Month: October 2021

An Open Door From A Closed-Down World

(This story originally appeared in SPIN in February 2021.)

The first story that I ever wrote for SPIN was about The Hold Steady, and specifically, about my trip to see them in London in March of 2020. It was right before the pandemic (which is a clever way of saying that it was totally during the pandemic, but we were simply still convincing ourselves that it wasn’t happening). I always laugh at the memory of those three shows, these sweaty, packed rooms of people from all over the world, an event that somehow didn’t include a devastating body count. About the only concession we made to the real world was that the meet-and-greets with the band didn’t feature the usual handshakes, just us all standing shoulder to shoulder without intentional skin-to-skin contact.

In London, the guys played some new songs and made clear that there was a new album on the way, but months later, as we all sat in a live-music-less world, the album never dropped. Understandably, the band was waiting until they could take the songs out on the road, but once it became clear that live shows weren’t on the horizon, the band decided to release Open Door Policy, their second album as a six-piece band (and their second with producer Josh Kaufman.)

The album is a real departure from most of the band’s previous work. There’s a lot more sonic composition, more complex layering that is common to Kaufman’s work. There are parts that feel like a Craig Finn solo album, and other guitar riffs that are clearly from the heart of THS. But there’s maturity and consequence in the lyrics, an evolution from the days when the kids were making the ER look kind of like an afterbar.

I liked doing this as a Q&A. Especially when I’m writing about a specific album in this way, I prefer to let the artists do most of the talking. I thought that Craig and guitarist Steve Selvidge both made me really think about what they were trying to do, where they succeeded, and what it means for the future of the band and the future of music if we can ever reach a post-pandemic world (fingers crossed).

https://www.spin.com/2021/02/the-hold-steady-craig-finn-steve-selvidge-interview/

Baby Steps

(This story originally appeared in the Official 2020 New York Yankees Yearbook.)

Part 3 of my Pandemic Baseball series picks up right where Part 2 left off, and by this point in the season, I’d gotten enough glimpses of the bizarre day-to-day absurdities that the story almost wrote itself. I loved getting to highlight the things that I had never seen before, and would never see again — how about walk-off homers by the Mets at Yankee Stadium, or Yankees relievers scoring the winning runs in games despite never batting, or sacrifice flies to lead off innings?

It was all so weird, and it allowed me to play with a version of a quote that I heard sometime like 400 times during the season: “It’s 2020, man …” I think I got that into the story three separate times, but it’s perfect in its way. The 2020 was real, and the Dodgers’ championship rings are plenty shiny, but everything felt just enough like fantasy to allow us to shake off some of the individual moments. “It’s 2020, man,” was the perfect shoulder shrug in word form.

There’s fun stuff in here. I loved getting to tell the story of Deivi García’s debut and his repertoire with Erik Kratz. I really enjoyed learning that the Yankees were worse in late-and-close situations at home in 2020 than they had been in any year since the new Yankee Stadium opened, which seemed like a fairly clear indication that the special sauce of Yankees fans might be even more important that we’ve thought all these years (and I really loved Tampa Bay’s Blake Snell saying that he would sometimes curse at himself in the bullpen to make up for the absence of fans’ creative vulgarities).

This was a fun series to write. I missed the clubhouse access, and I missed the ability to write about things behind the scenes that fans weren’t seeing. This year, I kind of felt like I was sitting in the same seats as my readers were, which was challenging. But it also allowed me to (and really forced me to) see the game differently. I felt that this year, I was analyzing more than I was unveiling. It was more storytelling than reporting. I had fun with it. That said, I can’t wait to get back into the clubhouse sometime soon.

https://www.mlb.com/yankees/news/yankees-magazine-2020-season-review?t=yankees-magazine

Anything But Ordinary

(This story originally appeared in the September 2021 edition of Yankees Magazine.)

For Part 2 of my overhead view of pandemic baseball, I focused mainly on the sights and (lack of) sounds in Yankee Stadium. Covering baseball in 2020 was an enormous challenge, with magazine deadlines looming and black pages staring back at you despite next to no access to the players. One of the great joys of writing about baseball is the downtime. As frustrating as it can be sometimes to stand around a Yankees’ clubhouse with 50 other reporters and no baseball players to be found, there’s still so much that we can all learn from getting to chat with players, to make small talk, to ask questions out of view of the entire beat.

Obviously, everyone knew that things would be different in 2020, but as one of very few people who could be in the park during games, I really wanted to give a sense of what it looked and sounded and felt like. I wanted to know how players got themselves amped up, how gameday operations employees tried to get some sound into the atmosphere to trick the players’ brains, and how everyone tried to make the games feel as normal as possible. I also spent time chatting with all the people who made the YES Network broadcasts work despite the announcers sometimes calling games from three time zones away.

I’m proud of this series, and of the way that I think it will stand as a reminder of how weird everything was in 2020, even when we were kind of pretending things were normal again.

https://www.mlb.com/yankees/news/yankees-magazine-making-2020-baseball-seem-normal?t=yankees-magazine