Joe Posnanski: Why We Love Baseball

Joe Posnanski: Why We Love Baseball

By Scott Bolohan

It was Opening Day 2006 in Chicago and the White Sox got their World Series rings before the game, but I don’t remember anything about that. I was in college at the game with my buddy Kevin. All was good until it started raining, and April rain in Chicago is never ideal. As the rain poured down we had made our way down behind the Sox dugout as the crowd thinned. And through the pouring rain, Jim Thome, in his first game with the Sox, sent the ball towering through the pouring rain to the rightfield seats for a game-winning grand slam as Kevin and I, drenched to the bone, lost our minds.

It was the first moment that came to my mind when I thought about my favorite baseball moments. Except it didn’t happen quite like that.

When I looked up the game, there was a three-hour rain delay and Thome’s two-run homer made it 6-3 in the 4th inning. I have no idea if we stayed to see the end of the eventual 10-4 win. But there was something about being young and carefree combined with the loopiness that comes from waiting out a long rain delay and a little bit of Hall of Famer magic. It was, frankly, just a home run, and I doubt even very many other people remember it, real version or otherwise. But in my mind, this was a defining moment in my baseball-watching life.

Joe Posnansk’s latest book, Why We Love Baseball: A History in 50 Moments, is full of moments like this as it ranks the greatest moments in baseball history, from the obscure to the legendary. The book is a warm baseball hug and it becomes clear that moments make the game, but it’s the stories of the moments that we tell—or tell ourselves—that make them unforgettable. And there aren’t many better storytellers than Posnanski.

You just wrote, what, 800 pages on players. And now you’re writing about moments. Why moments?

I think the driving force of this book was the title, Why We Love Baseball. I kept thinking about that question. I kept coming back to moments. It’s probably true for everything, but particularly baseball. When you ask somebody, what it is about the game they love, they think instantly of moments—some of the big moments, some of the small moments, some of the personal moments, but it’s moments. It’s specific, individual things that they saw or that they were a part of, and I think that’s different from other sports. I’m writing a book now about football and really marveling as I think about how different football and baseball are. One of the things that I think of is when you wonder why we love football, it comes down to about 50 things that are very specific—the violence, a great run, a great pass, just very specific details about the game itself. You ask somebody why they love baseball, and it’s like, ‘Oh, it’s because the first time my dad took me to a game, I remember walking up the concourse.’ It has nothing to do with the game sometimes. So I think moments are very much at the heart of the game and why we still love it after all these years.

How did you go about trying to balance a personal moment with the major baseball moments that everyone knows?

What was so important to me was the balance and to give a good amount to all of it. I think this book would have been incomplete without the biggest moments ever, without Babe Ruth’s called shot, Willie Mays’ catch, Kirk Gibson’s home run, Reggie Jackson’s three homers in the World Series. But that wasn’t the book I wanted to write. I wanted all of these small moments, personal moments, moments people might never have heard of which illuminate the game a little bit. I was being guided by the whole idea of why we love baseball. I would come upon a moment and I would say, ‘Is this a reason why we love baseball?’ Maybe that moment was great, maybe that moment was dramatic. But maybe that moment didn’t fulfill that idea in my mind the same way as a simple, meaningless moment like Kevin Mitchell reaching up and barehandling the ball. It was trying to balance out all of these reasons why we love the game and telling them through as many different kinds of moments as I could.

Did you have a moment that kind of got you started? Like, ‘Oh, I have something here?‘

There were a few times that actually happened. And of course, it was never one of the famous moments because those were already on the list. As soon as I came up with how I was going to do this, I wrote down 75 or 100 great baseball moments. I knew I wasn’t going to use all of them. What really got me to do the book in the way that I wanted to do it was these other moments that I just kind of came across. One that really comes to mind because I love the moment so much is when I was walking through the Hall of Fame while researching this book, and I took a break from doing some of the core newspaper and magazine research just to walk through the museum. I went into the section where they had women in baseball. I came across a little picture and a jersey of a girl, a Little Leaguer named Chelsea Baker. I didn’t know her story. But I was reading about how she threw two perfect games in Little League. And I was like, ‘Oh, that’s interesting.’ I started doing a little research on her and, and learned a little bit about her story. I realized I wanted this moment and I was going to try to talk to Chelsea. That was harder than I expected because she was a big deal. ESPN did a big thing on her and she was in newspapers and magazines. Then she just disappeared. I didn’t know if that was purposeful, or if that was something that just naturally happened. I tried to chase her down and I found her, and her story turned out to be incredible. She threw the perfect games because she threw a knuckleball, which she learned from Joe Niekro.

I already couldn’t believe the story and it just got better. She’s so delightful and wonderful. This is what the book is. You’re going to pick up this book and want to read about Hank Aaron’s 715th home run and Babe Ruth’s called shot and you’ll get all of that in the book. But then you’ll come across something like this Chelsea Baker story, and that’s going to be the story that’s really going to grab you. There were a few of those. But that was one that really stands out in my mind.

I would say at least a third of the moments in the book I didn’t know, like Dave Bresnahan, Yutaka Entasu was another great one. I also became obsessed with Joe Bauman.

That’s exactly what I wanted. I wanted people to be drawn into the book and you know, say ‘Oh, yeah, Kerry Wood’s 20 strikeout game, I remember that’ or ‘Oh yeah, Game Six of the 2011 World Series, I remember that.’ But then, like you say, a third of the book, you go, ‘I’ve never heard of this person. I’ve never heard of this moment. This is crazy.’ That was part of the challenge. I knew it was going to be a countdown. And some of these moments that I had to get in the book, I couldn’t even in good conscience put them as one of the 50 greatest moments in baseball history. But I had to get David Holst getting four consecutive foul balls and the opponent’s dugout in. It’s not one of the 50 moments, but I’ve got to get it in.

There was one moment that completely shattered my reality. It’s one of the greatest catch moments. I can picture the entire newsreel of Al Gionfriddo making the catch on Joe DiMaggio’s hit. But the catch in the video isn’t real. I had no idea.

I didn’t either. It’s a funny story. In my mind, I wasn’t going to put the Gionfriddo catch in the book. Because even though it’s an incredibly famous catch because Joe DiMaggio kicked the dirt afterward, I’d seen that video of him making that catch 25 times or whatever. And I didn’t think it was that good of a catch. It wasn’t going out, he kind of stumbled his way back to the ball. But I thought I had to do due diligence so I did research on what people said about the catch. The way they were describing the catch in their stories doesn’t sound at all like what I saw. In my mind, I was like, ‘Man, sportswriters were terrible back then.’ So I’m doing research and I see a story talking about the next day when Al Gionfriddo had to go back out on the field and recreate the catch for the newsreels. Each newspaper did a story about how silly it looked and how the fans were supposed to cheer like it was the World Series catch. And some did, and some didn’t. I went back and looked at the video and, oh my god, this is not the catch. I had a complete rethinking of the game. For me as a huge baseball fan, this was the mind-blowing moment.

We publish baseball fiction, so for you to put fictional baseball moments in the book meant a lot to me. It is a reason why we love baseball. Was that was it a part of your idea from the beginning or did that kind of come up as you went along?

It was part of my idea from the beginning. My wife is a moderate baseball fan. But she’s also kind of a literal baseball fan. And so when I first told her that I was thinking about the Dottie play at the end of A League of Their Own and I told her I was going to make it a moment,  she was taken aback a little bit by that. But then I thought about it and these moments are absolutely why we love baseball.

Without giving anything away, when we got to the second-greatest moment, I was a bit surprised it wasn’t the greatest. But I also followed why you picked the greatest moment that you did. How difficult for you was it to parse these final ones?

I thought a lot about it, to be honest. There was an obvious number one, yes. I would talk to people for the book and they would ask me what my number one was, and I would say that I was debating. They would say there’s no debate, it’s got to be Jackie Robinson, right? There’s no possible other option. I just kept going around and around with it. First of all, it’s not a moment, though. That was what really bothered me. So I write it as a series of moments. It’s a very, very, very long and hard journey over many, many years. But it’s not a moment. So that was the first thing that came to mind. And the second thing that came to mind was, what did it lead to? It wasn’t a triumph when Jackie Robinson stepped on the field. It was still an open question of how this was going to play out, and what it was going to lead to. He had to deal with all of these difficult issues, he had to win over teammates, but it wasn’t like a moment. But there is a moment that this led to directly and it is the most crescendo moment in the history of baseball. So that’s where I went. I’m going to have to defend this moment for as long as the book is out. I’ve totally loved defending it. I think it’s the greatest moment in baseball history. At the end of the day, it wasn’t that hard of a decision, but I did put a lot of thought into it.

I’ve been dying to talk to someone about this. This is one of your top meltdown moments. Roger Clemens throws the bat at Mike Piazza. And I have I have a theory about this. I think the reason why people don’t talk about it or make more of a big deal about it is because Clemens’ answer for why he did it was so illogical, so cuckoo bananas that we don’t know what to do with it so we just kind of let it go. But it was an insane moment in baseball history. And I’m so glad it was in the book.

I think you’re right. There’s nobody who tells that story anymore without talking about his answer to what happened, and why he did it, but a man threw a baseball bat and another player in the World Series.

Like when in football Miles Garrett conked the quarterback on the head with his own helmet, it was news for weeks and weeks. And when in the World Series, he throws a weapon like a spear at Mike Piazza directly after hitting him in the head a few weeks earlier, and he doesn’t get thrown out of the game! It’s one of the most incredible things ever in baseball.

Two legends in the biggest media market in the world, in the World Series. I’ve struggled with this for years. Am I the crazy one here?

That’s exactly right. It’s the gaslighting of all time. Why are we not talking about that every single day now, even twenty years later?

Joe Posnanski‘s Why We Love Baseball: A History in 50 Moments is available here.

Scott Bolohan asked Joe to speak at 1.75 speed so it wouldn’t feel weird. The PosCast is his favorite baseball podcast.

The Twin Bill is a nonprofit organization with 501(c)(3) tax-exempt status. You can support The Twin Bill by donating here.