The shelves at Powell's are lined with memoirs written by people who spent some period of time, maybe a year, immersed in an unfamiliar subculture searching for fundamental truths. These books are usually based on some intriguing premise:
studying gender roles by dressing up like a man for a year, taking a minimum-wage job to examine
life at the bottom of the service economy, or maybe spending a few months
journeying by land through the five books of Moses.
My book, Fantasyland, is the latest addition to the genre. I have used some of the same narrative techniques as these other memoirists. But I can tell you, with complete conviction, that there's something about this book that makes it stand out from all the others: Its premise is easily the dumbest yet.
If you're worried about the reaction major publishing houses may have when they get a copy of your proposal or the first few chapters of your novel, this may help to ease your mind. A couple of years ago, one of them agreed to give me real money in order to write a nonfiction book about spending a year pretending to manage a baseball team that doesn't actually exist. In fact, there was an underbidder.
If you haven't had a moment to read Fantasyland, I'll try not to give away any of its secrets. The general topic is baseball, or more specifically, fantasy baseball ? a sort of parallel galaxy inhabited by millions of this game's most committed fans. Not one of these people is actually paid to run a major-league ballclub, but they still get together every season to participate in an elaborate game that allows them to feel as if they do.
In a nutshell, the dozen or so members of a fantasy or "Rotisserie" baseball league gather before the season to handpick their own team of fourteen (real) hitters and nine (real) pitchers who, in their opinion, will perform better during the actual baseball season than every other combination of fourteen hitters and nine pitchers chosen by the knuckleheads in their league.
Before I wrote the book I had never played this game, but I was impressed (and a little frightened) by the obsessive behavior some of its participants had demonstrated. Some of these people had called up executives of real baseball teams to complain about certain roster moves that had been detrimental to their imaginary ones. Some were surely capable of worse offenses, but had been jailed before having an opportunity to carry them out.
But the chief reason I decided to play was an attack of intellectual vanity. As a sports columnist for the Wall Street Journal, I figured I had an advantage in being able to decide which hitters and pitchers were going to play the best from year to year: I could walk into the locker room and ask them. And if that didn't work, I could pick up the phone and ask their bosses. If the only thing standing between me and winning the league was a bunch of accountants, truck drivers and computer salesmen who get their information from the Internet, I could win without breaking a sweat.
I was so confident, in fact, that I joined a league called Tout Wars, which is sort of like the national championship of Rotisserie baseball. The people who play in this competition are professional fantasy baseball pundits who write books and run Web sites and can do things with baseball statistics that are more sophisticated than anything most actual teams do. I looked at them as myopic laptop huggers who didn't have a clue as to what really goes on in baseball. They looked at me as another arrogant dope to mount over the fireplace.
Okay, here's the point in the blog entry where the author realizes that he's just spent eight paragraphs telling you things that you may already know about a book that you may have already read. Or in my case, spent eight paragraphs doing everything in his power to make sure that nobody else will bother. In any event, my goal here in the Powell's blogosphere is to lead you into the baseball season with some illuminating baseball talk. I'm not sure if there's enough of a groundswell of Rotisserie players among you that I could talk about the minor league park-adjusted power correlates for Ian Kinsler of the Texas Rangers, but I suppose I could. If any of you have questions about the precise sequence of bovine hormones, horse steroids and plasma shakes Barry Bonds used to take before spring training, I'm afraid you have the wrong book.
So to keep this simple, I'll try to limit my thoughts to two subjects I know something about: the upcoming baseball season and my experiences as a first-time author caught in the gear teeth of modern publishing. If it's possible that these two subjects ever converge, I'll do my best to make that happen. Next time, maybe I'll conduct an interview with pitcher Miguel Batista of the Arizona Diamondbacks, who's working on a detective novel.
Until then!