The Snowball Effect

Of course, I could have just written some questions and sent letters to selected players. I’ve seen some inspiring blog pages and sites dedicated to that type of communication. After all, a letter is much less invasive than a phone call. And a letter can be ignored, while a phone call, once answered, is harder to ignore.

Exactly.

Though some people cringe at the thought of making any kind of phone call, or talking to strangers in general, I was already an old pro. Brash, you might call me. I wasn’t afraid to confront celebrities and ask them questions. I guess it went back to my days as editor of my college newspaper.

Like the time in 1989 when I asked Sting a question at a press conference. Or 1994, when I managed to ask Kurt Vonnegut a couple of questions at a press conference. And after that, many more phone and personal interviews with many others. So for me, that was what made the most sense.

Over the last two years, many times I have thought – gee, if I had done this years ago, imagine the players I would have been able to reach, players from the 1920s and even 1910s. But back then, there was no internet phone directory, and besides that, phone long distance was a much more daunting and expensive proposition. I told myself not to regret anything. Now was the ideal time to call players, for many reasons. And of course, having a book in the works, that was the real reason for my calls, for all my research (though the project itself would eventually overshadow the book, by far).

If you would have told me then, in August of 2012, just how many interviews I would conduct, I would have shaken my head in disbelief and said it was not remotely possible for someone to do that. Or for someone to *want* to do that.

But as I said, it morphed…the more stories I heard, the more fascinated I became, the more of a snowball effect it had on what I believed to be the importance of my project. Many of these players were very old. And even as my project began, some of the players I had hoped to speak to passed away – players such as Johnny Pesky and Andy Pafko, for example.

By my calculations, only about 25-30% of the players from the 40s and 50s were still alive.

I was already up to 5 interviews, then 6, then 7. From wanting to contact a few players, my goal was now to speak to 25 or so.

And time was of the essence.