A journalist needs something to write about: Richard Ben Cramer, Alex Rodriguez and the book that did not get written

 A journalist needs something to write about -- a subject worthy of the time and effort it takes to gather the information and put it into a suitable form.

Seems pretty obvious.

Sometimes, of course, stories just don't pan out. If you're working in daily journalism, a story like that is no big deal. It might mean a few hours lost and a few phone calls that go nowhere.

But, what if you've committed several months of your life and your big-time book publisher has advanced major bucks for your manuscript?

That's the story that is told several years ago in an excellent article in  Sports Illustrated, The Puzzle That Couldn't Be Solved by S.L. Price. (At this point, it takes a subscription to see it, so there's no link.) The subject is  Richard Ben Cramer, a journalist of distinctive style and stunning success (What It Takes: The Way to the White House; Joe DiMaggio: The Hero's Life; What Do You Think of Ted Williams Now: A Remembrance; Being Poppy: A Portrait of George Herbert Walker Bush, among others).

Cramer died in January 2013 of complications from lung cancer. He was 62 years old.

In 2006 Cramer sold both his publisher and his subject on a book about Alex Rodriguez, the star of the New York Yankees who was later banned for a year by Major League Baseball for taking banned substances. The book had the title, The Importance of Being Alex: A Life with the Yankees. He had a $550,000 advance from the Hachette Book Group. Rodriguez had agreed to cooperate fully. In fact, he welcomed Cramer into his entourage.

During the next year and a half, Cramer was all in with A-Rod and his crowd, spending hours and days traveling with him, talking with him, figuring out the relationships he had. It was a time when A-Rod was fulfilling most of the expectations that baseball fans had for him -- the expectation, in particular, of being one of the greatest baseball players ever.

But at some point, in Cramer's head, A-Rod began to evaporate.

He had hoped to give A-Rod "his size" as the apotheosis of postmodern stardom, but the deeper he dug the more he found, says one close friend, "nothing there. A completely vacuous person and a completely vacuous life." (quoted material from the Sports Illustrated article)

By 2010, after A-Rod admitted using performance enhancing drugs, not only was Cramer unable to find his larger-than-life story, but his subject had become loathsome.

It's a sad tale for all concerned. 

Cramer's story is not unique. 

Historian Edmund Morris encountered the same problem when he signed on to write the authorized biography of Ronald Reagan in 1985. At that time Morris had gained a good reputation of a biographer with his work on Theodore Roosevelt, and he had been courted by the Reaganites for some time. He was given special access to the White House and Reagan and his family. All were fully cooperative.

Reagan left office in 1989 and went into retirement. Morris continued to work with almost unlimited access to files in the Reagan Library.

The result of his efforts, finally, was Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan.

Morris included all the standard biographical material, but he also created a fictional version of himself and placed it in the book. He resorted to this "literary device" because no one, including Reagan himself, understood the man. He had no close friends. He was not in the least curious about himself. And no one that Morris talked to "could ever figure him out." That would include Morris himself.

In reviewing the book, the New York Times referred to Reagan as "the hollow man."

Morris, who lacked Cramer's journalistic integrity, fell into fiction to try to explain a subject he couldn't locate. Here's what the Times review said:

Most journalists, historians and nonfiction writers will find this unacceptable. The fictional characters are not clearly identified as such; often they are unnecessary and distracting, particularly an obnoxious made-up son of the author who becomes a radical in the 1960's. Yet a reader who surrenders to Morris's self-indulgent blend of scholarship and imagination will be led through a riveting story to a transcendent conclusion with a surprise twist. If there is a ''higher truth'' justifying the book's technique, it is that Ronald Reagan lived in a world of his own fictions, far more extensive than the fictions of Edmund Morris. Who better suited to plumb a phantom subject than a phantom narrator? (quoted material from the New York Times review)

So, the lesson for journalists here is a cautionary one. Despite receiving the accolades of the world (in these instances baseball and politics), a subject might not be worth your time and talent.

Bouton's 'Ball Four': a book that afflicted the rich and comfortable of the baseball world

 When someone writes a book that thoroughly offends and discomfits people who are well off, in positions of influence, rich, and comfortable, it should merit our attention.

That was the case when Jim Bouton, briefly a star pitcher for the New York Yankees, wrote his tell-all memoir Ball Four that centered on stories from inside the locker room of the then most successful team in Major League Baseball.

When it was published in 1970, “Ball Four,” which reported on the selfishness, dopiness, childishness and meanspiritedness of young men often lionized for playing a boy’s game very well, was viewed by many readers, either approvingly or not, as a scandalous betrayal of the so-called sanctity of the clubhouse. Source: Jim Bouton, Author of Tell-All Baseball Memoir ‘Ball Four,’ Dies at 80 - The New York Times

Bouton was thoroughly excoriated by the likes of Bowie Kuhn, commissioner of Major League Baseball, and Dick Young, baseball columnist for the New York Daily News and dean of baseball writers at the time. Young wrote:

People like this, embittered people, sit down in their time of deepest rejection and write. They write, oh hell, everybody stinks, everybody but me, and it makes them feel much better.

Not everyone was offended.

Some astute reviewers recognized the ardor and the poignant tension in Bouton’s tale; in The New Yorker, for instance, Roger Angell described “Ball Four” as “a rare view of a highly complex public profession seen from the innermost inside, along with an even more rewarding inside view of an ironic and courageous mind. And, very likely, the funniest book of the year.”

Bouton took Dick Young's criticism and turn it, somewhat, to his advantage. After the book was published, Bouton saw Young at spring training and decided to approach him in a gentlemanly fashion. They shook hands, and Young said, "Well, I'm glad you didn't take it personally." Bouton took that line and used it as the title of his next book, I'm Glad You Didn't Take It Personally, which chronicled the reactions to Ball Four.

Ball Four has since risen to the level of a classic tale, named as one of the 100 best sports books of all time by Sports Illustrated in 2002 and the only sports book in the New York Public Library's centennial exhibition in 1995.

Bouton died at the age of 80 in 2019. In addition to his authorship, Bouton lived an interesting and varied life that is chronicled in his New York Times obituary (Jim Bouton, Author of Tell-All Baseball Memoir ‘Ball Four,’ Dies at 80 - The New York Times).