Craig Fan Fiction? Sure, why not?

So last August a reader of mine started writing comments over at HardballTalk in which he humorously imagined me pondering the great baseball problems of the day thusly:

I have this image of Craig sitting in a high chair in a front of a fireplace, smoking a pipe (not really, the pipe is expelling bubbles) and the man is dressed in a Braves bathrobe thinking intently in front of Chess set with baseball players as figurines (Braves vs Nationals). Caption: “Why do thee always vex me so?”

Soon after that he expanded the idea into one in which I sit in my "lair," which is some mix between the Bat Cave and the headquarters of a Bond supervillain, smoking that bubble pipe and monitoring the entirety of the baseball world via a huge video monitor and, somehow, controlling things and people and stuff.  Oh, and I had a sidekick: my HBT Daily video host Tiffany, about whom I've written before.

Yes, a little strange, I'll grant you that.  Even stranger when he moved the operation out of my comments section and created an entire "Craig's Lair" blog out of it.  Complete with background facts and stuff. And  the"Craig Signal," pictured above.

I can't say that I fully understand the motivation behind it, but the author, Francisco Colemenares, is harmless enough and the posts haven't gotten creepy or anything (I'll admit that when Tiffany was introduced I worried that it would turn ... weird).  Indeed, they often operate as pretty good satire and kind, subtle mockery of the things I write about over at the blog. And they often make me laugh.

This isn't strange, is it? I sort of think it might be strange. But I guess it's OK too.

Old Business

It's an exaggeration to say that drafting legal documents is all copying and pasting, but not that much of one. At least if you sort of know what you're doing. Make sure you know what you're trying to accomplish, find a good form and pay attention to the local court rules and you're most of the way home.  After substituting "Craig Calcaterra" and "Petitioner" for "State of Ohio" and "Plaintiff," I was on my way to turning my last legal brief -- written in 2009 -- into my divorce petition.

I had been putting it off for a while. For logical reasons mostly. I wanted to have everything settled between us prior to filing rather than make the court have to weigh in, and those negotiations took a little time.

But there was part of me that was procrastinating due to the unpleasantness of the task.  To reducing 16 years of marriage to a pleading, two contracts and a handful of affidavits. Given my complicated relationship with the legal system, doing such a thing seemed like an even greater insult to the memory of my marriage than did its ignominious end.

But I got through it. To be honest, it was easier than I thought it would be. For as much as I disliked it when I was practicing, there is a certain calming ritual to legal writing. To formatting the page just so. To inserting just enough terms of art to make the document accomplish what it's supposed to accomplish without making it unintelligible and jargony. To going back and making sure that your editing didn't cause the numbered paragraphs to be non-sequential. To make sure your Exhibit A is, in fact, what you said it would be in the body of the document.  After a little while I was able to forget that I was drafting the documents that would put an end to my marriage and just think of it as a necessary task.

Married: July 1, 1995 at Beckley, West Virginia ... Residents of Franklin County, Ohio since May 20, 1998 ... two children were born of this marriage ... Petitioners are separated, and have been living apart since October 21, 2011 ... the residence shall remain in the possession of The Husband ... a Shared Parenting Agreement has been entered into ...

After a while the words become secondary to the form and it all washes over you.

When I was done I secured the necessary signatures -- mine, hers, the notary and the witnesses -- and made the necessary copies.  I was left with a neat stack of white paper, properly bound and ready for the clerk's stamp. I put them in my messenger bag and, for the first time in over two years, went to the courthouse.

In some ways it was more emotionally daunting to walk through those courthouse doors. I had a nice bit of catharsis upon my marriage ending and I'm moving on in healthy directions now.  I still feel like I have unfinished business with the law, however. Maybe because I left it instead of the other way around. Whatever the case, I found the few brief minutes I spent there Monday morning mildly unsettling.

As the clerk took the documents and stamped each one, I was waiting for her to give them back and to tell me that they weren't in proper order. To tell me that the local rule I had followed in preparing them had been amended recently and that I needed three more copies, two more signatures and a different kind of fastener because staples were no longer sufficient.  It dawned on me as I was waiting that the two biggest anxieties of my life -- my difficult legal career, complete with all of the little rules that always seemed to vex me, and the deterioration and ultimate failure of my marriage -- had joined forces. I stood there terrified that I'd have to redo the documents and prolong this unpleasant process.

But it all checked out OK.  The clerk handed me back my copies and gave me a slight smile and nod, which is probably as close to a "have a nice day" a person who processes divorce and child custody documents all day can muster.  I took the elevator back down to the lobby and walked out onto the sidewalk.  It was cold, but clear and the air felt clean. I took a deep breath and exhaled, feeling lighter than I had in a long while.

The final hearing is set for March 20. After that, there will be no reason to look backward instead of forward anymore.  And what has so far been a pleasant new morning can grow in to a bright new day, unimpeded by old business.

New Morning

One day last October I wrote something raw and personal. She read it. She sent me a message saying "hey, I know you're gonna be OK, but hit me up if you ever want to talk." So we talked.

I didn't know her that well. We had been vague Internet acquaintances for some time, but not close in any way. But I needed to talk to someone like her.  I had friends helping me deal with what I was going though. I needed those friends to help me recover from the past year and make sense of my new life. I still need them.

But I also needed a friendly voice and ear who wasn't immersed in all of that. Someone with whom I could talk about the present and the future, not the past.  Someone with whom I could, however temporarily, forget about all that was troubling me. Someone with whom I could be myself, whatever that had become.  She quickly became that person.  But as the small talk grew larger, it became clear that something else was going on.

The random coincidences piled up. We shared the same interests. The same humor. The same temperament. So much of the same past. We didn't, as the old cliche goes, complete each other's sentences. We spoke them as the other formed the very thought.  It was all light and casual and friendly on the surface, but I found myself talking to her all night and into the early morning. I found myself thinking about her more and more.

Then one night:

Am I allowed to wonder aloud what's going on here? Or does that ruin it?

I'm glad she said it before I did. It was so soon after my life spun out of control that I didn't know if I trusted myself or my feelings. I didn't know if I was misreading it all.  It turns out I wasn't. And her wondering aloud didn't ruin it. It ignited it.

We spent four days together in Dallas in December. I just got back from spending five days with her in San Antonio. Every time I go away someplace I get a feeling of relief when I come back home. Happy to be back in my own space and in my own bed. For the first time ever I've not felt that same relief upon returning home. Being with her was so comfortable. So natural. I felt at home.

I know all of the objections those who care about me will raise. I'm not ignoring them. I know all of the obstacles we face. I'm not denying them. All that matters to me is that she brought me happiness and joy at a time when I figured I'd never feel those things again and that those feelings have outlasted the initial euphoria that often accompanies something new.

And all I know is that last week, at 6:30 in the morning, I woke up and for a moment and I didn't know where I was. Then she stirred. She wrapped her arm around me and kissed me softly. And nothing ever felt so right.

Shyster: Epilogue

Here ends the little writing project. There were eleven installments before this. Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5 ,Part 6, Part 7 , Part 8, Part 9, Part 10 and Part 11.

I started writing this series for very personal reasons. A lot has happened in my life over the past couple of months. Some terrible. Some -- which I'll be getting to in future posts -- wonderful. I needed a project in which I could immerse myself. I needed to get down in writing what had been floating around my head for a few years. Other events in my life were going to eclipse it and I didn't want it to slip away.

But a funny thing happened as I gazed at my navel: a lot more people have been reading it than I ever thought would. And, apparently, a lot more people are going through the same career angst I went through over the past decade or so.  In the last month I've received several dozen emails from people offering me encouraging words. Thanking me for writing it. Congratulating me on finding my way out of darkness and into light.

Most common, however, are people asking me if I have any advice for them. But even now I can't quite say why it worked out the way it did. I can't, as I am so often asked to do, give anyone any pointers. While it unfolded in somewhat orderly fashion in these posts I wrote over the past month or so, it felt like anything but orderly as it was happening. All I can say is that a writer writes, as the old expression goes, and I made a point to keep writing.

The key, though, is that at a couple of times in that process I stumbled over some good luck.  Better writers than I never get a chance to make a living writing and it's not for lack of skill or lack of effort. It's just for lack of the good fortune I happened upon. Maybe it's silly, but I occasionally have something akin to survivor's guilt over the fact that I've been able to make this my career while those better writers did not or, as of yet, have not.

I also sometimes wonder if I have cost myself something for going so hard after what I wanted.

As I wrote a couple of months ago, my marriage is ending. I'm not going to suggest that my writing is the cause of that. Anyone who knows what actually happened with my marriage knows that's not the case.  But at the same time, every action has a reaction. People are creatures of habit and routine.  Who's to say that my refusal to be content with my professional life as a lawyer didn't upset the expectations of others? Who's to say that in doing what I did with my life, I didn't throw off my marriage's equilibrium, even if that equilibrium was ultimately unhealthy and unsustainable? Maybe my soon-to-be-ex-wife had settled on a world view in which I would go downtown and fight with other lawyers all day for the next 30 years, and my short-circuiting that was something she simply couldn't deal with anymore.  Maybe my search for meaning and fulfillment spurred a corresponding one on her part and it simply wasn't compatible with us staying together.  I have no idea. You have to ask her, I suppose.

The point of all of this is that, even though I laid all of this out as the straightforward narrative of a boy who made his childhood dream come true, nothing in life is so simple.  There are no definitive paths. There are no definitive beginnings. There are no definitive ends until the day we die. I'm doing this now. I wasn't doing it before. I may be doing something else later. As all of that happens, other things happen. People come into your life and then leave. Others come into your life after that and, hopefully, stay. Those dreams you had once no longer hold currency. New ones crop up. No clear narrative of anyone's life can be written until they're dead and gone.

But what I've written over these past couple of months captures a chunk of it. An important chunk of it and one that will always be with me. And no matter where else life takes me, I will be able to draw on these experiences. To look back and say:

You once dreamed something big and made it happen.  You once had big problems and overcame them.  You once took risks that seemed unreasonable, but survived them.  There is nothing you put your mind to that, with time, effort, perseverance and a little luck, you can't accomplish. And even if that luck doesn't come, you will be able to look yourself in the mirror with pride for having made the effort.

Thanks for hanging around for all of this. Now forward ho.

Shyster: Hardball

I've started a little writing project. This is the eleventh installment. Here's Part 1, Here's Part 2, Here's Part 3, Here's Part 4, Here's Part 5 , Here's Part 6, Here's Part 7 , Here's Part 8, Here's Part 9, and Here's Part 10.

My most optimistic plan for full-time writing had been to get something working by the fall of 2011. This was based just as much on the scarcity of opportunities -- there aren't a lot of full time baseball writing jobs out there -- as it was on the convenience of life.

Things like my legal career being stabilized enough to where, if I left it for something else, I could go back to it without having burned any bridges. Things like the kids finally being in school all day. Starting a part time writing job with NBC in April 2009 seemed like it would keep things squarely on that track.

In less than four months, however, I goosed it a little.

One night in late July, after a bit of bourbon, I wrote down all of the things I thought were working well with the NBC blog and all of the things I thought could be better. Then I slapped that into an email to multiple NBC people. At the end of it all I quite immodestly suggested that if I was working on the blog full time and wasn't distracted by my legal career, I could do more to make the good things happen.

I didn't hear anything for two days. I assumed during those two days that I had overstepped my bounds and pissed everyone off.  That's OK. Wouldn't have been the first time. Then I got this email from the guy in charge of everything:

From:
To:   Craig Calcaterra
Date:  Tue, Jul 28, 2009 at 7:48 PM
Subject: Re: Thoughts on CTB

They forwarded me the note you sent on Sunday.  I really agree with pretty much everything you said. What would it take to get you to do this full time? 

I want you to think about all that and see what it would take to make it work.

I tend not to notice the momentous moments in life as they're happening. I live them and carry on and only a little later do I realize that, hey, something pretty major happened back there. This was not one of those times.  My mind reeled. My heart raced. Adrenalin surged. I knew exactly what I had done. I knew exactly what the response meant. I knew that, at that moment, my life was about to change forever.

Everything I wanted to do at that moment -- respond immediately, scream from the tops of buildings -- crashed into everything I had learned about business and negotiation in the previous 14 years of my professional life. I almost had to handcuff myself to keep from writing back immediately and saying that they had me no matter what, pay me whatever they wanted.  I mean, how long had I been doing this for free? One cent more than whatever would keep me out of poverty was OK, right?

I calmed down.  After an appropriate time I responded and acted like a reasonable person, soberly weighing the risks of leaving my legal career against the rewards of living my dream.  It took a bit of time to get everything hammered out because that's just how that kind of stuff works, but we came to terms.  I worked my last day as a lawyer on November 27, 2009. When I left the building that day I didn't look back. Not even once.

On the morning of November 30 I woke up at 5:30 AM. I drank some coffee. I fed the children breakfast. I took a shower, shaved and got dressed.  I walked to the den and sat down in the same chair I'm sitting in as I type this, and I began to do the same thing I had been doing every morning for nearly three years: I read the baseball headlines. Then I wrote what I thought of them all.

But for the first time, it was my job to do so. For the first time since I was a teenager, I was doing exactly what I wanted to do with my life.  I was living the life I dreamed about over 20 years before.

And I'm still living it.


Head's up: there's gonna be an epilogue

Shyster: Circling the Bases

I've started a little writing project. This is the tenth installment. Here's Part 1, Here's Part 2, Here's Part 3, Here's Part 4, Here's Part 5 , Here's Part 6, Here's Part 7 , Here's Part 8 and Here's Part 9.

After a month of unemployment I interviewed with the Ohio Attorney General's office. The people there knew me from my law firm work, much of which brought my clients -- many of them unsavory -- into conflict with various state agencies.

My interviewers asked a lot of questions designed to determine if I was what, during those cases, I pretended to be, or if I was something else. Most of them seemed satisfied that circumstances and not character caused me to take unreasonable positions in contentious litigation. In this they gave me more benefit of the doubt than I had been willing to give myself.

One other topic came up in interviews: the baseball writing, which I had included as an item on my resume.  How serious was I, they asked? How much of a time commitment was it?  I wouldn't be doing it on company time which, at this job, would be taxpayer time, would I?  I downplayed the seriousness and commitment. Having never considered the idea that blogging from a state office computer would represent a misuse of public resources -- which is a misdemeanor in Ohio -- I paused and then said, no, I wouldn't be doing that. They offered me the job.

I began working in the AG's office in mid February. By late March, something strange was beginning to happen: I was beginning to like the law a little bit. Released from the billable hour and the need to manage insane clients, I actually started to warm back up to it. My colleagues and I sat around and discussed competing legal theories just like I imagined I would always be doing back when I was in law school but never really did in private practice. No one ever talked about the amount of attorney time being devoted to the case. Everyone wanted to win it and to win with their honor intact, but when the day was done, they went home to their families. Everyone was well-adjusted and had lives. It was almost enough to make a guy forget that he was making half of what he made back at the law firm.

I was still blogging, although my habits had changed. I made a point to write even more from home in the morning than I used to. Paranoid of breaking work rules and, by extension, laws, I never used a state computer or Internet connection to blog at the office. I brought my personal laptop and a mobile broadband card with me to work each day and would write a few posts during lunch. And, well, occasionally when I was supposed to be doing something else, but only when something fairly major was going on. It was a balance I could have maintained indefinitely if I had to.  But the balance was about to be thrown off.

In late March I got an email from Aaron Gleeman, who worked for the Rotoworld website which was owned by NBC. I had met Aaron once before and knew him in that way you know people on the Internet, but I didn't know him particularly well. NBC was launching a new baseball blog, he said. It was called Circling the Bases and would be part of a relaunch of NBCSports.com. Aaron and Matthew Pouliot of Rotoworld would be writing it, but they felt they needed a third person involved to round out the coverage. In Aaron's words:

It's funny, when we first started talking about the need/want to have a third person involved, the NBC folks told Matthew Pouliot and I to both come up with a short list once we got off the conference call with them. We hung up the phone and immediately IM'd each other with your name. It was like a moment from the world's most boring, least romantic comedy or something. Some of the higher-ups weren't familiar with you, but after reading your blog and doing some Googling several of them basically came back and said, "I think this Craig guy would be a good fit."

I began contributing a handful of posts each morning to the tune of a couple hundred bucks a week. Basically, taking what I would have written for ShysterBall anyway and putting it on the NBC site. It didn't alter my legal workflow any. It did, however, start to prey on my mind. I wasn't making a living, but I was writing professionally. For a major media company who was invested in smart, sharp baseball blogging. Everything I had ever wanted to do -- the dream I had as a kid but buried for years and which I thought would be the end of me when it resurfaced -- was within my grasp.

The only question was whether I could balance the legal career with the baseball writing long enough to where I could make the latter pay off before the former crashed to the ground.

Again.

Shyster: Reckoning

I've started a little writing project. This is the ninth installment. Here's Part 1, Here's Part 2, Here's Part 3, Here's Part 4, Here's Part 5 , Here's Part 6, Here's Part 7 and Here's Part 8.

On October 20, 2008 I was called to the managing partner's office. The conversation was quick.

Everyone likes you, Craig. You do good work when you're motivated, but you're not motivated. A law firm can afford to keep a nice guy like you around when things are going well, but things aren't going well. The firm needs to cut people. You're not going to make partner here, so you're one of the ones getting cut.You can have until the end of the year. We'll give a good recommendation to any potential employer. Your job between now and then is to hand off your cases and to find another job.

I knew on some level it was coming, so I didn't have much of a reaction. I think I even thanked my boss when he was done. I didn't feel much of anything for the rest of the day except maybe a small bit of relief if you can believe it. I had been worried for some time that I wasn't going to be able to reconcile my personal and professional lives. Now that had been taken care of for me. What lay ahead was harrowing, but I've always been better at dealing with adversity than anticipating it.

I left the office and got a drink. Then I drove up to the Ohio State campus, walked around for an hour or two and tried to remember how I perceived the world 17 years earlier when I first walked around the place. Nothing came of it so I went home.

After the kids were asleep I told my wife. I lied and told her that I was blindsided. I lied again and told her I knew that everything was going to be OK. How could I have any idea of that? The economy was in full collapse. People were being laid off by the thousands. Maybe I ruined us.

A sensible person would have taken that as a major wake up call. Would have realized that his pipe dream of being a writer derailed his legal career. Would have gladly traded any glimmer of hope that he could make a living doing what he loved for a steady paycheck doing what was necessary.  I've always been a sensible person, but in this case I made an exception.

In early November I was asked to move Shysterball to The Hardball Times website and did so at the end of the month.  I updated my resume and included the blogging on it alongside my other work experience. Maybe it would scare potential employers off, but I'd be damned if I was going to hide that part of my life any longer. I may have killed my legal career, but I wasn't going to kill the chance at having a writing career. Whoever took me next was going to take me for what I was, not something I pretended to be. Because we are what we pretend to be.

I didn't have a job yet when December 31st hit and began 2009 unemployed. I wrote my blog from home and hung out with the kids. When I was able to put the fear of being broke and maybe homeless out of my mind, I thought about how great it would be to do this all the time.

Shyster: ShysterBall

I've started a little writing project. This is the eighth installment. Here's Part 1, Here's Part 2, Here's Part 3, Here's Part 4, Here's Part 5 , Here's Part 6 and Here's Part 7.

It's the spring of 2007. I wake up at 5:30 AM. I never used to do this. I am not a morning person. But I am training myself to be one.  I just started drinking coffee at the age of 33.  I need it now. The baby wakes up by 6:30. Never any later. Sometimes earlier. It's my job to go to him when he wakes up, and it is a personal goal to have written three blog posts by the time he starts to stir.

I scan the baseball headlines. The games don't interest me as much as the stories around the games do.  The scandals. The human drama. The things that have enough of a connection to baseball to fit in what is nominally a baseball blog, but which have enough meat on their bones to where I can come up with an angle that justifies the exercise. There are hundreds of real baseball writers. I can't do what they do, because no one would care. But I can maybe do something that is different enough to where anyone who chooses to read my stuff will not have wasted their time.

There aren't many readers. Twenty. Then fifty one day. If I break 100 I am ecstatic, but I am happy with whoever shows up. Hmm. Half of today's readers were obviously looking for something else and quickly left. That's OK. Eventually more will show up.  Eventually they do.

They start coming in real numbers when Rob Neyer takes an interest. Does he remember that he liked what I had written for Bull five years earlier? Probably not. It wasn't very memorable. But I write something about racial politics in baseball that ESPN might not let him get away with, and he links it approvingly.  In an ESPN chat one day he says I'm his favorite baseball blogger. The traffic really starts pouring in then. I learn quickly to say what others can't or won't say for whatever reason. After all, I'm using a pseudonym -- Shyster -- so none of this can really hurt me. I want nothing more than to justify those readers' decision to give me their time. To keep them coming back.

By the summer I'm writing as many as six posts before the baby wakes up. Some are superficial. Some are deep. I'm learning, however, that the more you write, the more people want. It's not always about the unique takes, it's often about just being there and reliably updating so that readers always have something new. It's like working overnights back at the radio station: people just want a friendly voice sometimes. If you can make them laugh, all the better. If you can make them think occasionally you're way ahead of the game.

Soon those six posts before the baby wakes up turn into six before the baby wakes up and four at work before the day gets too busy. I'm still getting all my work done, though.  Surely this isn't going to turn into a distraction like Bull did. I'm smarter about things now. Writing shorter takes. And unlike then, I have a family now. Real responsibilities at work. I'm on the partnership track. I'm not going to blow all of that over writing, am I?

For the past four years I had gone out for drinks with coworkers several nights a week. I do it less now. I claim that it's because of family obligations, but it's usually because I have things I want to write. A book I want to read. I'm drifting away from my coworkers because of this. The esprit de corps of the gang is suffering because of it. I regret this a little because I like these people, but I can't do anything about it. Drinking and sharing legal war stories with my coworkers is important for a lot of reasons, but writing makes me happy. It's been a while since I've been happy.

It's September 2007. The head of the litigation department calls me in to his office. There is no real purpose for the conversation -- he says he just wants to talk -- but soon he begins talking about entropy. About how, if you don't add energy to a given system, it declines and degenerates. A legal career is that way, he says. How if you don't constantly work at it, everything eventually crumbles.  I know what he is telling me. I don't listen to him at all.

It's November 2007. I'm told that I'm not making partner this year. They just want to see one more year of solid production out of me. Which is what they said last year. They don't know that I'm writing a baseball blog every day. But they're not idiots either. They know my head is not in the game. They're giving me a chance. I know as soon as they give it to me that I'm not going to take it.  In the previous seven months I've found something I enjoy more. I have no pretensions that it could ever be a career. I just know that, unlike everything else in my life, it brings me joy.

It's early 2008.  I've dropped the pseudonym and blog under my own name. I'm not sure why. I won't get fired simply for having a blog, but I realize that I'm pushing it.

In June the Columbus Dispatch does a small story about me in a sidebar to an article about sabermetrics. They send a photographer to my office to take my picture. I'm sitting at my desk, legal books behind me, the glow of the laptop in front of me as I toss a baseball into the air.  Some partners in the firm thought it was great. No one said it was bad. Many, however, were silent. Silence among lawyers is unusual and ominous.

Later in the summer American Lawyer does a piece about me on their blog. "Lawyers with hobbies" or something like that. I realize that I've made a big mistake. I told the interviewer the truth about how much time the blog consumes. Anyone can read between the lines to see my priorities are out of whack.  I hear whispers that the firm brass is not pleased.

I know I should care. I know I should worry. I don't.  I'm getting several thousand page views a day now. I'm not making a dime, but for the first time I start to get a sense that I could make a career out of writing.  The only question is whether I can make that happen before I make a mess out of my career.

Shyster: One more try

I've started a little writing project. This is the seventh installment. Here's Part 1, Here's Part 2, Here's Part 3, Here's Part 4, Here's Part 5 and Here's Part 6.

In hindsight I would have crashed and burned at the document review law firm no matter what had happened, but at the time it seemed pretty clear that Bull had done me in.

It was March 2003 and I was called into the managing partner’s office.  He never mentioned the baseball writing – and I’m rather doubtful that he even knew about it – but he told me that I was obviously distracted and no longer productive. He said he wasn't firing me as such, but it was clear that I had no future there. They’d give me a more than reasonable amount of time to find something and they’d tell anyone who asked that I was leaving on my own accord.  It was all very polite.

And really, given the good job market at the time, it wasn’t all that stressful.  I knew that with my experience – not so much to where a potential employer needed to decide if I was partnership material immediately but not so little that I’d need to be trained – I could find another job fairly easily. And within two weeks I did.  At a firm across the street.

The interview was a breeze.  Three years earlier while working at the fixer firm I had represented the hiring partner and his wife, handling some ugliness with a home contractor. It was a favor to my old boss who was the hiring partner’s golf buddy.  While that was going on the hiring partner -- the man who was considering whether or not to give me a job -- had been arrested for soliciting a prostitute in a grocery store parking lot at 9AM on a Tuesday morning and the wife had cried on my shoulder about it.  That I hadn’t blabbed about that all over town probably sealed the deal for me.  The hiring partner knew he could trust me.  And unlike the last place, the hiring partner worked for a firm where fixers were still highly valued. I got the job.

I took a month off before I started work there and took a cross-country road trip. While on that trip I found out that my wife was pregnant with our daughter. That obviously changed the game for me. It changed the trip too from one of aimlessness to one of self-discovery. By the time I got back I thought I had found some contentment and new resolve to make my legal career work.  And I worked at it for a while. A pretty good while, actually.

Motivated by fatherhood and the knowledge that this was my last shot to make something of myself as a lawyer, I worked hard. I shut down my baseball column at Bull. I worked long hours and worked difficult cases. I mentored law students and young lawyers and did my best to be reliable if not indispensable to the partners and the clients. I billed a ton of hours and settled in for what I thought would be a decade or two of keeping my head down and defining what middle age would look like.

But something happened as I delved back into the fixer work. Rather than experience a voyeuristic thrill from the foibles and scandals of my often noteworthy clients and their often newsworthy cases, I began to feel something else. Dread. Loathing. For my cases, my clients and eventually for myself. Maybe it was just because I was older or maybe fatherhood had changed me, but I couldn't just sit back and laugh and mock like I had before. Bad people were doing bad things, quite often my job was to either defend or facilitate that, and I started to develop a pretty major problem with it.

Not that this led to some principled stand. I never made one. Instead, I internalized my discontent and dealt with it in other, less-than-healthy ways.  There are a million stories about this period in my life that I may tell one day -- maybe here -- but the upshot is that I began drinking more and began going out with coworkers too much, many of whom felt much the same way I did about our jobs and our place in the world. I'd unconsciously slow down work on cases I hated and overcompensate on cases I found acceptable. Which, however noble I wanted to pretend it was, was me not doing what I was paid to do.

All of this came to a head at the end of 2006. I had spent most of that year and the year before helping defend an embezzlement and public corruption case which was fairly big news here in Ohio.  I threw myself into it with abandon. I got close -- maybe too close -- to my client.  I lived it and breathed it.  At the end of it all I wasn't sure who was right and who was wrong and whether my client deserved all that time in jail he got even though, in all honesty, the evidence required that he go there.  Despite all of that I still think to this very day that the people who led the mobs after my client were every bit as misguided and potentially corrupt as my client was himself.  Though I myself never crossed any lines, I still feel like I suffered a complete loss of ethical and moral gravity as a result of the experience.

My client went to jail in November. Despite this outcome I received considerable praise from my firm about how hard I worked (i.e. how many hours I billed) and how dedicated I was (i.e. how many hours I billed).  I was told that if I had one more good year I'd make partner.  Despite this, I was basically numb through the end of March.

One Saturday in April of 2007 I decided that I needed something positive in my life. I needed to get back that feeling that I had five years previously when, on occasion, I wrote about baseball and, on occasion, someone said that they liked it and that it was good.  I sat down at my computer and opened up a Blogspot blog about legal issues that I had erratically maintained. It was called Shyster.

I deleted the legal posts, changed its name to Shysterball and put up a post about baseball. A few days later I put up another.  I thought it would great if a handful of people read it.  Anything else would be gravy.

Shyster: Bull

I've started a little writing project. This is the sixth installment. Here's Part 1, Here's Part 2, Here's Part 3, Here's Part 4 and Here's Part 5.

Late in 2001 my friend shot me a column a notable national sports writer had put together.  The point: Barry Bonds was about to break Mark McGwire’s single season home run record and the writer was not at all pleased with it. The Roger Maris card was played. A lot of nostalgia and "back in my day" was thrown on top and it ended up being something of a half-baked column. My friend ended the email with “good point, huh?”

I disagreed with the notion.  While I drifted fairly far from baseball through the 1990s, in the previous three years I had become reacquainted and actually once again obsessed with the game via my exposure to Bill James, ESPN’s Rob Neyer and the sabermetric world.  While no analyst myself, I shot back a sabermetrically-informed and profanity-laced tirade to my friend in which I outlined all of the reasons why the writer was wrong.  I went on about how you can compare the olden days to modern times and put the accomplishments of each in context. About how you could separate the wheat from the chaff and, dear lord, you could not simply say things were better when you were a boy, because brother, they were demonstrably not.

My friend forwarded my rant to a friend of his who was launching a webzine, called "Bull Magazine." That guy asked me if I could clean up that rant for publication.  I did so.  And then I wrote some more.  By the spring of 2002 I had a weekly column up that started to gain a bit of notice.

I don’t know what kind of traffic the place did, but my little bits began to get linked by some of the websites I frequented while trying to kill time between document review jags.  Places like Baseball Think Factory (then known as Baseball Primer) chief among them.  The twin highlights of my run at “Bull” were receiving emails from Neyer and from Keith Law, who had just been plucked from Baseball Prospectus to help run the Toronto Blue Jays.  They seemed to like my stuff.  It made my year.  And it almost – almost – caused me to come to terms with the fact that I was finally, after all of these years, doing something that I wanted to be doing, even if it was then only a hobby.

But before I could do that, reality intruded.