Quick Cuts with Jonathan Eig

Jonathan Eig has written for the Wall Street Journal, Esquire, Men’s Health, and the New Republic.  He has taught writing at Columbia College Chicago and lectures at Northwestern University, where he earned his degree in journalism.  He has traveled the country fundraising for awareness and treatment of ALS; and in 2005 was the keynote speaker at the Cooperstown Symposium on Baseball and American Culture at the Hall of Fame.  In 2005, Eig’s investigation of Lou Gehrig’s battle with ALS, Luckiest Man , became a New York Times best seller and won the Casey Award.  Last year, Eig followed that effort by publishing another New York Times best seller, Opening Day , an in depth look at the first major league season of Jackie Robinson.  The Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, and Sports Illustrated named it the best baseball book of 2007.  Recently, the award-winning author was kind enough to take time from researching his most recent endeavor, Get Capone, to talk with me. 

Josh Deitch:  First of all, how did you get into writing in general?

Jonathan Eig: It goes all the way back to high school, where I liked the writing more than anything else. I started working for the school newspaper in junior high and then high school [at Spring Valley High School in Spring Valley, NY], and just kept doing it.  I figured I would keep doing it as long as I was having fun.

How did the books come about?  Specifically, how did you choose to focus on baseball history?  

I’ve always been a big baseball fan, and a big Yankees fan in particular.  Actually, what got me going was when I was reading Seabiscuit , and I was saying to my wife  how not a lot of sports books take a serious historical approach and focus on the characters as much as action.  They tend to get bogged down in the sport too much and don’t really give you a sense of the time, the place, and the characters.  I said you could really do the same thing with an old time baseball player.  You could look back and create what their lives were like, and what the times were like, but most baseball players don’t really have anything beyond the baseball.  Most didn’t do anything off the field that was all that interesting.  Over the course of dinner, I said Lou Gehrig was probably an exception because he played with the symptoms of ALS and died in his prime.  That’s a story that’s really universal and goes way beyond baseball.  Anyone can relate to that.

Talk about the research process that such an endeavor must require. 

First I thought I might just try to do an article on how Gehrig’s illness was diagnosed and treated.  The more I looked into it, the more I realized that there was enough material for a whole book.  I was doing it in my spare time, I was working full time at the Wall Street Journal.  On my nights and weekends, I started digging into Gehrig’s life.  Three years later, I had a book.

The first thing was to read all the books that were out there, and then I went to the newspapers.  I probably looked at every game story of every big league game he ever played.  For certain key seasons, like his rookie year or when he started showing signs of slowing down, I’d go through eight or ten newspapers, because back then there was a wealth of good journalists to cover these guys.

I found some people to talk to as well.  I tried to get his medical records released to me from the Mayo Clinic, but of course they wouldn’t do that because of privacy laws.  But then I was incredibly fortunate to find 200 pages of letters that he wrote to his doctor when he was dying.  They were in his own voice, describing what was happening to him.  That was a year and a half to two years into the book when I even found that stuff.  That was amazing.  To get my hands on that stuff was beyond my dreams.

Of the ballplayers you talked to, are there any ones that stand out?  

I talked to Bobby Doerr.  I talked to Billy Werber, who was 95 at the time and was with the Yankees in 1927.  I talked to Dom DiMaggio, Bob Feller, Tommy Henrich.  Henrich was actually one of the lastpeople to see Gehrig alive, so that was a really big interview.  Guys, who I had never heard of before, had some great stories, like Billy Rogell.  Rogell was actually a big player in his day—a shortstop for the Tigers.  It was such a thrill.  Most of these guys are listed in the phone book, and you call them up and they’re just happy to talk to anyone that calls them.  They’re just happy telling the old stories.

One of my favorites was this guy, Johnny Welaj, whose first game was the day that Gehrig made his speech on July Fourth.  He comes over to the ballpark thinking that he’s going to be the big celebrity that day, and he invites his whole family to come in from New Jersey to see the game.  Gehrig gets up to make his speech and nobody remembers that it was Johnny Welaj’s first day in the big leagues.

I got to talk to Welaj just as he was in the hospital, and it still made him cry to think about Gehrig up there making that speech.  He’d seen Gehrig play as a kid and he just thought [Gehrig] was the biggest strongest man he’d ever seen in his life.  I talked to Phil Rizzuto too, and it was the same thing.  Growing up in New York, Gehrig was just a god to these kids.  In some ways, he was more of an imposing figure than Babe Ruth, because Ruth was this teddy bear.  Gehrig was just a monster.  He was so strong, and to see him hobbled like that was just heartbreaking to these guys.

What about the book on Jackie Robinson?  

Yeah, I finished Gehrig and my editor asked if there was another baseball book I wanted to write.  And I thought about it a long time, and said I really couldn’t think of another ballplayer that was as interesting off the field as Gehrig.  But Robinson fascinated me, and it occurred to me that there was a pretty good Robinson biography out there by Arnold Rampersad, which was pretty big, thick, historically accurate,and a little dry.  The more I thought about it, the more I realized that there was a way to tell the Robinson story that hadn’t been done before and that was just to look at that first year.  In a way, his whole life, his whole meaning is in that first season.  That’s when he accomplishes everything that he really accomplishes.  He changes the world in one season.

I liked the idea of having that tight narrative arc to the story and then expanding it by looking at American history and how it hinged on that season.  I talked to people whose lives were changed by that season: factory owners that integrated their factory that year, kids who saw him play that year and realized the possibilities.  I think my favorite interview from that book was this guy, Gil Jonas, who was living in Brooklyn that year.  He went and interviewed Robinson for his school paper and didn’t ask Robinson a single question about him being the first black guy in baseball.  It was April 1947, and this white kid Gil had never met a black person before and didn’t really think about the historical importance of it.  He just asked Robinson about hitting, about the difference between the minor leagues and the majors, and about which teams were going to be the toughest this year.  Then he goes to the ballpark and hears Robinson being heckled and he has this epiphany.  Like “Oh man, I probably should have thought about that when I was interviewing him.”  And then this kid goes on to college at Stanford, and gets upset that his college is all white.  And he says if the Dodgers can integrate, then why can’t my college do the same?  He starts the first NAACP chapter on campus and gets Stanford integrated, and then ends up working his entire career becoming the NAACP’s top fundraiser over the ‘50s, ‘60s, and ‘70s.

There were ripple effects like that all over America.  I think a case can be made that that season was the most important moment in Civil Rights history.  It jump started so many things.

Considering how in depth you went on that season, do you have any thoughts pertaining to the state of the game now, specifically in reference to the decreasing percentages of African American ballplayers?  

I think it’s a concern that we don’t see more minorities in management and in the front offices and ownership.  But on the field, I think the game is really diverse right now.  You’ve got players from all over the world, players of all colors.  I don’t see any discrimination.  As a baseball fan, it would be nice if Americans and kids in general were more interested in going into baseball, but right now other sports are tempting them away.  That’s why I think you’re seeing more kids from Latin America and kids from Asia getting into baseball and rising up to the majors.  But I don’t think there’s any discrimination in that process, so I don’t really have a problem with it.  I think it’s just supply and demand right now.

These things go in cycles.  I think at some point kids might say that football careers are really short and football might lose some of that popularity.  More kids might get interested in baseball, but these things go in long term cycles.  So, I don’t know, but baseball is a healthy game right now.  Kids’ll get into the game and have good long careers, and baseball might come back in terms of its popularity among kids again.

What about the internationalization of the game?  

I think all that’s good.  It makes people appreciate the game more and it increases the competition.  I think that it’s a smaller planet now and the more people that are allowed to compete, the higher the quality of play.

As a big Yankee fan, what are your thoughts as the life of Yankee Stadium comes to an end? 

I’m sad that we’re not going to see any playoff or World Series games at the Stadium this year, but ever since they renovated the park, I haven’t had the same kind of warm feelings that I have for Wrigley Field or Fenway Park.  I think those are the old classic ballparks that really take you back.  When you walk into those parks, you can really sense the ghosts and imagine that you’re sitting in the ballpark and having the same experience that your grandfather or even your great-grandfather did.

Yankee Stadium doesn’t do that for me anymore.  When they renovated in the ‘70s, I think they took all the charm out of the place.  So, I’m not really all that sad to see it torn down.  I think the new stadium might even be nicer.

It is sad that when you look out at first base, it won’t be the same first base, the same spot where Lou Gehrig stood.  I think there’s something lost about it.  I wish they could have rebuilt on the same land so that you’d know that this is sort of hallowed ground.

Is there more content of gravity in the history of the game than there is now?  

I think you have to give it time to see historically how important it is right now.  I’m not that interested in writing about the baseball heroes of the ‘70s and ‘80s, because I think it’s still unclear to me what their historical impact may be.  But it’s becoming more clear for some.  I think Hank Aaron is a story that I’ll be interested in, because it tells you a great deal about culture.  He made the transition from theNegro Leagues to the big leagues and then defined how people thought about the game.  Having the all-time home run king as a black man was an important moment for baseball.

Pete Rose’s story may be one that would appeal to historians even though he’s clearly an unpleasant guy.  I think it’s too soon to say whether Derek Jeter or Alex Rodriguez would have that same kind of interest, when historians look at their lives fifty years from now.  I like to use baseball as a lens to look at bigger cultural things.  I love the baseball part of these stories, but I like to expand the picture a little bit too.

Doesn’t that type of cultural significance go hand in hand with baseball?  

Baseball was the game that people followed the most closely day in and day out.  Boxing was really important, but there were maybe one or two big fights a year.  It wasn’t a part of your daily life the way baseball seeped into the neighborhood.  If the game was on the radio, in your living room, every day and night, it was part of the summer air.  I don’t think any other sport has ever permeated in that way.

Baseball players tended to look like everybody else, and they lived in the same neighborhoods.  You’d see them on the street, walking home from the game.  That was really important, especially in baseball, because it was a game that belonged to the people.  It was cheap to go to the ballpark.  Now, there’s this huge chasm between the ball players and the fans, in terms of the money they make and their lifestyle.  I think that’s a shame.  It takes some of the intimacy away from the game.

Thank you so much for your time.  

No problem, it was fun.

For more information on Jonathan Eig and his books, visit http://www.jonathaneig.com/