Let's Row Together
Sprinkling fairy dust from my experiences to those passionate about wanting a sports career. Discovering my baseball DNA, my girlhood at Fenway Park, and a legend in our time, Shohei Ohtani.
I’m going to Fenway Park today.
Not to see a game but to talk with Boston area college students interested in pursuing a career in sports media.
I do this all the time. Not usually at Fenway Park, more often via Zoom, though when I can be with students in person, I’m there.
Photo by Stan Grossfeld, at Fenway Park
Giving what I can to young people who are thinking about a career in sports is a big reason why I wrote Locker Room Talk: A Woman’s Struggle to Get Inside. I like to think that my words could inspire students to push through the new challenges they will encounter in the much changed sports media marketplace. As my friend and longtime Boston Globe sports columnist Dan Shaughnessy said in a Zoom we did with Baseball’s Hall of Fame this week, “It’s tough these days, but if you have the passion to do this work, you will find ways to do it.”
I convey this same message by sharing my own unlikely story of being hired at Sports Illustrated. After graduating from Wellesley College as an art history major, I was hired as a reporter-researcher at the world’s premier sports magazine without presenting even one clip of a sports story I’d written. That’s because I’d never written one!
Like fairy dust, I sprinkle hints throughout my talks to students, believing they might lead them to places where similar miracles can happen.
Yesterday I spent an hour on Zoom with Claire Smith’s1 class at Temple University. They’d watched the ESPN film, “Let Them Wear Towels,” about my era of women sportswriters, and then each student came up with questions to ask me. It was sort of a press conference, only I wasn’t the reporter asking questions; I was answering them.
I’ve been on the road talking about my book for about a month now. Last week, I was in New Orleans where I did two book events, and starting today – at Fenway Park – I have eight book events in the next eight days, plus some media talks – including a live interview on GBH’s Boston Public Radio on Thursday, Sept. 26th in the 1:00 - 2:00 hour. From there, I drive West to my hometown of Amherst to talk with students at the University of Massachusetts with sports journalism professor Steve Fox.
Among the more frequently asked questions I get are variations on this theme: Why did you grow up liking baseball so much?
I get it. As a girl growing up in 1950s/1960s America, I don’t think that a lot of other girls were as passionate as I was about baseball; I didn’t know any! My love for the game is a wondrous oddity for which I owe my mom my utmost gratitude.
This photo is from the summer of 1951, taken in Waterloo, Iowa before my parents loaded their car, laid me down in a bassinet on the back seat (no car seats or seatbelts then), and drove to Massachusetts, with them enduring what I am told was a solid 12 hours of me crying. We ended our trip in Amherst, MA, where my father had his first post Ph.D. job as a finance professor waiting for him at the University of Massachusetts.
Baseball in my DNA
In the following excerpt from Locker Room Talk’s Chapter 14, I write about a revealing letter I came across after my mom died of Alzheimer’s in 2011. It was in a box that she’d held onto for 60 years; she’d filled the box with scraps of paper relating to my birth, as well as letters that friends and family wrote her after I was born.
When I opened this envelope and unfurled its letter, I discovered my DNA connection to the game.
I used what I found in that box to write these chapter-opening paragraphs:
“Baseball is fathers and sons … the generations, looping backward forever with a million apparitions of sticks and balls. … Baseball is fathers and sons playing catch, lazy and murderous, wild and controlled, the profound archaic song of birth, growth, age and death. This diamond encircles what we are … joining the long generations of all the fathers and all the sons.” – Donald Hall, “Fathers Playing Catch with Sons.”
“My mom and I didn’t play catch, but she passed on to me a deep affection for baseball and her lifelong devotion to the Red Sox, which her father had passed on to her.
“On May 27, 1951, as the New York Yankees rode a train to their three-game series in Fenway Park, my mom checked into University Hospital in Iowa City to have her first child, me. Though I was breeched and had the umbilical cord around my neck, the doctors didn’t surgically remove me. Instead, they numbed my mom with spinal anesthesia, delivered me safely, but then forgot to warn her against sitting up when she woke up. As a consequence, we had to stay a day or two longer in the hospital until she recovered from her incapacitating headache due to the anesthesia. She rested while my dad paid $2.65 to telegraph news of my birth to her parents in Milton, Massachusetts and telephoned his parents in Waterloo, Iowa.
“The next day the Red Sox beat the Yankees 3-2 with its star player, Ted Williams, going hitless.
“I was four days old when my grandfather in Milton rolled a sheet of lightweight paper into his typewriter to write to my mom. ‘My dearest Jean,’ his two-page, single-spaced letter began. After declaring me a ‘Smart girl,’ he misspelled my name as ‘Millissa’ and expressed his excitement at my birth. Quicky, however, he transitioned to the truly vital news of his day – the Red Sox sweep of the Yankees. As a teenager, my mom had been her dad’s Fenway Park seatmate and their baseball bond endured. Writing from afar, he typed a rat-a-tat-tat, play-by-play account of the double-header that sent the Yankees on their way to Detroit with no wins in Boston.
“Decades later, when I found my grandfather’s letter in my mom’s papers, his words reminded me why I’d always felt a visceral connection with baseball. At the time I was born the notion that I, or any girl, could grow up to cover Major League Baseball for the leading sports magazine was so laughably absurd as to be out of the realm of possibility. My mom’s pedigree as a lifelong fan gave me a running start, but the odds that my life would turn out as it did were slim to none on the day her Fenway Park seat mate welcomed me into the family. Seven years later my mom took me to my first baseball Major League game, at Fenway Park, of course. She squeezed my hand tightly as we fell in with the crowd of people moving slowly through the short passageway taking us into the ballpark. From the cave-like interior of this old ballpark, we emerged into the bright afternoon sun. I pulled on my mom’s hand to signal I wanted to stop. Slowly turning my head, I took in the full measure of this compact, pentagonal ballpark, then let my eyes settle on its pristinely mowed, shimmering grass and finely combed dirt infield. As we resumed walking to our grandstand seats near third base, the towering leftfield wall with its embedded scoreboard grew larger and larger. I’d seen this so-called “Green Monster” on TV but being this close to it was magical.
Fenway Park, the view in my childhood
“By then, my father was driving my sister and me on Saturday afternoon road trips to root for the University of Massachusetts football team. After earning his Ph.D. in Iowa, he and my mom and me had moved to Amherst, a rural town about 90 miles from Boston, so he could be a professor of finance at the state’s flagship university. He brought East his Midwest habit of college football each Saturday, and he’d enlisted the two of us as his seatmates. I enjoyed these outings as my dad taught me lots about that game, but nothing about football made me feel exuberant, like I did at Fenway Park.
“When my mom and I reached our seats that afternoon in Fenway Park, I walked a few steps more so I could lean over the low wall to try to touch the field. I couldn’t reach it, but I wanted to try. Years later with Sports Illustrated, whenever I walked onto that field, I paused and reached down to touch the grass, a motion that rekindled my joyful memories of that first game.
“Baseball hooked me that day. It never let go.”
My mom’s father didn’t play baseball in college. He ran track, excelling in the hurdles.
Never before in baseball
Now that is a phrase you seldom hear. But in last night’s game, Shohei Ohtani stole his 50th, then his 51st base, while hitting his 51st home run of the season after he’d already become the sole member of the 50 (steals)-50 (home run) club.
In that game, Shohei went “6-for-6, with three home runs, two steals and 10 RBIs (just two shy of the MLB single-game record set 100 years ago). Along the way, moments after he founded the 50-50 club, he was at 51-51.” [The Athletic] To remind you, this happened in a season when he is rehabbing so that he can pitch again for the Dodgers.
No player in the history of baseball who has hit 50 home runs has stolen more than 26 bases in that same season. Here is a highlight reel of his 2024 season.
Scroll through this video to watch him steal two bases and hit his home runs.
Book Updates
There is good news – but it also leads us to some challenging news, for now.
The first printing of Locker Room Talk sold out … BUT now there is a delay due to the current demand on book printing presses. We’ll soon restock my book with a second printing. It will not be a long delay, but it is a delay. You can backorder, and as soon as the books come in, you’ll get yours.
And there are lots of options to choose from. The audio edition of Locker Room Talk is available. It is not read by THIS Melissa, but by Melissa Redmond, and I hope you’ll consider that option, along with the Kindle version for those who prefer ebooks.
This Sunday morning (8:30 to 10:00), I will be the guest of Sree Sreenivasan on his Digimentors’ #NYTimesReadalong. You can participate on Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn … essentially any platform you prefer. It’s always a fascinating conversation, and I hope you’ll tune in.
The visual I used is from a #NYTimesReadalong I did with fellow 1970s sportswriter Lawrie Mifflin in memory of Robin Herman, our colleague during that era.
Claire Smith wrote baseball for more than a decade beginning in the early 1980s, and she is the only woman sportswriter who has a plaque in the writers’ wing of the Baseball Hall of Fame. Claire and I will be together at the Philadelphia Free Library on the evening of Oct. 17th to talk about Locker Room Talk, then I will join her at the Claire Smith Center for Sports Media on Friday, October 18th for a day-long Women in Sports Media symposium.