Book Tour Diary #5: Friends and Family Edition

The west coast leg of my book tour wasn’t really a book tour. Okay, I did four events, including a standing-room only stop at Book Soup in LA (and okay, they only had 12 seats out, but all those seats were full, so technically it was STANDING ROOM ONLY). The whole trip was more of an excuse to see friends and family. My old buddies Kim and Kyle brought their three kids (my godchildren) up from San Diego and had dinner with me in Los Angeles, where I also had lunch with my old work buddy Erica, and got drunk and sang karaoke with my friend Billy. In Napa, I spent two days with my high school buddy and one-time roommate Nick, his wife, and his two terrific boys. In Portland, I stayed with my sister Darcy, her husband Dayton, and my beautiful nieces. I also had lunch with Scott, who was my intern in 2008 on the Jeff Merkley campaign. In Seattle, I was surprised at my book signing by Maria, who was a volunteer on that campaign. You don’t know any of these people, but they exist, and they’re wonderful.

Amazingly, I also met a few readers of this very Substack. While I spoke with a customer at the Barnes & Noble in Seattle, a gentleman with a Mets hat lingered nearby. I had a hunch he was there to see me, and it turns out I was right. He’s a faithful reader of Good Eye, and we had a great chat about baseball movies and the Mets. At virtually every stop, a reader told me that they heard me on Effectively Wild, the greatest baseball podcast there ever was. I was fortunate enough to be a guest in May. You can listen to the episode here. 

I did see some baseball. After my final event in Seattle, I spent a day in Tacoma and went to see the Rainiers play. They’re the AAA affiliate for the Mariners, and despite being located less than an hour from the big league club, they have a dedicated fanbase who clearly views them as more than just a feeder for the Mariners. The stadium was charming as heck, with lots of exposed wood and a lovely view. I sat in front of five older guys, who all clearly knew each other, although it was hard to parse just how close they were. It seemed like some of them hadn’t seen each other in a while. They were asking those kinds of questions: Are you still married? Where are you living right now? How’s retirement treating you? They cracked jokes, none of which were very funny, but it didn’t matter. They just enjoyed being in each other’s company in a nice location on a pretty day. That’s what baseball is really about, if you ask me. The game was fun. The Rainiers lost 20-10, but nobody seemed to mind.

A few days earlier, I had convinced my friend Nick to take a trip from Napa down to Oakland to visit the Coliseum. I keep a running list of current MLB stadiums I’ve been to, and the Oakland Coliseum won’t be on it for long. All signs point to the A’s departing for Sacramento after the season, staying there for a few years, and then maybe going to Las Vegas or Nashville or who the hell knows. This debacle has been orchestrated by A’s owner John Fisher, who is not the dead-eyed sociopathic owner portrayed in Moneyball (that’s previous owner Steve Schott) but might as well be. The city of Oakland won’t give him the money he wants for a new stadium, so he’s leaving, devastating a city that has already lost the Raiders and the Warriors, and will now have no major sports team. It’s a travesty.

Nick and I paid just $60 for two tickets in the front row behind the home dugout. The A’s were playing the Royals, who I had just seen in their home stadium a week earlier. I wore my new Royals hat, but no one gave me any crap for it. Most of the fans there were already defeated. Nick and I picked a random player to root for. It was Zack Gelof, who was batting .191 when the game began and stuck out on three pitches in the second inning, but crushed a homer to center in the 7th. We took credit for it. He homered in his next two games, too. That was also our doing.

Any night spent watching baseball is a good night, but the Coliseum really challenged my belief that the old ballparks, even those that are not aesthetically pleasing, are better than the new ones with all the bells and whistles. This stadium has hosted some great teams, but you have to squint to see them now. The place was virtually empty, as most A’s fans are boycotting the season. Especially with no fans in it, it’s a strange stadium. You can see why Fisher, and probably many A’s fans, would like a new one. The food and drink options are anachronistic, although I did find a Beyond Burger in the concourse behind home plate. It’s not beautiful in the traditional sense. It’s a place that, when crowdless, seems hollow and spiritually vacant. It only makes sense when the team is good. Maybe that’s better, as it will motivate the front office to put a good team on the field. I can imagine what it felt like there when the A’s were in a pennant race and the Coliseum was filled to the brim with rabid fans who were there not for the light show or the fancy food or the music but just for the baseball. When the A’s were good, it might have been the best stadium in the league. Now it’s an empty grave, but on this night, I was grateful to fill it with some life. 

Still, this trip was mostly about the people. The real book tour, as they say, was the friends I made along the way. In Tacoma, I went out to a beach to watch the sunset. Just after the sun went down, a security cop pulled up and shouted to me and a few others that if we parked in the nearby parking lot, it was now closed, and we would need his help to open the gate. I bounded over to him and asked, “Could I get a ride?” Undaunted by my brazen request, he moved a few things off the passenger seat, and I hopped it. We talked for a few minutes. Turns out his name was Ed, and Ed is a huge Mariners fan and spends part of every March down in Arizona for spring training. I told him about my book, and he wrote it down in his notepad. We shook hands, and he let me out of the parking lot.

In Portland, I took an Uber from the bookstore to my sister’s house. The driver was a guy  named Sam Sachs who immediately clocked me for a fellow tribesman. When I told him my people came from Lithuania, he raised his arm to show me a giant Star of David tattoo with a Lithuanian flag in the middle of it. He had a heckuva story to tell about his adopted brother who was shipped off to another family when Sam was young. Sam spent years trying to track him down. He finally did, only to have the brother steal Sam’s girlfriend (at Sam’s adult bar mitzvah) and marry her. He’s going to write a book about it, and he wanted my advice, although I got the sense that he really just wanted to tell his story again. Really, isn’t that what most of us want?

I’m at the end of this particular story. I’ve got a few book events left this summer, and maybe a couple more in the fall. As the tour winds down, it’s the fortuitous encounters with strangers that will stick with me the most. Ed. Sam. The Uber driver in Houston who wants to write a children’s book. Jill from Seattle. The couple at the vegan restaurant in Downers Grove, Illinois who struck up a conversation and then invited me to join them for dinner. The girl I met at the book signing in Dallas who is the only girl on an all-boys Little League team. For a couple months there, these people were the hallmarks of my existence. And what brought us together? Only the greatest game man has ever devised.

Thank you, baseball.