On Whiteyball

Whitey Herzog, former Major League Baseball player and manager, passed away in April, at the age of 92.  

What does that have to do with writing?  Stay tuned.  I’ll get there, with a little meandering along the way.

I was twelve years old when Herzog managed the St. Louis Cardinals to victory in the 1982 World Series.  You’re never again a fan of anything the way you’re a fan when you’re twelve, and the Cardinals were my team.  Downstate Illinois, where I grew up, was in a perpetual state of simmering conflict between fans of the Cardinals and fans of their fiercest rivals, the Chicago Cubs (plus a few people who rooted for the White Sox, apparently just to be weird).  Now, my father was, and remains, a die-hard Cub booster.  When I was very young, however, I had a crush on a babysitter who liked the Cardinals, which was enough to cause my loyalty to permanently shift to the redbirds.

Whitey Herzog

(Six years old, and already a femme fatale was alluring me into betraying my own family. Shocking. I was destined to write crime stories!)  

Baseball in the early eighties was a very different game than the one played today, and not just because the abomination known as the designated hitter was still safely quarantined in the American League.  Power wasn’t nearly as central or dominant; the Cardinals, as a team, hit only 67 home runs in their championship year (by way of contrast, in 2023 the Atlanta Braves hit 307, and even the team with the fewest homers, the Cleveland Guardians, hit 124).  Instead of waiting for a shot over the wall, St. Louis followed a strategy widely called Whiteyball, built around sound defense, solid pitching, and, above all, speed.  It wasn’t at all unusual for the Cards to string together a walk, a stolen base, a sacrifice fly, and a squeeze bunt, putting themselves on the scoreboard without ever getting a base hit.  Cardinal broadcaster Mike Shannon described playing the Cards this way: “You think you’re just getting a few mosquito bites, and all of a sudden your head falls off.”

I loved this aggressive style of play.  I still do, though you don’t often see it these days.  Even before Herzog arrived in St. Louis, my favorite player was Lou Brock.  Brock was a member of the elite 3,000 hit club,

My Lou Brock shrine

but more importantly to me, he was perhaps the greatest stolen base artist who ever lived (I know what the stats say, and I hear some of you yelling the name Rickey Henderson, to which I reply, with a dismissive curl of my lip, that I am familiar with his work).  Brock was retired by 1982, but his aura still hung over the team.

In Bull Durham, veteran catcher Crash Davis tells young pitcher Nuke LaLoosh to stop trying to strike everybody out: “Strikeouts are boring.  Besides that, they’re fascist.”  I have similar feelings about the home run.  It can be spectacular, but it’s an individual feat, a single player imposing his will on the game rather than a team working together.  Once the ball leaves the bat, there’s nothing to watch except the hero jogging around the bases.  Give me, instead, a battle of wits between a pitcher and a speed demon on first who keeps edging a couple inches closer to second.  Give me a well-executed hit and run, the ball squeaking under the glove of a second baseman pulled out of position.  Give me a beautifully placed bunt trickling along just inside the foul line, the runner charging from third, the bang-bang play at the plate (and no review via replay, thank you very much). And, what the hell, give me the best defensive shortstop who ever lived doing a backflip as he runs to his position, just for the sheer joy of it.

Ozzie Smith on his way to work

At its heart, Whiteyball is built on a simple idea: make something happen.  If you stand at the plate just waiting to hit a home run, you’re going to fail more often than you succeed.  Often you’ll strike out and turn around to trudge back to the bench.  But if you get a couple of guys on base and just manage to put the ball in play, all kinds of things start to occur.  Aggressive baserunning has caused more than a few defenses to utterly fall apart, after all.  In Whiteyball, every runner and every ball put into play has the potential to bring in a run.  Every pitch becomes a test of strategy and improvisation.  For me, at least, it’s a style that’s a heck of a lot more fun to watch–and it looks like a heck of a lot more fun to play, too.

Which brings me, finally, back to writing.  When I read about Herzog’s passing, and thought fondly back to the way his team played, it occurred to me that make something happen is a pretty accurate description of the way I approach writing, on a couple of levels.

First, on a macro level, I feel like my focus on writing short stories has a certain affinity with the principles of Whiteyball.  A novel, in this possibly tortured analogy, would be a three-run homer.  Instead of building my fiction-writing campaign around that, I’m going for the equivalent of bloop singles, stolen bases and drag bunts: short stories in magazines and anthologies, as many as I have the time and imagination to produce.  For me, at least, it’s more fun, just as Whiteyball was more fun than, say, watching Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa turn games into steroid-fueled home run derbies.  Every story I send out is putting a ball in play–and you never know what might result.

As a career strategy, it seems to be working out.  I’m enjoying the hell out of writing, seeing my name in a fair number of publications and, hey, getting invited to be a SleuthSayer is kind of like being called up to The Show, right?

Words of Wisdom from Bull Durham

Make something happen is also a pretty good strategy on the micro level–that is, within the world of each story.  When you’ve got five thousand words (and sometimes a lot less) to work with, there’s only so much space you can spend on passages of introspection and detailed description.  Those things have their place, of course, but, most of the time, it’s action and incident that drive the story forward and keep the reader engaged.  When I’m working on a story and I just get stuck, I can often get unstuck by making something happen–a new character arrives, a gun goes off, a police car comes around the corner at just the wrong moment.

I’m not suggesting that Whitey Herzog actually directly influenced the way I write. After all, I didn’t publish my first short story until thirty years after his 1982 triumph.  But I do find an affinity between his style of baseball and my style of writing, and I think the central idea is one that can be helpful to any writer–and indeed, in a lot of areas of life.

When in doubt, make something happen.

RIP, Whitey, and thanks for some of the greatest moments of my childhood.

(And now a word from our sponsor: if you're interested in my most recent effort to make something happen, check out today's release of Black Cat Weekly #143, which includes my story "Sunrise at the Moonshine Palace." Thanks to BCW editor and fellow SleuthSayer Barb Goffman for selecting this tale of music and murder!)