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Interview Q: Your first novel, North of Montana, opens at Dodger stadium. Your new novel, Be the One, is set almost entirely in a a baseball milieu. What is it with you and baseball? A: Isn’t it funny how the subconscious works? In North of Montana, FBI Agent Ana Grey is on the way to opening day at Dodger Stadium when she becomes involved in a bank robbery in progress. Why was she going to the ball game? Because I wanted to show the comradeship of her squad, that they’d have the gumption to play hookey – but also it established Ana’s character in the first paragraph of the book. Here’s a female who loves and understands baseball. That’s fairly unusual. It makes her someone interesting and spirited. Someone you want to know more about. From this little thread, I go and write a whole book. I guess because professional baseball represents for me an intriguing world of its own, part carnival, something a lot of people invest a lot of time watching just a few people do. The people who do it are special. It’s even special to be just close to doing it. Imagine an outsider, a woman like my main character, Cassidy Sanderson, who breaks through the barriers to become the only female scout in the major leagues. Now that’s a special person you want to know more about. Why baseball? Many have written more eloquently than I about the mysterious symmetry and fluidity of the game, but that attracts me, also: The nature of it. All the sights, sounds and textures associated with it. The slow tense build to each play. The intricate strategies and nuance of performance. The unbelievable satisfaction of a well-hit ball or beautiful catch. I just like it. I like to play it. I like to coach my daughter’s softball team. I liked the feeling of being close to my father and brother when we’d go to the park and shag flies (Spaldeen balls, this was the Bronx), and I was fascinated by my brother’s baseball card collection -- the complicated flips and trades with the neighborhood boys, that also was a world of its own. I sensed from him something exciting was happening there, and I wanted to be part of it, too. Q: How did you come up with the title Be The One? A: I was at a UCLA Bruins softball game at Easton Stadium. Co-Head Coach Sue Enquist was coaching first base, keeping the energy high by calling encouragement to the girl at the plate. I remember sitting in the stands and hearing Sue clap her hands and shout to the batter, "Be the one, Kathy, be the one!" and it was as if some transcendent message were being delivered to my ears only. When you are writing a novel you become totally immersed in the world of the story so that outside events can seem supernaturally relevant; this was one of those moments. "Be the one" immediately reverberated for me on many levels. In terms of baseball it means you now have the opportunity to be the player who can get a hit, get on base and change the outcome of the game. For my protagonist, Cassidy Sanderson, "be the one" defines her life dilemma – carrying the mantle of responsibility, both for her own disrupted family and for women trying to break through in sports. It can also be read as a wishful expression of love, as Cassidy’s lover, Joe Galinis, wishes her to save him from himself. For those in every field who strive to break down barriers, or identify with people who do, Be The One is more than a title, it’s an anthem, cheering us on to be our best. Q: The story’s protagonist is a female scout in a male-dominated world. Is this based on anyone? How many female scouts are there in major league baseball? A: To my knowledge, there are no female scouts in the major leagues. I invented Cassidy Sanderson from the ground up. In doing so I had to fashion a life history that would realistically prepare a woman to succeed in the world of male baseball scouts. After spending time with the Player Development Department of the Dodger organization, it became clear such a proposed human being would have to have unusual qualities. She would need a background in baseball. She would have grown up with strong male influences. She would have been a standout athlete. She would be physically impressive. She would have to be smart, tough and driven. Although Cassidy is not based on anyone specific, I did pay special attention during my research to the women in sports I met who were comfortable and successful in that world, such as female sports writers, coaches and players. I was interested in their personal styles as well as backstories. Interestingly, many contained exactly the elements I had already outlined for my character. Q: What does it take to be a good baseball scout? What are some of the attributes scouts look for in players? A: There are good scouts and bad scouts. The bad ones are called "pack scouts" who are too lazy or afraid to assert their opinions, who make their reports based on group consensus. They’re the ones who sit back in the stands and copy everybody else’s numbers on a kid or hang in the bars making sure their recommendations are based on a sure bet. Basically, they phone it in. A good scout is a secure individual who goes the extra mile. A good scout ideally loves kids and takes a parental interest in his or her prospects, becoming a caring advisor. All scouts need to have had a lifetime of experience in the game -- it has to be in the bones – but the better ones have an uncanny instinct for projecting a player into the future. To make a good guess about how his body and emotions will develop. To be able to read the family dynamic and ascertain their level of support. Families are important in the development of a young player. One scout told me he checks the tires on the family car to find out if they are understating their economic level. Needless to say, I slipped that baby directly into the book. Good scouts also can play the office politics necessary for advancing their boys. They are competitive, aggressive, thorough and fair. And have the physical endurance for the tiresome drives and long hours of the job. In answer to your second question, players are evaluated according to tools and signability. Tools refers to the basics mechanics of the game – hitting, running, arm strength, fielding, instinct and aggression. Injuries are noted as well as the "intangibles" – attitude, moral fiber, heart. Pitchers are rated on fast balls, curve balls, movement on the ball, control, change-up, strike outs, arm action, poise, instinct, aggression and gun readings. Catchers are rated on release time. Signability is based on parental expectations and competition from other teams. All these categories are assigned number ratings by the scout. In the case of two prospects with competitive numbers, it’s a good scout’s gut instinct that will influence the scouting director’s choice. Q: How were you able to research the intricacies of the sport, which are detailed throughout the novel? A: I was extremely lucky to have broad access to the Dodger organization for the five years it took to research and write the book. I spent so much time interviewing scouts, secretaries, players, players’ wives, announcers, locker room attendants, et al that I was ultimately accepted as a member of the Dodger family, which I found very touching. I visited their training camps in the Dominican Republic and Vero Beach, Florida and hung out at the stadium for winter ball. I was invited into a top secret western regional meeting on the June draft, which became a major scene in the book. Everyone treated me with the openness and respect I believe they extend to most serious writers. Q: Many players, especially Latin-born players, are being drafted and signed at younger and younger ages. The Dodgers were recently involved in a scandal for signing a 16 year-old. Did you have any exposure to this kind of activity during your research? A: You’re referring to Adrian Beltre, third baseman for the Dodgers. He was signed at 15, not 16, which is the minimum legal age in the Dominican Republic. The consequences were severe. The Dodgers were fined by Major League Baseball and their Dominican training camp was shut down and several of their prominent Latin American personnel banned from baseball for a year. The irony is that I made up a similar scenario for one of my main characters, long before the real life scandal broke. I had not personally encountered this kind of thing in my research, but I needed a scam and an embarrassment for my plot, and signing underage players seemed to fit the bill. Q: Baseball has a checkered history when it comes to women reporters. As a novelist reasearching the sport, did you meet with any resistance? A: I got yelled at by a famous Latin American scout who was incensed that I didn’t know who he was. Otherwise, everyone was patient and maintained a respectful distance. I was accorded all the access the male journalists had, including the locker room where I was able to get up close and personal with Raul Mondesi, which was inspiring. Q: Why are some professional sports inhospitable to women? Are men threatened? A: For most of this century we have been living with a post-Victorian notion of how women should participate in sports, which is, very carefully. There is a cultural predisposition to protect females from rough behavior, and females in turn must behave like "ladies," which is to say, like delicate objects removed from the real stuff of life. Therefore we had PE classes in which how sharply you ironed the creases in your gymsuit counted for a significant part of your grade. I think it was the running craze of the seventies that brought millions of women to consciousness about fitness, and around that time ‘women’s liberation’ succeeded in gaining equal access to the male locker room for female reporters, as well as equality in sports activities for girls. Boys and men, meanwhile, played sports with the same entitlement as ever. Simply because they’d always played the game, they believed they owned the game. Of course men are threatened on the field. It’s their field. (Although women have played baseball since the turn of the century, in barnstorming Bloomer Girl teams, and from 1943-1954 in the All-American Girls Baseball League, which had about six hundred players.) Women are perceived as interlopers, trying to take something from men – their ownership and power. Men have had a variety of defenses against this threat such as intimidation and ridicule. You hear this most poignantly from women who were outstanding athletes as girls but had nowhere to play – excluded by the boys with no other organized support until Little League was integrated in 1974. The media has helped. Televised triumphs of champions such as Martina Navratilova and Jackie Joyner-Kersee inspired a new generation to demand more options for girls. Over the past decade the women’s sports industry has exploded with magazines, tours, competitions, clothing and leagues of their own. Men are probably a lot more comfortable with this parallel universe. They can deign women’s athletic accomplishments or applaud them with awe: the point is, who cares? Women have learned to take the field for themselves. Q: Are any of the characters in Be The One based on people you met while doing this research? A: Since I was working with real people in a real organization I had to scramble them up pretty well so all the characters are composites, but there’s a lot of Ralph Avila in the character of Cassidy’s godfather, Pedro Pedrillo. Ralph is the director of Campo Las Palmas, the Dodger’s training facility in the Dominican, and a former Cuban pitcher; a warm and generous baseball man, tough as they come, who loves "his kids" with traditional macho pride. You run across a guy like Ralph and don’t immediately import him into your manuscript, cash in your computer. Q: What makes Be The One a thriller? A: Well, the three main characters are threatened with death by unknown and unseen forces, for one thing. By the end of the first chapter we know our young Dominican ball player, Alberto Cruz, has received a series of blackmail notes demanding money for something he did – but what? Alberto doesn’t even know. Or does he? Is he hiding a hideous crime in order to stay in this country and play baseball? Then it turns out another person has been receiving identical threats: a Los Angeles developer named Joe Galinis who spent a few hours in the Dominican with Alberto and the scout who signed him, Cassidy Sanderson. Back in LA Joe and Cassidy become lovers. And then Cassidy is brutally attacked. What ties these three – scout, player, and power broker -- together? Meanwhile, a dangerous psychopath has followed them from the Dominican to Vero Beach and now, Los Angeles. Be the One is a classic triangle of deception and greed in which boundaries become blurred until you can’t rely on your most basic perceptions. As the violence gets closer to home and the stakes rise, it becomes clear one of the three is lying and our heroine finds herself caught between the man she loves and the boy she believes in. Sounds like a thriller to me. Q: What will real-life baseball people think when they read this book? A: They’ll think, "How did she do it?"
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