Today, we are honored to kick off another Grab The Lapels blog tour. This time, it's for Caryn Rose's A Whole New Ballgame, and here she is, sharing with us the story of how her love of baseball all started!
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
For someone who has
published two baseball books in one year, it might seem odd to point out that
10 years ago, I wouldn’t have been able to explain one thing about baseball to
you. I didn’t grow up a baseball fan; my dad is one of those guys who gave up
on baseball when the Dodgers left Brooklyn. My mom was a White Sox fan, but not
enough to have passed it down to me. So,
I grew up without a team, and very little understanding of baseball.
I lived in Seattle in the mid 90’s, when the Seattle
Mariners just started to get good. I had lots of friends who were die-hard fans
and always wanted to go to games, and I would go, but largely felt guilty to
waste time and money because I didn’t know what was going on. And everyone
assumes that you do know, so you don’t want to try to ask them to explain it to
you. Some people aren’t good teachers, and others don’t understand things well
enough to explain it to you.
When I started dating my significant other almost 11 years
ago, I knew he was a die-hard Mets fan, and I never would have expected him to
watch less baseball just because we were a couple and I didn’t love baseball
like he did. But I definitely wanted to go to games with him, because he loved
it so much. So, we started going to games, and I started asking questions, and
the more questions I asked, the more he explained. Talking about baseball is
one of the things he absolutely loves doing, and his enthusiasm was infectious.
Plus, it’s a lot more fun to watch the game if you understand what’s going on.
At some point in 2005 I said, “I think we should go to
some more games this summer,” and by the end of the season I had been to 12
games—some I even went to of my own volition, solo, because I’d had a bad day
or to get out of the house or because there was a moment I didn’t want to miss,
like Mike Piazza’s last game as a Met.
In the winter of 2005, I got an email from the Mets urging
me to consider putting down a deposit on a season ticket plan because season
ticket holders would have first priority on ticket locations in the new
ballpark they were going to start building to replace Shea Stadium. I had seen
what had happened to my friends in Seattle when the Mariners moved from the
Kingdome to Safeco Field, and I didn’t want that to happen to the SO. I had a
day job at the time where I earned commission and I’d had a pretty good month,
so I put down a deposit. We were officially Mets season ticket holders.
I started blogging about baseball because I wanted to
capture my first real season as a baseball fan. I’m a writer, and writing is
how I process and celebrate and commemorate things. It was my own tiny little project, and I had
no idea I would be good at it or that anyone who didn’t know me would care
about reading it. It was also the first year that the Mets “blogosphere” (for
lack of a better word) really took off.
My readership grew as the season went on; my
non-sports-loving friends started reading my blog because they liked my
writing. Other Mets fans, especially those not in New York any more, started
reading it for the same reason. And once we reached the post-season, other
non-Mets baseball fans (whose teams were out of contention) were drawn to it. I
wrote about baseball the same way I wrote about music; I wrote about the
experience of watching the game, of what it was like to be there. This was
different than some of the more analytical or statistics-based writing that was
going on at the time, and was an easy place for someone to jump in who wasn’t
completely familiar with every nuance of the season.
In 2007, I moved the blog off Blogger and bought my domain
name, and kept writing. Our ticket plan meant I was at 25 games at a minimum,
and we would augment that by following the Mets on the road and visiting other
ballparks. We would average 40-45 games a year in a 162 game season, 80 of
which are at home. That is a lot of baseball.
Some I watched on TV or listened to on the radio, but I was happiest
writing about being at Shea Stadium, sitting in Section 12 with the rest of the
season ticket holders, people you see twice a week from April to September. The
stories of Shea and Mets fans were endless. The Mets, however, did not have an endless
season, and if you’ve read the book, you know what happens.
Baseball blogging was now officially a focus of mine, and
I was writing about all of the games I attended, every night, just like one of
the beat writers. I had finished my first novel and my agent was working on
selling it, while I went off and started the next one. Of course, with the
frenetic pace of the baseball season, this meant that I only wrote fiction in
the off-season. At some point during all of this, an editor contacted my agent,
saying that she liked my baseball writing, and wanted me to write a
baseball/rock-and-roll type of memoir—she referred to it as “The Eat, Pray, Love of baseball and rock
and roll.” I wasn’t interested in doing that, but I was interested in writing
about being new to baseball and learning about baseball late in life.
One year, when I was composing a piece to submit to Hobart’s annual baseball-themed issue, I
started writing a story about a woman who travels to visit her out-of-town
paramour, only to find him otherwise engaged when she arrives. She gets caught
in traffic as she’s trying to flee, discovers the traffic is heading for a
baseball game, and decides to join them. When the story passed 7,000 words, I
realized it had taken on a life of its own. Eventually, it became A Whole New Ballgame.
Caryn Rose is a Brooklyn-based writer and photographer who documents rock and roll, baseball and urban life. From 2006-2011, she authored the groundbreaking blog metsgrrl.com, covering baseball and the New York Mets. A Whole New Ballgame is her second novel. You can find her at jukeboxgraduate.com and on Twitter at @carynrose and at @metsgrrl during the season. Purchase A Whole New Ballgame HERE!
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Like this post? Why not continue following the rest of the tour? Tomorrow, stop by Booked in Chico for Day 2.
No comments:
Post a Comment