A nice story about Doug Glanville

I was pleasantly surprised the other day to see former baseball player, ESPN commentator and writer Doug Glanville announced as a candidate to manage the Tampa Bay Rays. I’ve admired Doug’s thoughtful, engaging writing for a long time, maybe a decade. I also have a personal connection to Doug that I haven’t shared here, though I thought the time might be right.

As an independent baseball blogger, I sometimes devise unusual methods to promote my work. In the past, I wrote a weekly column here called “Any player/Any era” where I projected players into different eras than the ones they played in. A couple of years ago, having interacted with Doug once or twice through Twitter, I thought he’d be interested to hear I’d be writing one of these columns on him. Doug was receptive, answering a few questions while I researched the piece. He had nice things to say about the end product, too and within a few months, we were following each other on Twitter.

Around this time, I went through a rough stretch with employment, being unable to consistently pay my bills. I sometimes will stay quiet during such stretches, as they’re embarrassing, though I decided to speak up this time on Twitter. Doug caught site of my tweet as follows:

@grahamdude Ridiculous that you are not employed wherever you want. That means you start up your own biz and end up running the world.

— Doug Glanville (@dougglanville) April 17, 2012

The best was yet to come.

Shortly thereafter, Doug messaged me asking where I’d want to write, if I could do so anywhere. Would if every struggling writer could get one of these messages. I was so excited I called my parents at 6:30 a.m. to tell them. That probably wasn’t my best idea, as parents worry when they get calls from or about their kids so early in the morning. Still, I couldn’t hide how I was feeling.

After thinking about it briefly, I told Doug of a few places I might like to write, including the San Francisco Chronicle. Doug said he’d email the sports editor. While Doug wasn’t the only person who put in a good word for me, he’s part of the reason I wound up freelancing for the Chronicle for about a year. [A collection of my Chronicle stories can be found here, by the way.]

With sabermetrics staking more and more of a place in the baseball world, the job of a manager is changing. For some teams, managing is less these days about devising in-game strategies [front office employees and computers can do that] than it is about managing the various personalities that play for any given team. Managing is about offering encouragement to a collection of mostly 20- and 30-something-year-old players, getting the best out of them, helping them to believe they’re capable of more than they have been heretofore.

Doug did this for me and while I don’t know if that means he’d make a good big league manager, I like to think it does.