Tag: Hall of Fame

Wait For It

(Story originally appeared in the March 2017 edition of Yankees Magazine.)

When Tim Raines goes into Cooperstown next month, it will be — fittingly — as a member of the Montreal Expos (RIP). But he did play three seasons in New York, including the 1996 and ’98 world championship years. So in early January, just before the voting results were announced, I headed to Arizona to spend some time with a guy we were all very confident would be getting the good news. Thankfully, it turned out that we guessed correctly.

I loved getting to know Tim over the parts of two days that we spent together. He’s hilarious, and easy to laugh. He was perfectly willing to talk about the mistakes he made in his career and his life, and he did it all with the good cheer and confidence of a person who long ago came to terms with the entirety of his experiences.

I settled on my theme for the piece fairly quickly — he ran so fast in his career, but then he had to wait so long to get the reward he deserved. In my head, I was really just talking about the Hall of Fame and the World Series rings. But as we talked, a bunch of other examples of having to wait out unfair or upsetting circumstances. It all made for a pretty easy story to write, and I think I was able to do with it what I initially sought to. Enjoy.

http://m.mlb.com/news/article/215870536/tim-raines-yankees-hall-of-fame-cooperstown/

Legends Never Die

(Story originally appeared in the Home Run Commemorative Edition of Yankees Magazine.)

Weird confession here: Until I decided to write this story, I had somehow never seen The Sandlot. I don’t know how I had avoided it through the years, but it just never happened. But as I describe in the opening scene in the story (which was a pretty accurate chronology of my reporting), I didn’t have any choice once I started talking to some of the players about their first contact with the legend of Babe Ruth.

We were producing a special edition of Yankees Magazine that was celebrating home runs and home run hitters in Yankees history. I decided to write a story about the Babe Ruth Birthplace & Museum in Baltimore, and I was extremely fortunate to have the museum’s curator, Michael Gibbons, take me around the exhibits, then drive me and a photographer all over the Babe’s Baltimore, showing me other places he lived, the boarding school where he was discovered, and other places from his life. As I detail in the story, though, I didn’t end that day with any clear picture of what I wanted to write. Something about spending time around all these places from Ruth’s past made him smaller, in a way; it was diminishing. That’s not a knock on the museum at all — it does a wonderful job showing Ruth the human. But it’s hard to square that circle with the image of Ruth the superhero.

Confused as to how I should proceed, I posed the question to a bunch of players on the team — what was their first contact with the legend of the Babe. How did their shared experience of being Yankees color their perspectives. I was hoping that the players could help me bridge the gap that separated who I felt Ruth was, and how he was perceived. But the first three players I spoke to — Andrew Miller, Chase Headley and Aaron Hicks, literally the first three players! — all mentioned the same thing: The Sandlot. 

Well, I guess I had to watch the movie.

And it was great, of course. I reached out to the writer and director, David Mickey Evans, to see if maybe he could help me answer the question better. And then the inspiration hit, and the words started flowing. I’m really proud of this story, as I think it does a good job looking at the way that we create heroes, and the people that they really are. As the

We discuss this a lot more on this episode of the Yankees Magazine Podcast. Take a listen (and subscribe!).

Anyhow, enjoy the story.

http://m.mlb.com/news/article/209340058/legend-of-babe-ruth-lives-on/

Confidence Man

(Story originally appeared in the Derek Jeter Commemorative Edition of Yankees Magazine)

When Derek Jeter announced his retirement before the 2014 season, we knew that we needed to do something extra special to celebrate his career, so we put together a special edition of the magazine, looking back on the Captain’s entire career. It was an awesome project, with so much awesome material that we were able to unearth. We reran a bunch of old Yankees Magazine content and supplemented it with some great original pieces.

Obviously, there are only so many different ways to talk about Jeter on the field, particularly when you’re a house organ like Yankees Magazine. So it was really important to me that I find something a bit off-beat. I had always been intrigued by the story of Dick Groch, the scout who signed Jeter. The main is famous — trying to alleviate the concern in the Yankees’ war room that they were going to use the 6th pick in the Draft on a player who would spurn them to go play college ball at Michigan, Groch, the legend has it, insisted:

“He’s not going to the University of Michigan. The only place Derek Jeter is going is Cooperstown.”

That’s a lot of confidence, and as Groch says in the article, if he had been wrong, he probably wouldn’t have lasted much longer in the industry. But the belief paid off. Jeter became a generational player, a certain Hall of Famer and one of the most beloved Yankees of all time. Not a bad scouting job.

Here’s my attempt at putting Groch’s whole story together. Hope you’ll enjoy.

http://m.mlb.com/news/article/229038088/dick-groch-scouted-jeter-for-cooperstown-in-92/