Who the hell
are you, and where the hell did you come from?
My name is Rob Neyer, and since 1996 I’ve written a (more or
less) daily baseball column for ESPN.com (which became a daily blog in
2007). Before that I was with STATS, Inc. for two-and-a-half
years, and before that I spent four years working with baseball author
Bill James (and before that I didn't do anything worth mentioning).
Sounds like
you’ve got a great job. How do I get one like it?
The short answer is, “Watch a lot of baseball, read a lot of
good writing, and get real lucky.” The long answer can be
found in a separate article, The
Best Job in the World. And the best answer is, “I
can give you no prescription for this career.”
Do you write
anywhere other than ESPN.com?
Not often.
Except for the books.
Why is Feeding
the Green Monster an e-book?
My editor at Random House hated the manuscript that I turned in, and
refused to publish it. A few other publishers had some interest in the
book, but they all wanted to delay publication until the spring of
2002, which would have required a fair amount of reworking the
material. My goal, on the other hand, was to get the book out as
quickly as possible, and publishing as an e-book turned out to be the
only way to do that. For those of you interested in the grisly details,
I wrote this essay.
Working on
anything now?
After writing (or co-writing) six books in nine years, I'm putting that
avocation on hold while I spend some time trying to figure out how to
be a blogger (I know, that probably doesn't sound like a difficult
adjustment, but you're probably younger and smarter than I).
What happened
to Rob & Rany on the Royals?
It was just time for me to stop. I'm grateful to all the
Royals fans who dropped by every so often to see if Rany and I had
written anything new, but too often the answer was no, we hadn't. And
when we had, it usually included me writing yet again that the Royals
were stupid and weren't ever going to win anything again. Which got
tiresome for me and must have been the same for some of you. Anyway,
between Joe Posnanski's columns and marathon blog entries and Rany
Jazayerli's ranyontheroyals,
there's no shortage of entertaining material. I'll be
little-missed.
Who is
Scribbly Tate?
Scribbly Tate is a veteran baseball and sports writer who covered the
Yankees for a long-defunct New York daily in the early part of his
career.
Born Scrippo Hazmaty in Budapest, Hungary, Tate moved with his family
to Vienna, the capital of the Hapsburg Empire, soon thereafter.
Scribbly arrived in the United States in 1920, under complex
circumstances. He soon quit school to begin work as a copyboy at the
New York Loyal Citizen, gravitated to sports
writing, and served as New York Yankees beat man for over twenty years,
until the time of the paper’s closing in the late 1940s. He
served in the U.S. armed forces during World War II. In addition to his
beat writing, Scribbly has ghost-written player autobiographies, and
written baseball fiction for boys, magazine articles, the popular
“Where the Hell Are They At?” series on old
ballplayers, and many, many bad checks.
He currently resides in New York City.
Why aren't
you on Baseball Tonight?
Nobody's asked. If someone did ask, I'd ask my best friends to convince
me to decline.
Ask Rob Neyer your own
question.
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