BookWire - Meet The Author- David Shiner

"I've written a large number of articles, interviews, and stories about baseball for sports magazines, research journals, and literary publications. I speak frequently on baseball topics. Some of my work is in the Hall of Fame Museum at their request. In my professional life, I hold a Ph.D. degree in Philosophy and have been a member of the faculty and administration at Shimer College in Illinois for the past 25 years." - David Shiner

Neela Sakaria: Thanks for taking the time to speak with us, Mr. Shiner. Your book is a sequel to Tom Meany's 1953 book, which profiled the top 25 baseball players of the first half of the century. You talk about the difficulty of selecting 25 from the second half of the century in the introduction of your book. Can you tell us more about the selection process?.

David Shiner : The selection process was very tough. I used a number of factors to try to decide on the players who would be profiled in the book, the top 25 players of the last half of the 20th century. I looked at their seasonal records and their career records. I assessed how they matched up with their contemporaries. I considered their defensive accomplishments and their achievements in postseason play. I also looked at how they were regarded in their own time. Some players have done very well in Most Valuable Player or Cy Young or Gold Glove voting; others with numbers that look just as good haven't. No single factor was decisive; in fact, no two or three factors were. I considered all the evidence and then made the best decisions I could.

Some choices were easy. No matter how the various criteria were weighted, anyone would have included Henry Aaron and Willie Mays and Tom Seaver. But most of the choices were tougher. Lots of people would have ranked Nolan Ryan, who isn't in the book, ahead of Juan Marichal, who is. I was a little surprised at the results of some of the research, and there's certainly room for disagreement -- after all, that's what baseball fans do best! But I'm very satisfied with the way things worked out.

DS: I can't say I had one. I enjoyed them all. For the purposes of research and writing, there were some interesting differences between them. Writing about Yogi Berra was easy, because he said so many interesting things and so much has been written about him. The hard part in a case like his was in deciding what to leave out. Steve Carlton probably presented the biggest challenge. He was just the opposite of Berra; he didn't even talk to reporters for most of his career. In his case I really had to dig for things to write about, but it was definitely worth it. I learned a lot about him, and my readers will too.

NS: Tell us about the process of writing this book, from start to finish. At what point did the idea come to you? When did you decide to actually write the follow-up to Meany's book? How did you find the publisher, etc.? How long was the whole process?

DS: I started thinking about a book-length project about five years ago. I'd written a lot of baseball articles and wanted to try for something longer, more substantial. After mulling over some ideas for a few months, I found myself looking over the Meany book, which is one of my all-time favorites. I remember thinking, "It's almost the end of the century. Meany's book came out in the middle of the century. If I start working on a sequel now, the timing would be just about perfect." So I sent a letter to a publisher asking if he would be interested in such a book. He was enthusiastic, which was all I needed to get started.

My first task was to try to figure out which 25 players would be in the book. I put together a long list of stars and then narrowed it down to the top 50. They were all superstars, but I still had to cut out half of them. That's when I delved deeply into the records to try to separate the in-group from the rest of the crowd. As I did that part of the research, I began keeping track of items that might find their way into the book.

By the end of the 1997 season I had a tentative list of the top 25. At that point I started focusing on particular players that were definitely going to be in the book, partly to get a sense of what completed chapters would look like. The first five players I wrote about were Yogi Berra, Sandy Koufax, Joe Morgan, Cal Ripken Junior, and Warren Spahn. I sent those chapters to some knowledgeable baseball people and got very positive responses, so I kept going.

I was able to research and write about a chapter per month, so the completed draft took me about two years. Then my agreement with the original publisher fell through. I spent some time proofreading and editing the manuscript while marketing it to other publishers. SuperiorBooks offered me a contract in October of last year, which I accepted. That meant I was able to include events from the 2000 season. So the whole process took a little over three years from the time I started the research to when I sent the final manuscript to the publisher.

NS: How long did it take you to research each player? What was your strategy for doing so? How did you decide which facts and anecdotes to include in such a limited space?

DS: It's hard to say exactly how long it took to research each player, because I often did research that involved several players at a time. For example, Johnny Bench, Joe Morgan, and Pete Rose were in the prime of their careers as teammates with the Big Red Machine in the 1970's, so my research involving that team often did double or triple duty. On the other hand, I never wanted to tell the same story twice, so if I spent a lot of ink on the 1975 World Series in writing about Morgan, which I did, I didn't talk much about that series in the Bench or Rose chapters.

Since each chapter is really a short autobiography, I was able to include a lot of stories and anecdotes that other books don't. Still, there were almost always more stories than I had space for, so deciding which to exclude was tough. The main emphasis was on what each man did as a player. I always included events of world-class significance, like Mays' great catch in the 1954 World Series, Aaron's homer to break Babe Ruth's career record, and Ripken's conquest of the consecutive-games streak that Lou Gehrig had held for over 50 years. I also liked telling stories that aren't well-known, including ones that other former players told me. Those are among my favorite parts of the book.

DS: I was honored by Dr. Voigt's enthusiasm for the book, and I thought his comments were very insightful. In the Foreword he says that the "great man theory" goes far to explain the game's enduring popularity. I think that's true. If someone were to ask you what happened in baseball this year, one of the first things you would think of would be Barry Bonds hitting 73 homers. More broadly, when you think about baseball, you think about Babe Ruth or Jackie Robinson or whomever. If you see a history of the Red Sox, Ted Williams will probably be on the cover. For the Giants, it's Willie Mays. The great stars loom larger than life. They're cultural icons, and the game goes as they go.

My team, the Cubs, was fairly successful last season for a lot of reasons, but the one reason everyone focused on was their current "great man," Sammy Sosa. In the public mind, Sosa is the Cubs. People don't come to the park to see Eric Young steal a base or Jon Lieber induce a ground ball; they turn out in droves to see if Sosa will hit one. And the same is true, at least in some respects, for any great star in his prime.

NS: I presume you are a baseball fan. Was it hard to limit your own biases about certain players, in order to maintain a factual and neutral tone? How did you accomplish this?

DS: Let me respond to that question with a story. When I set out to write this book, I was pleased that it would give me the opportunity to write about Ryne Sandberg. He was my favorite player on my favorite team, and he was just about to finish his great career. I have lots of material on him. I've seen him play hundreds of times, and I have lots of eyewitness stories about those games. That chapter would be a pleasure to write. But then I did the research, and it showed that although Sandberg was a great player, he wasn't quite up to standard of the 25 who made the final cut. So I had to leave him out.

After that I never had a problem with having a positive bias toward a player. I was more concerned about negative bias, because I'm not crazy about some of the players in the book. But when I was writing about them, a strange thing happened. In every case I found myself in their corner, rooting them on, celebrating their triumphs and accepting their faults. And that seemed to work. I've had people tell me how they could see from my book how much I liked certain players that I actually don't like, because I was able to see the best in all of them while I was writing about them. That doesn't mean that I don't deal with their faults; I do. I just don't present them in a way that casts a shadow over their accomplishments as players.

DS: I'm researching my next book, a joint project with a well-known baseball author. This one is about Tinker, Evers, and Chance, the great Cub double-play combination of a century ago. And I'm always working on an article or book review. As long as I'm writing about baseball, I'm happy.

DS: The response has been terrific. Baseball insiders and fans love the book. Roland Hemond, who's been a major figure in the baseball world for more than 50 years, called me up to tell me how great he thinks it is; he's bought a bunch of copies. I have yet to get a negative review, as far as I know. It's been a very rewarding experience.

Neela: If you were to speculate on a few players to be included in the volume 3 version of this book for the next half-century which players would you select?

DS: A player had to be at least 30 years of age by the year 2000 to qualify for my book, so anyone older than Ken Griffey Junior was ineligible. So anyone I could name for the next book, 50 years from now, would have to be younger than that. That leaves out some awfully good players, like Randy Johnson and Sammy Sosa. They're great, but they're not as good as the current players who made the book, like Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens.

The most obvious candidate for Volume 3 is Alex Rodriguez. He's been one of the two or three best players in baseball for the past five years, and he's still only in his mid-20's. If he keeps it up for another 10 years, he'll be a no-brainer for the next book. If Pedro Martinez can stay healthy, I like his chances too. There are other candidates, like Ivan Rodriguez and Nomar Garciaparra, but they have to stay healthier than they have recently, and they have a little more to prove than the other guys I mentioned. There's probably a youngster starting out in the big leagues now who will be next Bob Gibson or Frank Robinson, but it's impossible to be sure who he is at this point.

Neela: Is there anything else that you would like to share with our readers?

DS: This book was a labor of love, and I think it shows. I feel fortunate to have come across Tom Meany's book when I was a kid learning about baseball. That book formed my ideas about Babe Ruth and Ty Cobb and Jackie Robinson and all the rest. Years later, I was pleased to discover that his book was just as entertaining and informative for adults as for kids. I've tried to do the same thing with my book, while also making it a volume that stands on its own -- that is, you don't have to have read the Meany book to enjoy this one.

If folks aren't sure whether they want to buy my book, they should log on to the publisher's website, www.SuperiorBooks.com, and check it out. The first 50 pages or so are posted there. I think you'll like what you see. And it makes a wonderful Christmas gift for any baseball fan.