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Barry Svrluga Author Of The Grind
What’s it like to live through the longest season in sports, the 162-game Major League Baseball schedule? Washington Post staff writer Barry Svrluga’s THE GRIND, now out in paperback, captures the frustration, impermanence, and glory felt by the players, the staff, and their families from the start of spring training to the final game of the year – and into the offseason, when the preparations start again. So much about baseball is known: the distance between the bases (90 feet), the batting average of a good hitter (.300), the velocity of a hard fastball (95 mph). THE GRIND shows us what we don’t know. No sport is as unrelenting as Major League Baseball; enduring the 162 games squeezed into 185 days (plus spring training and postseason) is shared, in different ways, by every facet of a franchise.
Join Barry Svrluga on Thursday, April 14th, as he zooms in on the 2014 Washington Nationals: not just the star players, but also on the typically invisible supporting cast who each have their own sacrifices to make and schedules to keep, including:
• The Wife, who acts as a full-time mom, part-time real estate agent, occasional father, and all-hours dog walker
• The 26th Man, a minor leaguer on the cusp of job security who gets called up to the majors only to be sent back down the very next week
• The Reliever, one of the most mentally taxing, precarious, and terribly exposed positions on any pro squad
• Many more players, scouts, equipment managers, and even travel schedulers that create the fabric of Svrluga’s intimate and unusual book.
Barry Svrluga offers an unforgettably raw, inside look at the wear and tear, the glory and impermanence, of America’s pastime.
About the Author
Barry Svrluga has worked at the Washington Post since 2003 and is currently the national baseball writer. He previously reported on and blogged about the Washington Nationals and is the author of National Pastime, which details the franchise's relocation from Montreal and its first season in the nation's capital. He lives in Washington, D.C., with his wife and daughter.
Join Barry Svrluga on Thursday, April 14th, as he zooms in on the 2014 Washington Nationals: not just the star players, but also on the typically invisible supporting cast who each have their own sacrifices to make and schedules to keep, including:
• The Wife, who acts as a full-time mom, part-time real estate agent, occasional father, and all-hours dog walker
• The 26th Man, a minor leaguer on the cusp of job security who gets called up to the majors only to be sent back down the very next week
• The Reliever, one of the most mentally taxing, precarious, and terribly exposed positions on any pro squad
• Many more players, scouts, equipment managers, and even travel schedulers that create the fabric of Svrluga’s intimate and unusual book.
Barry Svrluga offers an unforgettably raw, inside look at the wear and tear, the glory and impermanence, of America’s pastime.
About the Author
Barry Svrluga has worked at the Washington Post since 2003 and is currently the national baseball writer. He previously reported on and blogged about the Washington Nationals and is the author of National Pastime, which details the franchise's relocation from Montreal and its first season in the nation's capital. He lives in Washington, D.C., with his wife and daughter.
- Duration:
- 10m
- Broadcast on:
- 18 Apr 2016
- Audio Format:
- other
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Service fees and terms apply. Hey, it's Arrow and iHeartRadio. So what's it like to live the longest season in sports? 162 major league baseball games. What do those players go through? More importantly, what do their personal lives endure? The ups, the downs, the strikeouts, the home runs. Things that sports fans don't know about are unveiled in this new book called The Grind. We are unplugged and totally uncut with Barry Schfurluga. Baseball has always taken the hit for being the longest played game. And yet, you have lived it. It's not that long is it? I mean, the game itself on a nightly basis? No, no, it can move. It can move really quickly, actually. So it's pretty fun. It's such a game that that pulls in every generation. And with Charlotte, with the way that they've now moved our stadium uptown, I am so fascinated with the rediscovery of that game in our town. Yeah, I mean, I think what you find when you're looking at a baseball season, which is so different from any other sport, is that every dayness of it and how that really impacts not only your life as a fan, if you're really invested, you're not wondering whether there's a game tonight. You're actually surprised when there is no game, when there is a day off, because it's such a rhythm of playing every single day. But that kind of every dayness defines the existence of everybody in the sport, not just the players, but the support staff, the scouts, the general manager, the fact that there's no place to hide from the schedule that you have. If you fail one night, you've got a game coming up the next day. That's just as important. It really kind of shapes your entire existence. I think that's one of the things that Michael Jordan pointed out in his little date with with Meyer League Baseball in his book, Rebound, it was that everyday relationship, not only with the game, but with the fans. Yeah, I think that's an important thing to point out, and I think it's, you know, Jordan would certainly understand having gone through both of them now, what the differences are between the NBA and Major League Baseball or Minor League Baseball. If you have a bad shooting night in the NBA, more often than not, you're going to have an off day or a practice day where you can try to straighten things out. If you go for four and with three strikeouts and leave the tying run on third on a Wednesday night, there's no place for you to turn and adjust the next day. You're not taking a breather. You've got to go out and try to alter that performance in competition with all those eyes on you. Again, it's a much different thing. And your book goes really into detail about not just the ball player. The grind also introduces us to the wife. Yeah, and I thought that was an interesting and important aspect to get into because, you know, everybody is affected at work by their family situation at home. Are their kids happy? Is their spouse getting along? Okay. And that's no different for ball players. I think people think that millions of dollars in a lot of cases make problems go away. And, of course, that's a huge part. Their reward at the Major League level is enormous. And that's not to be trifled with. But there's also realities of wives and moms in baseball trying to raise their kids, their families in the most normal way they can, even though their circumstance is very, very strange. They often don't live in the cities in which their husbands play. They stay in their off-season home until school is out. Their husband, even if they do move up for the summer, it's a way half the time. And so you become kind of a single parent a lot of the time. And then you're just trying to give your kids as much time with the dad, even though the dad is working from, you know, leaving for the ballpark at 12.30 or 1 in the afternoon and not getting home until midnight. So it was an interesting, I thought, chapter that illuminates what a player's life is like for their family that has nothing to do with, you know, whether they went two for four or over four. Yeah, because it's so authentic your book is. And that just drew me closer to those paragraphs to find out how you were going to design what baseball has wrapped itself into. Even though it's a part of our thread, we don't know about them and what they deal with on a daily basis. Yeah, and that's why I think it was, you know, this is not a book about how to turn a double player, how to hit a breaking ball. It's really everything that goes into the hours spent outside that seven to 10 p.m. window every night that we can kind of casually flip on the game and pick it up midway through. There's so much preparation, so much pressure in a game that is really defined by failure. You know, everybody kind of knows the old saying of, you know, if you fail seven out of 10 times in baseball as a hitter, you're you're a pretty darn good hitter. No other professional sport is structured that way. No other kind of regular everyday blue collar or white collar profession is structured that way. So dealing with failure, dealing with the fact that you're probably going to fail back to back days, three days in a row. How do you put that behind and then turn it around and become successful again? That's a big part of determining who's a good baseball player as, you know, who has the best arm or the fastest bat. The coolest thing about the sport is is that they don't mind that I get to the baseball park early so I can see them strike the field. I don't know if it's the kid that's in me, but I still love the way they create that field. Yeah, there's a real, you know, romance to the sport still. And again, I wouldn't want to take the joy out of the game at all because I think everybody is in it or around it for exactly that. It's kind of rediscover the kid in yourself, but I also think it's important and players at some level want people to understand what they go through to do what they do, what they go through to perform and that, you know, it is difficult to endure all that failure that's inherent in any season. We're sitting here in mid-April and excited that the season is here. It can look long when you're standing on in mid-April and don't see an end until sometime in October. That can be a little bit daunting. A lot of fun mixed in, but a lot of arduous times, too. You know, you talk about the season and stuff like that. So as as the NBA is winding down, of course, I'm already getting shocked about what's going on with the baseball and stuff because it just opens up a brand new season of summer fun. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I kind of describe it as like a summer long reality series where, again, you kind of plopped up on the couch and watch it for three hours and think, you know, and flip it off at the end and you're either frustrated by a win. I mean, by a loss or are happy about a win, but the people involved in it are, you know, might be, if it's the end of a series, they're packing up very quickly and efficiently and going on a flight and maybe flying out west and not getting in until four in the morning and then having a game the next day, but and being expected to perform regardless of what the travel situation was, that really, it puts a pressure on players that I think they don't think fans understand very well. Have you ever wanted to sit back and just see if you could reinvent baseball? Because I've always thought that the guy that's at the plate hitting the ball should have a choice of either running to first or third. I have never thought that. I think they put the game took a long time to kind of perfect. They're tweaking it. I don't think one of the tweaks is going to be to run the opposite way. Don't you agree, though, that the grind is like the third level baseball card that it's not about just looking at the back of that card. Now, now I have a better understanding of the game and the player. Yeah, that's the hope. I mean, it really is, you know, I want people to be able to take away a much better understanding of not only what a player goes through, but really how an entire organization runs and how different the roles within that organization are even among the players. A veteran everyday player has a much different way to handle things than a starting pitcher does and a much different way to handle than a relief pitcher does. The general manager's job is so much different than the manager's. All those things, I hope, are outlined in this book. Breaking news, and this one is almost unbelievable. Yeah, it's all about new customers at Bet365, because they get $150 in bonus bets when they bet $5, and even better bonus bets can be used on the spread, totals, and player props. There you have it, bet $5 to get $150 in bonus bets, and see why it's never ordinary at Bet365. The gambling problem? Call a text 1-800-GAMBLER, 21+ only. Must be physically located in Colorado. Tems and conditions apply.
What’s it like to live through the longest season in sports, the 162-game Major League Baseball schedule? Washington Post staff writer Barry Svrluga’s THE GRIND, now out in paperback, captures the frustration, impermanence, and glory felt by the players, the staff, and their families from the start of spring training to the final game of the year – and into the offseason, when the preparations start again. So much about baseball is known: the distance between the bases (90 feet), the batting average of a good hitter (.300), the velocity of a hard fastball (95 mph). THE GRIND shows us what we don’t know. No sport is as unrelenting as Major League Baseball; enduring the 162 games squeezed into 185 days (plus spring training and postseason) is shared, in different ways, by every facet of a franchise.
Join Barry Svrluga on Thursday, April 14th, as he zooms in on the 2014 Washington Nationals: not just the star players, but also on the typically invisible supporting cast who each have their own sacrifices to make and schedules to keep, including:
• The Wife, who acts as a full-time mom, part-time real estate agent, occasional father, and all-hours dog walker
• The 26th Man, a minor leaguer on the cusp of job security who gets called up to the majors only to be sent back down the very next week
• The Reliever, one of the most mentally taxing, precarious, and terribly exposed positions on any pro squad
• Many more players, scouts, equipment managers, and even travel schedulers that create the fabric of Svrluga’s intimate and unusual book.
Barry Svrluga offers an unforgettably raw, inside look at the wear and tear, the glory and impermanence, of America’s pastime.
About the Author
Barry Svrluga has worked at the Washington Post since 2003 and is currently the national baseball writer. He previously reported on and blogged about the Washington Nationals and is the author of National Pastime, which details the franchise's relocation from Montreal and its first season in the nation's capital. He lives in Washington, D.C., with his wife and daughter.
Join Barry Svrluga on Thursday, April 14th, as he zooms in on the 2014 Washington Nationals: not just the star players, but also on the typically invisible supporting cast who each have their own sacrifices to make and schedules to keep, including:
• The Wife, who acts as a full-time mom, part-time real estate agent, occasional father, and all-hours dog walker
• The 26th Man, a minor leaguer on the cusp of job security who gets called up to the majors only to be sent back down the very next week
• The Reliever, one of the most mentally taxing, precarious, and terribly exposed positions on any pro squad
• Many more players, scouts, equipment managers, and even travel schedulers that create the fabric of Svrluga’s intimate and unusual book.
Barry Svrluga offers an unforgettably raw, inside look at the wear and tear, the glory and impermanence, of America’s pastime.
About the Author
Barry Svrluga has worked at the Washington Post since 2003 and is currently the national baseball writer. He previously reported on and blogged about the Washington Nationals and is the author of National Pastime, which details the franchise's relocation from Montreal and its first season in the nation's capital. He lives in Washington, D.C., with his wife and daughter.