Interwiew with Author/journalist Seth Mnookin (1 Viewer)

[The Man from Laramie]

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Since my friends run that site, I urge you to go there to read the article. Maybe I should have posted this in the FFA, since it goes beyond talking about just baseball.

Anyone read the book? (Feeding the Monster: How Money, Smarts, and Nerve Took a Team to the Top)

Here are some of the gems from the interview:

One of the things I was heartened by at the end was that fact that nobody internally was completely happy with the book. That made me feel like I wasn't one-sided, though a lot of people thought I was taking the other guy's side. There were definitely times when I thought one person was right in the scope of things. I think there is this mistaken notion that objectivity means never coming down on one side of an argument. I just don't think that's true. If you see a guy punched in the face, there's a school of thought that says you need to show the other side that says, "No, he wasn't punched in the face," even though it isn't true. If I believed strongly that something was true, then I showed that.

You see this a lot now, especially in retrospect in reporting from Washington. Not to turn this into a political discussion, but there was a sense among journalists at the beginning of the war effort that you had to present both sides, even though it turns out there weren't two sides. One of the great things about the American journalistic tradition is this consistent belief in objectivity, which is lacking in Europe. But one of the difficulties that people are still feeling their way around is the fact that not everything has to be on-the-one-hand and on-the-other-hand.

GM: In the book you reveal that Nomar is a moody prima donna, Schilling is self-righteous, Manny is just Manny, and possibly the guy who comes off worst is 2004 hero Kevin Millar, who turns out to be a self-serving, jingoistic jerk. Are all athletes this difficult or just these players on the Red Sox?

SM: I can't really say, because I haven't spent much time with other athletes. If someone were to spend a year living with my family, there would certainly be things that I would not want in print that they would see. From my experience, I would say that professional ballplayers live in an alternate universe in which their actions do not have many consequences. It's hard to go through life that way without coming out somewhat self-centered. You see that in the book, but there were also some guys that I really liked. I liked some of those guys that you just mentioned. Ortiz is essentially the same guy you see outside of the clubhouse—the expansive, big, and friendly gentle giant. There were plenty of guys who were interesting or funny; it just happens that a lot of the major personalities in Boston over the last few years have been pretty, well, distinct. But I think right now if someone were writing a book about the Yankees featuring A-Rod, Clemens, and I don't know much about Jeter but A-Rod, Clemens, and take your pick, you'd get a less-than-flattering portrait. Already there is a less-than-flattering portrait of A-Rod from a million different places. So I don't think that the Red Sox were totally unique in that respect.

Although at the same time, some of the reason for the attitudes on the Red Sox has to do with 2004. Throughout the season there was a sense of guys putting themselves into a common cause and believing in something greater—a difficult thing for baseball players to do in an age when they rarely stay in one place for too long. After they won the Series, there was an attitude of, "OK, when do I start to get credit for this?" That's also a product of what we talked about earlier, with baseball in Boston being a little bit different, both because of the history and the New England sports psyche.

I wish that a sharper line could be drawn in people's minds between what Larry King does with Paris Hilton and what Bill Moyers, or any serious investigative journalist, does. They're like two separate fields that happen to share a name. You don't use the same skills, you're not focusing on the same things, and you're not packaging things the same way.

I think there is this idiotic tendency in print journalism to refer to the internet as a monolithic creature. They would refer to your site just as they would to my blog, or to some boozehound's fan site the same way they would refer to SI.com. But they are not the same, just as People isn't the same as the Economist, or even an architecture magazine isn't the same as the Economist. They both might be printed on paper, but it isn't the same thing.

 

[The Man from Laramie]

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