatest utilities. I am able to still watch these games with curiosity, and excitement, and that wonderful sense of being awed, of being shocked, of being joyous. Sports surprise me, every day. And that’s how life stays interesting, vibrant and fresh.

I write nearly as much about things that are not sports as I do about sports anymore, and I think that’s healthy. But I cannot kid myself: When a week like this comes, when there is baseball after months where there was no baseball, when I can pour myself a beer and kick my feet up and just get lost in a game … I am, in the purest sense, happy. With any luck, I’ve got many years left to write about sports. I’m extremely grateful. Those guys in the press box lost what once made them love sports so much they wanted to make a career out of it in the first place. I realize now that I have constructed my own career specifically so that I never do.

SIX WEEKS TO BOOK LAUNCH

Every week here at The Will Leitch Newsletter, we countdown the weeks until the release of The Time Has Come, my novel that comes out May 16. This is the spot for weekly news, updates and pre-order reminders.

More than How Lucky, and really more than any other book I have written, The Time Has Come has a lot of music in it. A major character is a musician, another has worked at a rock club for decades, and the famous Athens music scene is its own sort of character all to itself. I also wrote the whole thing in a bit of a fevered rush while listening to music blaring in my headphones very, very loudly.

So: I made an Official The Time Has Come Playlist. As I described it on Spotify:

This is the soundtrack to the book, songs inspired by the book, songs that served as inspiration for the book, songs with thematic connections to the book, song that are simply great songs I was listening to when I wrote the book. Hopefully listening to this playlist is what it feels like to read the book.

I spent way too much time fiddling with this thing and, honestly, I’m probably still not done with it.

You can find it right here:

If you like this playlist, you will really like the book: I think of the book every time I listen to it. And if you don’t like this playlist … well, hopefully you will still like the book.

Thanks to my friend Will Haraway from The Sundogs for helping out with this as well. An infinite well of music knowledge, that guy.

So anyway: Listen, and pre-order!

Here is a numerical breakdown of all the things I wrote this week, in order of what I believe to be their quality.

1. Mike Petriello and I Did Our Annual World Series Winner Draft, MLB.com. One of my favorite pieces every year.

2. Opening Day Is Here, MLB.com. I got to write the scene setter.

3. Watch the Women’s Final Four This Year, Not the Men’s, New York. The women’s tourney, alas, is a lot more exciting.

4. What We Learned on Opening Day, MLB.com. Lots!

5. I’m Writing MLB’s Power Rankings a Few Times This Year, MLB.com. And this is the first one.

6. The Only Way Through Is Mean, Medium. Sorry, Tim Scott.

7. I Do a Yearly Small Cardinals Preview Thing For Cards Conclave, and This Is It, Cards Conclave. I think this is my … 15th straight year of doing this?

8. The Thirty: Every Team’s Most Indispensible Player, MLB.com. Not hard to guess a lot of these.

9. Your The Time Has Come FAQ, Medium. This is actually my last month writing regularly for Medium, so I figured I’d finish with something purely self-promotional.

PODCASTS

Grierson & Leitch, we discussed “John Wick Chapter Four,” “A Good Person” and “Tori and Lokita.”

Seeing Red, Bernie and I previewed the whole darned season.

Waitin' Since Last Saturday, I’m not on this show, which is probably why it’s such a good one: The Athletic’s Seth Emerson talks to Tony.

LONG STORY YOU SHOULD READ THIS MORNING … OF THE WEEK

“My 6-Year-Old Son Died. Then the Anti-vaxxers Found Out,” Billy Ball, The Atlantic. This is infuriating.

ONGOING LETTER-WRITING PROJECT!

This is your reminder that if you write me a letter and put it in the mail, I will respond to it with a letter of my own, and send that letter right to you! It really happens! Hundreds of satisfied customers!

Write me at:

Will Leitch
P.O. Box 48
Athens GA 30603

CURRENTLY LISTENING TO

“Ripe,” Screaming Females. When you read the book, there is a scene in which a certain character plays her most popular song on stage, and I spent way too much time trying to find the real-life song that sounds the most like the one I wrote for her in my own head and … well, this isn’t exactly right, but it’s close enough. Either way, it rocks.

Remember to listen to The Official Will Leitch Newsletter Spotify Playlist, featuring every song ever mentioned in this section.

Also, now there is an Official The Time Has Come Spotify Playlist.

It’s Spring Break for the boys, and we’re all going to be in Florida, just a few miles from Mar-a-Lago, the week Trump is arrested. Impeccable timing.

Have a great weekend, all.

Best,
Will