Shyster: How Did I Get Here?

I spent eleven years defending crooked politicians and embezzlers.  Amoral and sometimes immoral corporations.  The idle rich and – worst of all – the spoiled children of the idle rich.  My unhappiness with my clients was only exceeded by just how unpleasant it was to do battle with the lawyers on the other side of the table.  And as all of that played out my anxieties about making partner and providing for a growing family were ever-present.

I needed an outlet of some kind, and the closest one was at the bar around the corner from the office where I would spent late afternoons and early evenings with my similarly disaffected colleagues, engaged in a reality-obfuscating revelry.  I was drinking a lot, probably too much, and there is no question that it was the highlight of my day for a few years.

In the office I was miserable.  A procrastinator by nature, I’d tend to put off work until the deadlines started to loom.  During the down time I’d ask myself how I got here.

In late 2006 I was 33-years-old.  I had been practicing law since I was 25, having taken no breaks between college and law school.  I had a two-year-old daughter, a one-year-old son, a wife who had quit her job to raise them, a mortgage and all of the other trappings of the early 21st Century burgher lifestyle.  At no time, however, had I consciously planned any of it.

Things just sort of happened while I wasn’t paying attention.  Law school?  Seems like the thing to do.  Marriage?  Well, it is about time.  Babies?  How nice!  A house in the suburbs?  Seems sensible.  A BMW?  Allow me my one indulgence.  All of it was pleasant enough.  None of it was the result of a plan, let alone a dream.

But I had a dream once. Years before. What had happened to it? Where did it go?

Shyster -- Introduction

I’m often asked how I got a job writing about baseball for a living.  How I managed to turn a legal career and life in an office tower to blogging in my pajamas.  The people who ask me that do so in the same way that they might ask a magician how he guessed the card they picked.  As if there were some simple trick to it all that, were I so moved, I’d be willing to divulge.

I don’t have an answer for them.  There was a lot of luck involved. Some of that luck was the residue of design.  It wasn’t good design.  Indeed, looking back I’m struck by how reckless I was to make many of the decisions I made while crossing over from the real working world to however you’d describe the world in which I’m more or less paid to argue with people on the Internet all day.

I write a daily recap of the previous night’s events in baseball called “And That Happened.”  It doesn’t seek to explain all that much.  It merely sets forth what occurred and tries its best to place those events into some kind of understandable context.  That’s the best I can do with my career path as well.

I'm going to spend some time over the coming weeks writing down a bit about how I got where I am in life. A lot of it about my legal career and a lot of it about how I came to be a writer. Someone may find it interesting. But even if they don't, I feel the need to do it for myself. As the last few entries suggest, my life sort of blew up recently.  I'm dealing with that pretty well all things considered, but I have been worried that all of this chaos will push all which came before out of my brain for good as I begin a new chapter -- hell, a new volume -- of my life.  As a result, I kind of want to get that old stuff down before it slides out forever. For posterity, if nothing else. A demarcation between my old life and my new one.

Maybe this will work. Maybe it won't. We'll see.

Surprisingly, people don't suck

Extremes aren't my thing.  Stay the course. Steady as she goes. Peaceful equanimity. That's the stuff of my day-to-day, year-to-year existence.  Let the other people have the drama. Humm-baby was Roger Craig's motto. Works for me too.

Life has conspired with chaos to make such a philosophy inoperative lately. That's OK. It happens. I'm fortunate that is hasn't happened to me more than it has before now. We all get a turn on on this roller coaster. Buy the ticket, take the ride.  It's merely been my turn.

But a funny thing happened on the way to oblivion.  At the exact moment when I figured that the abyss and I would stare at each other for a while and agree to sink into one another, a bunch of people decided that they wouldn't tolerate me doing that. Indeed, my long-held belief that people are, at best, self-interested and more often than not fairly awful has been seriously tested by several great people who have been fantastic to me lately.

Fantastic in different ways.

Some of them have taken it upon themselves to nurse me back to mental health, as though I were a patient in a mental ICU ward.  I appreciate them so much for they obviously care so much. And while the reality is that my emotional paralysis only lasted a few moments and I don't really need that kind of attention anymore, it has been heartening to see how much they care.  Those people understand my past and appreciate the gravity of recent events in ways that no one else could.

In contrast, there have been some people who have made it their mission to make me understand that my future is bright and that I need to be thrust into it now. Yesterday! Move on, lad, because that's where your promise lies!  I am thankful for them too. Because, even if I'm not quite ready for that, I appreciate their optimism and I know on some level that I'll be there soon.  Those folks represent everything I want to be and know I will be some day.

But at the moment, the present seems most important to me. In the midst of all of this drama, humm-baby normalcy has been really hard to come by. And I've pounced on any chance I've had to get some of it.

My kids provide it in spades and I thank the cosmos for them. There's nothing that keeps a person from disappearing into their own navel or their own ego like a couple of rugrats who only want you in the here and now. I worry about them so much these days, but they are actually my center of gravity and have been a greater source of strength to me than I've been to them. I won't tell them that now because it's no good to lay that kind of weight on them, but one day they'll understand just how important they've been for me.

But it hasn't been just them.  There are a couple of people, and they know who they are, who have helped to make me feel human lately.  People with whom I can just chat and bullshit and let the world wash over me the way I used to let it wash over me.  Who don't see me as damaged goods or as some repository of hope and future bliss. They've been indispensable because they have made it clear that's it's OK to not have any answers or plans. That right now -- for whatever it is -- is important and valuable too.

To them and everyone, I want to say thank you. And to say that, despite the fact that you've forced me to have to consider a new personal philosophy that doesn't involve human beings being total scum -- and understanding that new personal philosophies require a lot of work --  I'm grateful for you being in and around my life.

We have no idea where we're going in this life. We rarely know how to get there.  All that we can really hope for is some good companionship along the way. And I got it, baby. I got it.

What we pretend to be

There were times in my legal career when I insisted that I played a role whenever I went into court. It didn't happen all of the time, but there were times when I'd yell, rant, rave and bring any other unpleasant tactic or rhetoric to bear as long as it advanced my cause.

I believed it was fake. That I was doing those things in a calculated manner in order to bring about my desired outcome. But I came to realize that it didn't matter what I thought I was doing. To the people in that courtroom, I wasn't acting like an ass. I was an ass. My intentions were irrelevant. It was what I did that defined me.

It's no accident that I lost my enthusiasm for the law around the time of this realization.  I could no longer pretend that as long as I could come up with a justification for what I was doing that what I did was justifiable. Because it simply wasn't true.

There is not a "real" you or me underneath it all. We are what we do. We are how we treat others. It's OK to fail, because people fail. It's OK to fall short of our objectives because that happens too. And sometimes we simply don't have any choice at all and are forced to engage in the least odious of several odious options.

But it's not OK to create fictions about who and what we are or to hide behind our amorphously described better intentions when we willingly do wrong. There is no such thing as doing the wrong thing for the right reasons. It's just the wrong thing.

As the man once said: we are what we pretend to be so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.

Say what you mean. Behave how you'd like to be treated. Understand that you are not your only audience and rarely your most important one.  It seems so simple. Yet so many people seem to have such a hard time with it.

Some other beginning's end

We were just kids. Then in less than five years we went from kids to grownups to making a home and then into our careers. We traveled, we dined and we danced. We created a space that was ours and ours alone. We created our own language that no one else could understand. Elaborate secrets, rules and inside jokes requiring just a nod or a wink to the other for meaning to be clear.  Most people didn't get us. And we were fine with that. We loved each other and nothing else mattered.

We had kids. Some people didn't think we ever would, but one day we just decided to. And we did. And then we had another one. They're perfect.  We weathered the stress and storms that come with raising babies into children. And with getting older. And with careers maturing, changing and everything else.

One thing that is certain in life: it never gets easy. Just when you get through a challenge another one pops up and it never ends until your race is run. If you try to look forward to a time when there will be no challenges or adversity and you can just relax you're going to be in for a rude awakening because that's not how it works.  The best you can do is set up a process to deal with the unexpected. You create fortifications that you hope will withstand an attack and a battle plan that you hope will win the day. And you hope to God that you never have to use them.

I thought we had a pretty good one. She apparently didn't. Or didn't believe in it. When the attack came -- a stealthy one that wasn't immediately apparent -- she broke formation. It was only a matter of time before the day was lost. After nearly 21 years together and 16 years of marriage, it's all over.

The details aren't anyone else's business and they're too painful to dwell on anyway. Someday I'll have some perspective and hopefully a little wisdom about it all, but right now I can't approach it rationally.  The most I can say is that I was blindsided and that I'm hurt and that the dust is still settling.

I am lucky to have close friends and family and they have been indispensable for me in this time. I mentioned before about how life never stops throwing stuff at you. But at the same time, it's an amazing and wonderful thing that, at the exact moment you think things are about to become dark and hopeless, you're reminded that -- if you've set things up properly -- you always have reinforcements. I guess I set things up properly, because I have had no shortage of support from those close to me.

But most important is that my battle plan was adaptable, even if I didn't realize it before now. And my objective is crystal clear. My children will never want for love or happiness and even though this will inevitably change their lives, I'm going to do everything in my power to make sure it is just change and nothing more. A new reality that, while not what was expected, will not harm them. And thankfully enough of the old battle plan is still readable and communication is sufficient that she and I agree on this. And as far as I can tell, her plan, for whatever the hell else it might entail, will also be centered around making life wonderful for the kids.

For me personally: it will take some time to recover, but I have no plans to pack it in. That stuff about "crisis" and "opportunity" being the same word in Chinese is apocryphal, but the sentiment is a valid one. You can pause to consult the map and you can change your course as circumstances dictate, but you can never stop moving. You can't break. Ever.

I have a great job that brings me joy. I have a fabulous family and good friends. I'm also smart, witty and -- if I may say so -- I'm a goddamn handsome man.  Things are hard at the moment and there will be many more ups, downs, false resolutions and false starts, but I look forward to forging my future.

And I know it's a bright one.

Don't break. Ever.

There are probably six people who read this half-dead blog from time to time who don't also read my baseball writing. I'd like to direct you six to something I wrote today about a man named Mac Thomason. Here's the full version. Here's the shorter version.

Most baseball fans start out as obsessive kids and then lose the game in their late teens and twenties, only to return to the game later. If they return. For those of us who do, something brings us back to the game. Someone gives us tickets. Or we get bored and start watching again. Or we have kids who get interested. Something kicks in.

There's a decent chance I wouldn't have gotten back into baseball as a twentysomething if I hadn't stumbled across Mac's Braves Journal blog in the late 90s. Actually, I probably shouldn't call it a blog given that it's been around since way before that term had been coined. Either way, Mac's work has been very important to me for many years. It rekindled the spark I had lost for a little bit. It got me thinking and talking about baseball again on a daily basis, and we all know where that eventually led.

Mac's been dealt a tough break. He's been battling cancer and it appears to have taken the upper hand. But as Mac said today it’s not hopeless. And as I said today, even if it was hopeless, I’m not going to give up hope. Why?

Because sometimes all we can do to keep our sanity in this world is to hold on to irrational hope. If not because it will make the situation better, then because it really, really pisses off the fates and dark spirits that seek to hurt us so. They want us broken. Don’t break. Ever.

I don't do religion. I don't believe that hope and hope alone is capable of overcoming the limitations of and the forces unleashed by the material world.

But I do believe in fighting tooth and nail for that which is important. And in never giving up, no matter the odds. And I also believe that when hope no longer makes sense, that we set the engines for ramming speed and take out as many of the enemy forces as we can. To make their victory as costly as is humanly possible.

Don't break, Mac. Ever. Let none of us ever break.

Interstate 71

I know this road better than any road I've ever driven. I've been up and down it countless times. Up for court. For a meeting. For a firm retreat. For a ballgame.  The first time I ever drove it was to take some eighth-rate speed metal band up to a gig in 1991. I was the only one in the dorm with a car and they paid for my gas and cover charge so they could make the trip from Columbus back to Cleveland and make a couple hundred bucks. Interstate 71. About 135 miles. I could drive it with my eyes closed.

It's been three years since I've driven it with trepidation, but I still can't feel at ease on this road.  Back then I was on my way to a meeting in which I was told in no uncertain terms that I didn't have much of a future with my law firm. Before that I was on my way to a hearing in which the judge, my opposing counsel and my client all seemed to conspire against me.  Before that it was for training. For recruiting. For an interview. I've driven this road with stress far more often than without.  I tense up at Lodi. I sweat at Linndale. I get a feeling of resignation by the time I hit Ontario Street. I suppose it will always be this way.

I'm driving it today for a good reason. A baseball game. Invited to the Indians' social suite to take in one of the last games of the year. Jim Thome tribute night. I'm honored by the invitation. Surprised that anyone knows or cares who I am, let alone thinks enough about me to offer me a ticket to a baseball game. I park the car and enter the ballpark an hour before the game starts.  I get a message from a reader who knows I'm here. He wants to meet me. I make my way to where he is. We talk for a few minutes. He's a lawyer too. We talk about old cases and people we have in common.  I like to be reminded of my old life. It helps me remember how fortunate I am to have my new one. I value them both for different reasons. I don't think I'll ever be able to completely leave the old one behind.

Baseball has always been an escape. When I was a kid and we moved so often baseball was always a source of gravity for me. No matter where I was or what new school I had to become accustomed to, I knew where the ballgames were and they brought me comfort and constancy and predictability.  When I lost my way in my professional life baseball was there for me again. It was the only source of hope I had for many years and it eventually led me out of the darkness and into happiness. Sometimes I think I was outrageously lucky that my little blogging hobby didn't ruin my life and that it was sheer dumb luck that I turned it into a career. Other times I am convinced that baseball knew that I needed it and saw to it that I would be taken care of.

Baseball is my job now, but it is still an escape.  Life has grown complicated lately. For a number of reasons, happiness has been hard to come by for the past few months. I wonder what I'd do if, instead of baseball, I had to deal with some contract dispute or the defense of some spoiled son of a CEO during working hours.  I'm pretty sure I'd simply fall apart. Instead I have baseball to greet me in the morning and to keep me company. It and the other people who write about it and the readers and everything else. It has saved me. It saves me every day.

There are around 2,500 baseball games played every year, but there is only so much that can happen in a baseball game. This one soon unfolds like any other game. The repetition is a comfort. Knowing that a ball hit here will end up there. That this pitch leads to that pitch and then on to another. This is mainlined zen, putting my mind and heart at ease. Each pitch, each putout helps me order my universe and helps me put my problems at a safe distance.

The game ends in spectacular fashion. There are two heroes. Thome, the man who's night it is and Santana, the man who was a kid when Thome's career began. I'm glad I'm not on the clock tonight, forced to write about the game. I've had increasing trouble writing about the specifics of any one game recently. The existence of 15 games a night and those 2,500 a year have meant way more to me. Baseball as a phenomenon, as a constant, has mattered to me in ways that actual baseball games have not. Any one game is but a drop in the ocean.  I need to do something about this because it's making it harder to do my job, but I put that off and for tonight feel happy that there was a game in front of me, regardless of what happened. That there were 12 or 13 other played in other cities, regardless of what happened there too.

On the way back to my hotel room I stop in a bar and order a drink. A blues trio is playing. As I get lost in the whiskey and the music I try to think about where I am and how I got here. About the things that have preyed on my mind lately. There are problems in my life that need attending to. I don't know when or how I'll do that. This evening I can't really care.

Tomorrow I'll get back on that road. As I turn off Ontario Street, onto the freeway and past Linndale and Lodi, I'll again get five-year-old pangs of stress. Phantom pains from a distant life and time. It will always be that way.  That will subside eventually, and I'll start to think about the here and now. The things that truly are problems.  But at least I'll have another slate of 15 ballgames to consider. To serve as a stabilizing influence on my psyche. Not because of what they are -- indeed, I'll probably watch none of them and will only think of a couple -- but because I know they are there.

Today's hate mail

I get a bit of hate mail from time to time. Not a lot. And even when I do get it, most of it is couched in at least a core of a legitimate complaint. And I usually take it in pretty good cheer.

This one that just came in didn't really have a core of a legitimate complaint. I mean, there are many factual assertions in there -- I do mix it up with readers, my comments section does occasionally get chippy, I have, from time to time, had little pissy battles with various other sports writers and I was, very briefly, considered for a job at ESPN -- but this one is just odd.

The things the guy complains of are, if legitimate, old, old news that, if they really bothered him, would have caused him to abandon the site a year or two ago. The reference to NBC's baseball content pre-me is also weird because there wasn't any. Really. It was just AP wire stuff.

But you know what? I still kind of love it.  For reasons I can't explain, this little bit of bile made me kind of happy. Oh well.
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The baseball portion of the NBC sports online operation is, and has been, going in the wrong direction for a long time.  The day your Mr. Calcaterra came in full-time, in my opinion, it began its slide.

In a matter of months, the entire tone of this website changed from one of joy to one of contempt, disgust and insults. Mr. Calcaterra, who at one time wrote humorously, apparently now prides himself on finding the lowest common denominator to not only write about, but to solicit as readers. And he has done an admirable job.

Read the comments sections now, vis a vis days past. These days, the comments are - in many cases - from apparent paranoids intent on insulting each other. And in large part, your Mr. Calcaterra is responsible for this. Go back and read any criticism of Mr. Calcaterra. Any minor comment, no matter how insignificant, brings about a vicious attack from your Mr. Calcaterra.

It is obvious that he brings this on himself. One day he describes himself as a "highly-paid, high-powered attorney", the next day he's off driving his Honda and regaling readers with tales of his hapless plight as a non-partner associate at some Columbus, Ohio law firm. But don't
criticize him. That's not his style. His style is to launch a hate campaign against one of Sports Illustrated's baseball reporters, for some unspecified reason. I doubt if John Heyman cares, but to readers who originally followed your website to enjoy baseball - it brings up some very dark questions.

I realize Mr. Calcaterra was not considered for the ESPN job, but to take it out on other reporters for no reason is non-sensical.  I do not enjoy reading your website any more.  I do not enjoy reading comments from your - now - pack of ranting paranoids.

In fact, I am out. If you should persuade Mr. Calcaterra to return to his strength - writing humor - you might be able to right the ship, but at this late date, I am afraid that NBC Sports has done themselves in.

Just for once, let me look on you with my own eyes

This is what happens when you reveal yourself to be a nerd to a video producer who knows how to use Photoshop:

Probably the highlight of my blogging career thus far, however.

The whole video in which this appears -- only for a second though -- is here.

PETA and the 1000 buckets of pig poop

I told this story over at HardballTalk today, but it's the kind of thing I usually put here, so why not put it here where it won't get buried?

The last stop in my legal career was at the Ohio Attorney General's Office.  One of my jobs there was to defend lawsuits brought against the state arising out of stuff that went down on the Statehouse grounds.  Some of it was slip-and-fall cases, but the vast majority of the work involved helping the people who managed the Statehouse property approve (or not approve) petitions for people who wanted to march or protest.

Normally it was easy: they'd call, asking if they can keep some group off the capitol steps and I'd say "Nope, sorry. Gotta let 'em march."  The First Amendment is so troublesome that way.  But heck, several years earlier the KKK got to rally there, and if you can't keep them out, you can't keep anyone out. Besides, the guy who ran that operation was a cranky old guy who didn't like anyone protesting, so it was a lot of fun to tell him just how little say over the matter he had.

But then, in the summer of 2009, came PETA.  Who, though I disagree with their stance on the tastiness of animals, their suitability for my barbecue and the comfort of their skin when put on my comfortable Eames lounge chair, I do respect in an odd fashion.  They've got moxy and chutzpah and, though they're occasionally (frequently) insane, they usually seem to have a good sense of humor about themselves. Which is essential when you're wrong so often. Live and let live, I say (note: this motto may not apply to cattle, pigs, chickens and other things that I may want for dinner this evening).

That summer PETA wanted to stage a massive protest on the Statehouse lawn in which they would (a) place approximately 1000 buckets full of pig poop in neat rows; (b) place giant industrial-sized fans all around them in order to blow the stink all over downtown Columbus; (c) bring in giant amplifiers with which to project the sounds of pigs being slaughtered to a mutliple-block radius; and (d) erect giant video screens on which the horrors of factory farming would be displayed.

You won't be surprised to learn that the guy who ran the Statehouse called me, somewhat upset over all of this.  And while I normally would just say "First Amendment, forget it" and go back to my clandestine baseball blogging, I felt that I needed to dig into this one a bit more.  So I did. And I learned that PETA had just recently tried to do the same protest in Washington and maybe in a few other states besides Ohio, but were denied everywhere else.  Indeed, it was my assumption -- based on the fact that they hadn't yet started suing everyone over it -- that the protest was never really going to happen and that they just wanted the headlines that the state's rejection of the application would provide.  Smart!

The whole thing fascinated me, really, so I decided that rather than simply send a letter saying no, I'd try to find a legitimate yet innocuous basis for denying their application, putting the ball back in their court rather than letting them use my state as an example of intolerance and authoritarianism for their next press release.

After an afternoon of research with a summer law clerk -- who herself happened to be a vegan and former PETA member and who had quit the organization because this kind of nonsense bugged the heck out of her -- we found some obscure 19th century law that dealt with the storing of offal within the city limits.  We didn't think that offal and pig poop were the same thing, but we figured it would be fun to make the PETA lawyers research that one and explain it in their letter objecting to our decision or in the lawsuit if it came to that.  If they want to fight over the true nature of poop, by God, I'd fight that fight.

We sent the letter denying their right to rally on the Statehouse lawn.  I spent another four months at the AG's office before coming to NBC full time. Never heard back from them, so even if it was just a phantom protest/publicity stunt, I'm still claiming that I'm 1-0 all-time vs. PETA.

Gosh, remembering that has me in a really good mood now. I think this evening I'm going to eat a really bloody steak in celebration.