Touring the Bases with…Gene Carney

Matt Sisson recently sat down with author, Gene Carney, to talk about his love for baseball writing, his new book, A Baseball Family Album, and the opening of a Shoeless Joe Jackson museum in Greenville, SC.

(Matt Sisson) Gene, you began writing about baseball in 1989. What got you into writing about baseball and how have you been able to write about it for so long?

(Gene Carney) Baseball had been a kind of constant in my life (and obviously still is), and most of my memories were positive, and I had enjoyed reading baseball since I was a kid. “Write what you know” the old maxim goes, so I started writing baseball, and haven’t really stopped. I cannot explain that. It is something I enjoy doing, so it’s never hard work. Research is hard work, editing is hard, and even reading takes discipline now. But writing itself is easy for me. When I look back at everything I’ve written, especially BURYING THE BLACK SOX , what amazes me is that I did all that in my “spare time” — that is, while working a full-time job that had nothing to do with baseball and yielded no time for writing. Now that I’m retired, and could write 10 hours a day (if I wanted), I find that I still just put in one or two hours, on most days, writing. 

(MS) You’ve been writing and editing Notes from the Shadow of Cooperstown since 1993. Can you tell us a little about your site and let readers know what sort of content you’ve been posting there?

(GC) I started doing NOTES as a way to send my “stuff” out to editors — articles, poems, short stories, reviews, humor, you name it — everything except collectibles & Rotisserie. The interested editors enjoyed the format, and NOTES was a kind of forum for editors, in its first year or so. Never printed more than 20-25 issues, and I mailed them out — no internet. By 1999, I was in a kind of routine … I think 10-12 pages a week worked best. When I switched to the internet, thanks to the invitation of Sean Lahman, whom I met via SABR, it was a mixed blessing. I think I lost some readers, and the friendships built up by exchanging NOTES for their publications. But of course now anyone could read NOTES, I could make the issues as long as I wanted, and there was no postage. The content remained the same — everything baseball, Little League to the majors.

Then in September 2002, with issue #268, I got hooked on the “Black Sox” mystery, and that dominated NOTES until just recently. I had no intention of writing a book, but after about 20 issues on the same subject, I knew I had one in the making. That was BURYING THE BLACK SOX. The research has continued since BURYING went to press in Fall of 2005, and I’m hoping to sign a contract soon for a sequel.

(MS) A few years after you began writing about baseball you joined the Society of American Baseball Research. What attracted you to SABR and how has it contributed to your research and writing?

(GC) I had known about SABR since it started up in 1971, but I had thought it was for stat-rats and math majors, the SABRmetricians. When I finally joined, in 1991, I was looking for others who were writing baseball and looking for publishers. Joining has made all the difference in the world — one of the first SABR friends I made was the late sports artist, Mike Schacht, who was editing FAN Magazine out of NY City. He and his editors were great critics and encouragers. Soon I was doing NOTES. Research was not my primary interest, I preferred to read the research and then to write about it. Gradually I started acquiring a small library and doing some myself. In 2000, Dick Hunt started up the local SABR chapter and I coordinate the programs, three or four a year. In 2004 I started presenting at the national conventions, something I never imagined doing back in 1991. Without SABR, there would be no BURYING, and my list of credits would be considerably shorter.

(MS) What would you consider to be SABR’s biggest contribution to the game of baseball?

(GC) I think the heart of SABR is its network of people who appreciate baseball history, and who help each other in their research. The SABR publications are nice, and have gotten better over the years. But it’s the people who make SABR fun, whether at the conventions, workshops or regional meetings, or on the internet. For “Organized Baseball,” I think SABR can do more, making the official records more complete and accurate, for example.

(MS) In addition to writing on Notes from the Shadow of Cooperstown, you’ve also written a number of books including Romancing the Horsehide: Baseball Poems on Players and the Game (McFarland, 1993) and Burying the Black Sox: How Baseball’s Cover-Up of the 1919 World Series Fix Almost Succeeded (Potomac, 2006). Can you tell us a little about what your books are about and what went into writing them?

(GC) ROMANCING grew out of an idea that Mike Schacht and I came up with. He was doing portraits of ballplayers in watercolors or oils, and I was doing them with poems. We decided to see if we could find a publisher that would bring our work together. The result was ROMANCING, virtually my first 125 baseball poems, coupled with Mike’s silhouettes (the publisher didn’t do color).

BURYING is about as far from poetry as a book can get — it’s about baseball’s darkest hour. I started out wondering who deserved the credit for bringing “the Black Sox” scandal to light. Then I noticed that it had been covered up for a year, and hardly anyone had written about that. And THEN I discovered this was not a closed case, but a cold case — I started finding new clues and putting together pieces of the puzzle. I had avoided “Eight Men Out” so I had no preconceived ideas about what happened, and it turned out that much of 8MO is not quite accurate. Well, it was 1963, the film 1988, but the film tells the same story. I also found that a lot of other folks were “hooked” on the B-Sox mystery, and willing to pitch in to solve it, at least parts of it.

(MS) Your second book, Burying the Black Sox: How Baseball’s Cover-Up of the 1919 World Series Fix Almost Succeeded (Potomac, 2006) was awarded SABR’s Ritter Award and was a finalist for the David Moore Award as the most important baseball book in 2006. Can you tell us about these awards and what it meant for your book to receive such high praise?

(GC) There are so many baseball books published every year, that you feel fortunate to get a review, much less an award. The Ritter Award meant a lot, because it was peer recognition from experts on the Deadball Era, and the competition was stiff. The Dave Moore nomination was a total surprise, and had nothing to do with SABR. When I accepted the Ritter Award, I did it on behalf of a small army of people who contributed to the research, it was a collaboration, and one which continues.

(MS)Your research has been acclaimed for being the best and most thorough in baseball writing by numerous people. What’s the secret to your research success and how do you go about finding the information you need?

(GC) SABR has many members whose research skills and knowledge dwarf mine. I just know a lot about a particular event. There is no secret, research has methods. I am fortunate in that I live an hour away from Cooperstown and the National Baseball Library, which is a unique resource. But my local public library provided countless books and articles, too. The internet is a wonderful tool for contacting others who are researching and writing, and I “met” a lot of authors via e-mail. A tool called ProQuest was available to SABR members for some years, which meant access to many newspapers, right from my home computer. With the “B-Sox,” I think the key was keeping an open mind, keeping a narrow focus (on the cover-up), and following up every lead. I was also fortunate to gain access to the material from a 1924 trial (Shoeless Joe suing the Sox), to a newspaper that hardly anyone ever heard of ( Collyer’s Eye ), and then finding so many people willing to share what they knew about different aspects or people in the story.

(MS) Your newest book, A Baseball Family Album , is due out in Spring 2008 from Pocol Press. What can we look forward to finding in your latest release?

(GC) I’ve seen the first copies of ALBUM, and I’m very pleased with it. This is a collection of short portraits, like ROMANCING THE HORSEHIDE, but it’s all about baseball people, over 130. Some are famous and everybody knows them, but many are obscure. So this is like everyone’s family album — the black & white photo section, that is. Some folks you’ll recognize at once, others not at all, but they are all in the family, and all have a story to tell. Before the strike in 1994-95, I had written over 250 of these short pieces, about half on people. Since then, very few. But a poem about Cy Young or Henry Chadwick will not be much different, written in 1990 or 2010, I think. Some research went into every one of them, sometimes I read whole biographies.

(MS) There are many people in the world who write about the things they enjoy. Few have had their work featured in such a number of diverse publications, including USA Today’s Baseball Weekly; literary magazines FAN, Spitball, Elysian Field Quarterly, and 108 ; academic journals including the Canadian NINE; and research publications such as SABR’s The National Pastime and The Baseball Research Journal . What would you say gives you the ability to write to such a diverse audience on a number of topics?

(GC) Well, I’ve always enjoyed writing, especially creative writing — including fiction, science fiction, plays, and short stories. The first baseball I wrote was a book, which was in the form of letters from a father to a son. It turned out to be an exploration of what it means to be a fan, and how parents talk to the next generation about their values and their passions. It was a pretty good book, but a hard one to market, and a very good editor at Macmillan advised me to set it aside and build a resume, by writing short stuff and getting published in a variety of places. That’s why my credits are so diverse. I like to say that I write strictly baseball, but I have never found that limiting — baseball is connected to so much else. So in fact, my baseball writings have at times been political, at times satirical or humorous, and I enjoy giving a baseball twist to things that seem to have nothing to do with the game. There are two more books I’d like to get published soon — one with all my Cooperstown writings; and one with my fiction, including a novella, which has the working title, The Shortstop from the Black Lagoon .

(MS) You were interviewed for a special feature that will be included as an “extra” in the 20 ^th anniversary edition of the DVD “Eight Men Out”. Can you share what the interview is about as well as your plans to market the filming rights to Burying the Black Sox: How Baseball’s Cover-Up of the 1919 World Series Fix Almost Succeeded?

(GC) Even before BURYING was published, I became known within SABR, and in Cooperstown, as “the Black Sox guy,” so anyone doing work on the topic — people making documentaries, writing articles or a Masters Thesis, or a grade school paper — started to contact me. The White Sox appearance in the 2005 World Series spiked new interest in 1919, and I found myself on MSNBC with Keith Olbermann and helping out the Wall Street Journal . So many people have helped me, that I found it hard to say no. The new DVD of 8MO will have a long “extra feature” — the last version I saw ran 35 minutes — on the historical accuracy of the 1988 film. Much of that will be edited out of an interview of several hours with me. 8MO is beautifully made, but it gives you no feel for the cover-up at all — the 1919 Series ends, there are a dozen or more little glimpses of events (most out of order), and all of a sudden you’re at the trial, which was in the summer of 1921. The Sox played a whole season before the scandal broke.

I’d like to see another film made that focuses, like my book, on that time between the Series and the end of the cover-up. I really think if Eliot Asinof was writing 8MO today, that would be his focus — his book did better after Watergate made Americans more aware of cover-ups. I’ve said that I’d like Kevin Costner to have the first shot at the film my book could script — because he is a Shoeless Joe Jackson fan, has made a number of baseball films, and also has done Chicago crime and conspiracy.

(MS) Lastly, you serve on the advisory board for the Shoeless Joe Jackson Museum in Greenville, SC, which opens this spring. Can you tell us a little about the museum and what baseball fans can expect from its exhibits?

(GC) The museum has been a labor of love for Shoeless Joe’s many supporters in Greenville for a long time. His old home has been moved and renovated. Jackson was illiterate, so I like the fact that the museum will also house or be connected to a library and research center. I think the museum will be very simple and plain, like Jackson. His role in the B-Sox story is the most complicated, and I think the evidence suggests that he was punished unfairly. But that’s my next book — in BURYING, I tried very hard to stay unbiased about Jackson — I just presented all the evidence I could find. And I think I succeeded. In the next book, I want to show what cases can be made for Jackson, Eddie Cicotte, Buck Weaver, and even for Chick Gandil.

The museum is due to open in June. Shoeless Joe Jackson was barred from baseball, and is not in the Hall of Fame, but he has always been honored by those who knew him best. He’s had a statue in Greenville for some years now, and the city has a baseball team and a field with a Green Monster (it’s a Red Sox farm club). I think a visit to Greenville will make people think, because the way Shoeless Joe was treated, by major league baseball and by Greenville, says a lot about this country, and the country of baseball.

I’d like to thanks Gene for taking the time to talk baseball with me. Be sure to look for his new book, A Baseball Family Album coming out soon.