Interview: KD Casey

Interview: KD Casey

By Scott Bolohan

KD Casey describes Unwritten Rules as “spicy.”

And she’s not wrong. After all, it’s what you would hope for in a gay baseball romance novel. But it also contains some of the most realistic depictions of life in and around baseball that fiction has produced lately. From the monotony of spring training to the players’ fraught relationship with the press, Casey puts her reader in a fully realized world, one that is just slightly adjacent to today’s major leagues (you can read more in her short story we published this summer).

The book follows Zach Glasser and Eugenio Morales, two catchers who are ex-teammates and ex-boyfriends, and explores the rise and fall of their relationship in parallel to their reunion at the All-Star Classic. Pitch framing becomes key to the book in both a narrative and also metaphorical sense.

We set up a ten-minute interview with Casey and ended up spending well over an hour discussing baseball, writing, and pitch framing.

You can read an excerpt of Unwritten Rules here.

The book just came out, how’s the response been?

KDC: I think the response has been generally pretty positive. It is a very baseball, baseball romance novel, which some people really dig, and some people don’t dig as much. But I wanted to really write something for the baseball people. If it’s wine, it’s baseball-forward wine. But generally, it’s really exciting to see it out in the world to hear people’s responses to it. And yeah, I get the sense that a lot of people really, really liked the book. So that makes me happy.

How do you balance that baseball aspect with that romance aspect?

KDC: Publishers Weekly’s review, which was very positive, said that the book had as much baseball as sex. And I’m like, ‘That’s true.’ Some people like both! I am obviously a big baseball fan. I enjoy reading about baseball. I enjoy writing about baseball. I’m also a big fan of romance novels. Don’t write in a genre you don’t like is generally good advice. And there are a good number of baseball romances. My working hypothesis is that baseball people tend to like a lot of baseball in their baseball narratives. They pick up a book, and what’s too much baseball for maybe the average person, baseball people are like, ‘No, no, I want more, I want to see the game.’ But it’s a romance narrative. Before we dig more into the questions—because that’s a big question—I was wondering, Is this the first romance novel you’ve ever read?

Yeah, it is.

Yep. And that is a valid answer. For the folks reading The Twin Bill, I want to define what a romance novel is, because I think that definition is necessary to understanding how baseball plays a hand in the narrative. A romance novel has to have three essential components. It has to have a central love story. It has to have a happily ever after between the people involved in that central love story, and it has to have an optimistic ending. That one is a little bit more difficult to explain. So basically, the main couple, or however many, ends up together, either in what’s called a happily ever after, happily for now, but they have to end up together and alive. The example I give is that Romeo and Juliet is not a romance. She’s All That is a romance. Nicholas Sparks does not write romances, he writes love stories. But that optimistic ending means in general, the protagonists have to achieve their aims. And those don’t have to be positive. There’s a lot of mafia romance out right now that’s on-trend. There’s a lot of hitman romance out right now. I want to be clear, it does not mean that they have to be lawful good. It just means that whatever goals that they set out for themselves, they have to achieve by the end of the book.

With all of that, Unwritten Rules is about a catcher named Zach Glasser, who goes and reunites with an ex-teammate, who’s also his ex-boyfriend. And the reason that they split up is that Zach can’t come out of the closet or doesn’t want to come out of the closet, due to what he senses as familial pressure and the structural homophobia in baseball. By the end of the book, Zach and Eugenio, his ex-teammate, have to end up together because it’s a romance novel. And Zach has to achieve his goals, which are coming out. He doesn’t obviously come out publicly in the book, but he comes out to everybody important in his life. But he also has to achieve the goal of—he fell out of love with baseball, and he has to fall back in love. That arc is as necessary to it being a romance novel as him and Eugenio getting back together.

It’s interesting to point that out because, throughout the book, Zach downplays how good he is at what he does.

Zach is not a reliable narrator of his own experiences. I tried to put some blinking signposts throughout. It’s close third person and it’s single point of view, so sometimes unreliability in narration is a little bit harder to portray that way than first person. But his assessment of situations is not always an accurate assessment and his assessment of himself. I wanted to write about a Jeff Mathis catcher, and a Jeff Mathis catcher’s skills are in pitch framing, but also in working with pitchers. Framing you’ll be able to extract from catcher analytics, but you’re not going to be able to extract pitch calling. That’s a thing that analytics just can’t measure. But I hope at one point you just like, ‘Dude, just talk to a trusted adult.’ And he does, but that was sort of the goal. Then the goal is to balance the love story with baseball with obviously the central love story of him falling in love with or re-falling in love with Eugenio, but also making it with his family.

How were Zach and Eugenio formed?

There are different styles of how people plot books and the terms are plotters, who nicely outline everything, and then pantsers, who are just flying by the seat of their pants. I am firmly the latter. I like to have some big tentpole moments as I’m writing. But everything between those is right into the darkness. And that, to me, is the fun part. It’s risky and you always end up with pacing issues you have to work out in the second, third, fourth, fifth draft. But it does tend to lend itself to a little bit more organic character growth. And frankly, just more interesting to me as well, as somebody who has to sit and sit down and type. It’s more interesting to me if it’s a process of discovery.

Zach and Eugenio started out as a Gchat conversation with a very good friend who was in grad school at the time working a huge amount and knew I wrote fiction. I have a degree in fiction writing from fifteen years ago. She asked me to tell her a story, so I asked for three keywords. We can’t remember the third one was, but two of them were four-seamer and hips. I can work with that, and I just start typing. I hate naming, so I put brackets around the word ‘name.’ She gave me like six names, two of which were Zach and Eugenio. With those names comes a lot about them as people. Zach Glasser is a big blinking signpost that says this character is Ashkenazi Jewish. I don’t know if to non-Jews, but if I meet somebody named Zach Glasser, my immediate reaction is, ‘How are we related? Do we know people in common?’ With that comes all this stuff about identity, because he has this name. That name contrasts with Eugenio Morales. Everyone asks if he’s named for Eugenio Suárez. He’s not. But with Eugenio, I knew a lot about him just from his name. His family is Venezuelan. He grew up in Indiana. He’s born in the US, but he is the child of immigrants. Zach is the grandchild of immigrants. I wanted to have some differences in their immigrant experience.

Eugenio cooks a lot. The first thing he cooks for Zach is this Bobby Flay recipe with pork chops. It’s gross, I’ll be honest. I wanted him to be a good cook, but not like an improbable for MLB good cook. Like a Garrit Cole-level good cook. But the second thing he makes is tarte tatin, and instead of apples, he uses bananas, which is actually a Venezuelan dessert. The third thing is he cooks is a Venezuelan dish. I wanted to have that progression where he’s letting Zach in a little bit into his heritage and life, but in a way that’s not all at once. He has this name that is very obviously marked as Latino and he’s playing baseball in the US, and we know unwritten rules about anti-Latino biases. A lot of the book is also about the fact that he doesn’t have the same sort of privilege of concealment that Zach does in a lot of ways.

So that’s sort of how they got they got built. You have some very overlapping things. I don’t know if some of this is clear if you’re not the child or grandchild of immigrants, but I felt like it was some big blinking signposts in how you navigate the world. And then I just think of it as winding up little figures, and you watch them go.

I also hope people got hungry reading the book. That’s one of the goals.

We published your short story, “The Wise Men of the New York Gothams.” Bryan, our fiction editor, said, “You adroitly blended baseball and Jewish mythology into a distinctly New York tale, all while maintaining a light touch that moved the narrative along at a brisk and enjoyable pace.” He wanted to ask you about world-building.

I don’t know if you remember the show Sliders? There is an episode of Sliders where they go into an alternative universe and the Golden Gate Bridge is blue. But it’s very similar. That’s what I think of this as. The Golden Gate Bridge was blue. There are some things that have to get simplified just for narrative purposes. I try to be very transparent about why I’m making those choices. In terms of world-building, there is absolutely a literary universe. I did make up a fake league with thirty teams, and I named all of them with the help of a number of people. The New York Gothams is Eugenio’s team in one of the timelines in Unwritten Rules. That is the previous name of the Giants, and this is a universe in which the Giants never changed their name and they never left New York. But if you look up the logo for the New York Gothams, it’s the New York Mets ‘NY.’ For that short story. I picked the Gothams because they’re, I would say, Mets-ian in my conception of them.

That short story is my take on what’s called a Chelm story, which is about this town in Poland that’s full of wise fools and they always have wise foolish adventures. These are Jewish folktale-type stories. There’s a story called The Wise Men of Gotham which is also an English folktale about a town full of wise fools. I already had the Gothams as the name, so it all blended perfectly, and I was very happy about that.

The Houston team has never been named in any of the stories or books, but they are the Houston Problems. The other one that people really find delightful is the Anaheim Californians of Anaheim California. Obviously, the Oakland Elephants have been a symbol for, but they are not the Oakland Athletics. I want to be very clear, the Golden Gate Bridge is painted blue. It’s a different universe but it’s obviously important to the team. And then the last one that I think is really fun—this is a friend who’s Canadian and suggested the Toronto team be the Toronto Jacks because bird jays in Canada are sometimes called jacks. It also means home runs, so I thought, that’s a beautiful name for the team. I did like little things for Instagram where they each got like a little team card and the logo and an explanation of the name just because I wanted this to have inside jokes for the baseball people.

I was hoping you could talk a little about pitch framing and its role not only as plot but also as a metaphor.

The working title of the book was Pitch Framing and Other Lies. My agent, who is wonderful, gently went, “No one knows what that means.”

I think ‘unwritten rules’ fits thematically with a lot of what’s going on in the book. I was happy about the name change. But there’s a lot of framing in the book. The book has a lot of forced proximity, which is really common in romance. So inevitably, Zach and Eugenio are competing for the same spot on the team. They get put together by their team, and they’re like, ‘Zach, you need to teach Eugenio how to pitch frame’ and Zach’s like, ‘Oh, I don’t want to.’ Zach is a Mathis-y catcher and Eugenio I modeled after Wilson Contreras, an offensive catcher, at least he was. But he taught himself and really learned and improved on pitch framing in specific. He’s been very transparent about that process. I didn’t just want an offensive catcher and a defensive catcher, I wanted somebody who had to learn pitch framing a lot more. The book is told in two timelines, so I wanted it to have recontextualization when you go between those timelines. You learn a little bit, you learn a little bit more, and you learn a little bit more. People have to piece the narrative together to a certain extent, and also deal with the fact that Zach’s not super reliable sometimes. That went with pitch framing. There’s this recontextualization of what’s actually happening, versus the appearance of what’s happening.

I don’t want to use the term deception, that’s a term for pitchers, and I don’t think that being in the closet is deceptive. There’s structural homophobia in sports. I want to be very careful about that. At the same time, Zach is tasked with all of these things where he really has to make one thing look like another. That is a theme throughout the book. He becomes more and more comfortable with who he is. But that was the construction that I really wanted to be fairly deliberate about in the book. I did have a reviewer say that they never expected to find pitch framing sexy. That was somebody who had no idea what it was before they read it.

The other person who I’ve gotten a lot of feedback from is Ben Lindbergh, who wrote the epigraph. And I had to permission the epigraph because there’s a quote at the beginning from an article he wrote in 2013 about pitch framing. I had to be like, ‘Hey, Ben, can I use this quote in my very spicy romance novel?’ And he was a good sport about it and said yes, and was like, ‘I never really considered the erotic potential of pitch framing.’ And I’m like, ‘Can I just put that on the cover?’ But I wanted the baseball to be doing something for the narrative.

The other thing that struck me about the book is how realistic I thought it was. How much research went into the book?

I did a lot specifically on pitch framing. I’m pretty nerdy about my research. At one point, I went to Harry Pavlidis, who’s the head of R&D for Baseball Prospectus. I asked him to explain catcher stats to me. He’s always a champ. I asked him questions like every three months. I looked a lot at what Wilson Contreras did to develop his framing. I want to say Jose Molina has talked about it a lot as well. He’s one of the leaders in transforming catching. Those parts I did research were mostly just for my own knowledge and understanding and not to try to make it super, super technical in the book. Sometimes you have to be specific to be clear, but I tried to condense it because a lot of readers are there for the mouth-mouth.

I did talk to somebody who played baseball in college years ago, and he mentioned that there’s communal soap, and sometimes deodorant, and I was like, no.

I share an agent with Jim Thome’s wife and I asked her what batting helmets smell like. The answer was gross. I found out rosin smells like licorice. I wanted to get that stuff. I’m not going to go find a batting helmet and stick my face in it, but I do want to get some of those sensory details. I’m not shy about asking, ‘Hey, what’s the inside of a batting helmet smell like?’ and the answer is, don’t put that in a romance. I didn’t put in chewing tobacco either. If the Golden Gate Bridge is painted blue, no one does chewing tobacco either.

Zach is he’s hard of hearing. I grew up rooting for the Tigers in the mid-’90s, which was awful. But Curtis Pride, who was deaf, was on the team. I really admired him. How did you approach writing someone hard of hearing?

I don’t tend to promote the book as Zach being heard of hearing, because I’m not myself. It’s something that runs in my family, so I talked to family members who are hard of hearing. I don’t know if it’s Ashkenazi Jews, but we have all of the genetic conditions. I’m allergic to spinach, which is weird.

Zach has non-syndromic genetic hearing loss, meaning he does not have any other associated symptoms, other than hearing loss. It’s more pronounced in one ear. In my head, his hearing loss was not noticed until he was slightly further along in childhood. He does wear a hearing aid and he has worn hearing aids since childhood. Part of what I did to research was look at what Curtis Pride had written and talked about in terms of his experience. He mentioned his first major league hit where he felt the sound, he felt it as an ocean or a sea in his chest. And there was a moment in the book where Zach says that he’s feeling the sound in the Union Stadium in New York, as a sea of sound in his chest. And that was my little shout-out to Curtis Pride. There is a really great book called Deaf Players and Major League Baseball, it came out in August of last year. And when it came out, I was like, ‘Oh, this is perfect. I have to read it.’ It’s an academic text. But it’s the history of deaf players in Major League Baseball, up to and through Curtis Pride, but really gets back into the 1800s about how a lot of the deaf schools had baseball teams. They were considered the Harvard-Westlakes of their day in many ways, a baseball player factory. But the deaf players who eventually made it into Major League Baseball were not playing on hearing teams. They were playing on these teams at deaf schools, but also the culture with it, where there was a newspaper called the Silent Worker, which was a deaf socialist newspaper. There’s a lot about how that occurred, amongst these nativist ideas about immigration about deaf people who were not accepted. Part of it was how my people, and Eastern and Southern Europeans were coming over and they were undesirables and there was a lot of pushback within the deaf community towards that attitude. It’s just a really fascinating read.

I did have a couple of people read this who are deaf or hard of hearing. One read a very early draft about the first 150 pages and went, ‘Okay, fix this.’ And I did, because it was all really good advice. It mostly pertained to the technology around Zach’s hearing aid, because if you’re wearing a batting helmet that’s something you have to negotiate around. So he is hard of hearing in the ear where he doesn’t wear an earflap. I had to be very clear about this. I initially had him with two hearing aids. But I couldn’t do that and then have a batting helmet. This is an iceberg, right? The little tip made it into the book and then the rest had to be part of the invisible world builder.

The last couple years, I’ve gotten really into women’s soccer. And in women’s soccer, they’ve been very supportive of public, gay relationships across the league. And certainly in Major League Baseball, there are Zachs and Eugenios. I think one of the things you do very well in the book is lay out the struggle that they face with how and who they tell. In the end, they don’t come out publicly. What went into that decision? How do you think baseball would react to a relationship like theirs?

That is something that I want to be clear about when people read the book. I wanted to make that a very specific narrative decision. Zach’s main point of tension is that he wants to be a baseball player, and he wants to live up to his parents’ expectations of marriage and family, which is a very Jewish expectation. That is his central problem and his initial misbelief is that he cannot have both. I didn’t want to have him come out publicly in the book for a number of reasons. His issue isn’t that he really cares what the public thinks or knows, his issue was he wants to play baseball, and that he wants to be close to his family. It was a conscious narrative decision in terms of players being out, so I want to be clear.

The book deals a lot with women’s baseball. So non-cis men play baseball. One of the major characters is Zach’s best friend who is a woman who’s a coach and is married to a lesbian. She goes and plays in the Women’s Baseball World Cup in Korea at one point in the book. She’s organizing events and coaching clinics in Colombia at the end of the book, and I wanted there to be a parallel between—she gets to be out and live her life, but the opportunities of professional baseball are denied to her in a lot of ways, versus Zach who has the opposite. There’s a lot of women’s baseball players who are out, much like there’s a lot of women’s soccer players. The best American women’s baseball player is named Megan Baltzell. She’s out, she’s great. She’s like if Kyle Schwarber were a catcher, that type of player. The Women’s Baseball World Cup has been delayed because of the pandemic, but I hope it takes place in about a month. So that’s sort of the world they have to negotiate in terms of coming out. Zach comes out to his family, he comes out to his best friend, and teammates, and the team’s media relations person. People are like, ‘Oh, he doesn’t come out.’ But he comes out to, like, everybody, he just doesn’t put out a press release. He comes out to the restaurant owner at his favorite restaurant in Miami. I want to be clear that he’s not suffocating in the closet at the end of the book. He’s just not going to put out a press release about it.

To me, this represents where baseball is. There was just a minor career minor leaguer who just came out as bi. He’s retiring at the end of the season after ten years in the minors and he’s like, ‘I’m retiring, I want to come out.’ His name is Kieran Lovegrove. He’s a pitcher for the Trash Pandas. He was on this minor league bus ride. It’s like nine hours and it’s the beginning of it and he and his seatmate are just shooting the breeze about music. He was talking about Harry Styles and Freddy Mercury. And his seatmate is like, ‘Are you straight?’ And he’s just like, ‘Well, I’m not, I’m bi.’ And the guy says, ‘Okay.’ And the rest of the bus ride he was like, ‘We got your back.’ That seems like it’s been the situation for him since. But he waited until he’s retiring. He’s very justifiably angry about the conditions with which minor leaguers are treated and the financial sort of straits that they’re in. He waited until baseball couldn’t punish him for this, and I think that has been the experience of players who have come out.

I’ve heard major leaguers say on social media and other places that they know that they’ve had gay teammates and they’re fine with them. But there is that difference between ‘I’m out’ and ‘I’m out to my team’ and ‘I’m out publicly in a way that I am not going to have retribution for something “intangible” in my career that will essentially be ended. I think of Glenn Burke being traded because he was friends with Tommy Lasorda’s son and then getting run out of League by the Athletics. I think that players see that as the potential of what will happen, especially guys like how Zach thinks of himself as, the backup catchers, the middle inning relievers. It’s going to take a big freaking star. If you’re a backup catcher, you are inevitably replaceable, unfortunately, and baseball is built on that. I know that sounds very pessimistic. But I also wanted to be accurate. He can’t change those circumstances of structural homophobia and in the sport on a massive level, but he can be happy. I wanted to have that balance.

The last thing I’ll say is I write for a queer audience. I want the reader to be able to say, ‘You know, I also live in a world like that, and I can be happy.’ At the end of the book, I have to be able to close the book, and go and deal with the world. And so if you have a situation where he comes out and he’s universally accepted, then what was he even afraid of to begin with? There’s a fantasy to it. I understand that fantasy. I’m going to write for somebody who can say, ‘This is this the world.’ Massive structural change is not a precondition of my own personal happiness. But I’m going to work towards that massive structural change.

KD Casey is a romance writer and baseball enthusiast living in the Washington, DC area. Her debut novel UNWRITTEN RULES, about a Jewish catcher who unexpectedly reunites with his ex-teammate—who’s also his ex-boyfriend—is available from Carina Press. Come talk baseball and writing with her on Twitter or Instagram, and subscribe to her newsletter for periodic freebies and updates.

Scott Bolohan is the founder of The Twin Bill. This was the first romance novel he read, and he loved it.