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As part of our continuing 2024 CASEY Award finalists series, New York Times bestselling author Keith O’Brien, author of the widely acclaimed Charlie Hustle: The Rise and Fall of Pete Rose, and the Last Glory Days of Baseball, joins the show. Enjoy!
Here are some highlights –
9:32-11:24: “From a process standpoint, what the records really helped me to do was create timestamps on a timeline. When you’re writing a narrative, and that’s what I’m looking to do any time I do a book, I want to write a narrative, a real story with a beginning and an end and a climax, all of that. … So when you’re doing that, timeline is really important to you. And I already had one timeline that was locked solid; I’ve got the baseball season. … Now, with those federal case files, I have a whole raft of different timestamps, so that while Pete Rose is in Los Angeles and the Reds are on a four-game win streak and he’s swaggering into the clubhouse and giving grandiose quotes to reporters about how great the Reds are, at that same moment, the FBI is knocking on the door of his closest associates in Cincinnati. These are dominoes that are falling. And I think what that did for the narrative was is it built an urgency to [it] in the final half of the book. You can feel the walls closing in around Pete Rose.”
14:29-16:38: “Pete Rose gets away with what he gets away with because he is charming. … The reporters –the beat writers in the ‘60s, ’70s and into the ‘80s – they loved him. … And I do think that Pete’s race did matter. I don’t think that a Black player in the1960s, ‘70s and in the early 1980s could have gotten away with the kind of stuff Pete Rose did on and off the field.” Continue reading
