RSN: In the book's preface, you talk about how the idea behind Game of My Life began to form some time ago. Tell us about that.
CS: Sports Publishing approached me with the idea for doing the book. The format is one the publisher has successfully used before with other teams and other sports, and SP wanted to do one about the Red Sox. One of the reasons I accepted the offer was because I remembered sitting in the manager's office that day, a quarter of a century ago, before a Red Sox oldtimers game and being fascinated by the tales of obscure long-ago games being related by Ted Williams, Dom DiMaggio, Bobby Doerr, Johnny Pesky, et al. I knew their memories for details were sharp, so I knew getting the players to remember and talk about games would not be an ordeal. And it wasn't. Their memories are phenomenal.
RSN: Both the foreword and dedication to your book were notable. Tell us a little about each.
CS: First, the dedication. Dick Radatz had eagerly agreed to be one of the subjects for the book. Like most of my subjects, he had difficulty whittling his brilliant (albeit short) career to just one game. As with all my subjects, I offered to provide him with several suggestions. For players prior to about 1965, this wasn't an easy task, because Retrosheet, the internet baseball source that was so handy for me, had a lot of gaps for years prior to '65. Much to my surprise and dismay, the Red Sox club archives were pretty much non-existent before 1969. No official scorebooks, no day by day performance charts. All the Sox had were box scores and game stories cut out of newspapers and pasted into scrapbooks, and before 1949 there was absolutely nothing. I pored over what the Red Sox had, as well as making trips to the Boston Public Library to look at microfilms, to isolate Radatz's most spectacular games. This took several weeks, and during that time Radatz fell down the cellar stairs at his home, hit his head, and died. So, he never got to pick his game, and I was, obviously, never able to interview him. But he was such a colorful and popular character among Red Sox fans, I felt the least I could do was dedicate the book to him.
Now, to the foreword. Johnny Pesky didn't know what to write about when I asked him to contribute the foreword. But he was always talking about Ted Williams. If Williams hadn't died a few years ago, I would have loved to interview him for the book. Pesky knew Ted about as well as anybody, so I thought: Why not have Pesky pick a game for Ted? And he went along with it.
RSN: A few of the games chosen by the players were somewhat surprising. Which did you find most interesting?
CS: More than a few of their choices surprised me. The pitchers were more or less predictable, especially the ones who threw no-hitters, although I fully expected Bruce Hurst to pick his 1-0 win in Game One of the '86 World Series instead of his 4-2 win in Game Five. The hitters were much less predictable. I thought, for example, that Bobby Doerr would pick his three-homer, eight-RBI game against the Browns in 1950, but he shrugged that off as "everybody had a good day" in that 29-4 blitz. I thought John Valentin would pick his unassisted triple play, followed by a home run leading off the bottom of the inning, or perhaps his three-homer game. He didn't. I thought Dwight Evans might pick his seven-RBI game with two homers and a triple in the game while the Red Sox were winning their AL-record 24th straight home game. He didn't. Of course, these players had long and illustrous Red Sox careers, and they had many, many choices available to them. Dave Henderson barely played a year in a Red Sox uniform, so his choices were limited, and everyone remembers the electrifying homer he hit in Game 5 of the ALCS against the Angels. I thought for sure he'd pick that game. But he picked Game 6 of the '86 World Series -- a game most Red Sox fans would rather forget. That choice surprised me the most. Blew me away, in fact.
RSN: Along with the (most memorable) games themselves, each chapter gives an overview of the player's career. Do you look at look at the book as a collection of short historical biographies almost as much as remembrances of specific games?
CS: I'm glad you asked this question. As I mentioned earlier, SP has a format for this type of book, and the publisher wants it followed. The focus is on THE GAME and the events immediately leading up to it and what happened immediately afterward, with just a little bit of background material. I wanted to stretch the format a bit. Well, a lot, to be honest. Many of the players in the book were and remain extremely popular with Red Sox fans, but most of them will never have a biography exclusively devoted to each of them. I wanted to write mini-biographies of them, as well as pay tribute to some other outstanding games they had. The contract called for a book of 50,000-60,000 words featuring 20-25 players, and by the time it was halfway written I knew I was going to exceed that amount by a considerable amount. I asked my editor what I should do. Should I include fewer players, or could I write more than 60,000 words? "If you've only done 12 players, and you've already written 42,000 words, you're writing too much," I was told. "It's a book about one game." SP was adamant about having a minimum of 20 players, and I was told it was better to exceed the 60,000-word limit than include fewer players. The final manuscript had something like 78,000 words, and I was (reluctantly) able to trim it down to about 72,000. At that point, my feeling was I'd leave the editing up to the editors, and I submitted it. Well, I'm pleased to say that I don't think a single word was cut. And my editor, Travis Moran, said it was the easiest manuscript he'd ever worked with. Obviously, the publisher did not mind that I had stretched the format.
RSN: There are a lot of stories-behind-the-stories in the book, including Ted Williams playing through an injury in the 1946 World Series. Do you have any favorites from among them?
CS: My favorites were the ones that, unfortunately, were irrelevant to the theme of the book and therefore couldn't be included. But I have kept these anecdotes because you never know when the proper forum for them might arise. Butch Hobson, a soft-spoken guy who rarely spoke at all when he played for the Red Sox, surprised me by having a lot of fascinating tales and by his willingness to tell them. My favorite one, I guess, was from Bill Monbouquette, a raconteur with a multitude of funny stories. Remembering his start in the 1960 All-Star Game, Monbo said: "Willie Mays led off the game, bailed out on a pitch, and poked it down the right-field line for a triple. I get Ernie Banks 0-and-2, then throw him a high, inside fastball that I cut. It ends up over the plate, and he hits it into the left-field seats. Del Crandall comes up next inning, and everybody tells me he can't hit a curve. So I throw a curve, and I hang it, and that one's out of the park. After the game everyone asks me what happened. I told them Yogi (Berra) called all the wrong pitches!"
RSN: 20 players told their stories in your book. Did you find most of them unique, or were there a lot of recurring themes to how they looked back at their career highlights?
CS: What surprised me most was how many of them chose games that the Red Sox lost. But when you realize that the Red Sox won only one pennant in nearly a 50-year stretch between 1919 and 1966, and played in only four World Series between 1919 and 2003 without winning one, just getting a true glimpse of the Holy Grail was the highlight of so many careers. I feel sympathy most for Frank Malzone, a very good player who played his entire Red Sox career on teams that were never more than mediocre.
RSN: A lot more than 20 players have enjoyed memorable careers in a Red Sox uniform. Can we expect a sequel to Game of my Life someday, and who might be included if we do?
CS: I would love to do another one of these, because I've really only scratched the surface. I wanted to cover as much Red Sox history as possible in this one, which meant limiting myself to 2-4 players from each of six decades, and I certainly wanted to get older players like Doerr, DiMaggio, Pesky, and Parnell on record before they passed on. I'm really sad I couldn't finish Radatz in time. SP wanted me to include a couple of players from the 2004 World Championship Red Sox, and while tempting, I thought it was unfair to the active players to pick a game before their Red Sox careers had ended. Part of the reason I didn't include obvious subjects like the reclusive Yaz, Jim Lonborg, and Carlton Fisk in this book was because I feared they might choose a game I had already written about. Given how many of my subjects made unexpected choices anyway, those fears may have been largely unfounded. Lonborg might have picked his one-hitter in the '67 World Series. But if he, say, picked the last day of the '67 season, I didn't want to tell him, sorry, Rico already picked that one. If that's Lonnie's choice, he should be given sole province for it. In the next book, he can. (Does that mean Yaz will have to wait for a third book? Maybe.) There's certainly enough material to write two or three more books. I hope I get the opportunity.
