I’ve been spending a lot of time lately at the Ball Park at Harbor Yard — better known as the home of the Bridgeport Bluefish, an independent baseball team. The stadium sits two Metro North stops away from where I live, in Milford, and the plan this summer is to write a series of dispatches on the team and on minor league baseball. The first dispatch is now up at Deadspin.

There’s some fun stuff in there, including a long interview with Tommy John, who became the manager of the Bluefish after Bobby Valentine recommended him. I talked to John right when Valentine was getting the worst of it from Boston fans, and John stood by his friend. “I guess what Pedroia’s saying,” John said, referring to the controversy over Valentine’s comments on Kevin Youkilis, “is that you gotta hold hands and sing Kumbaya. That’s not Bobby. He’s going to stir the pot. If those guys had to play for Dick Williams back in the 1960s, half the team would quit.”

Anyway, it should make for a fun series. I suspect John will reappear at some point, as well.

In this week’s NUVO, an alt weekly in Indianapolis, I’ve got a review of Matthew Tully’s Searching for Hope: Life at a Failing School in the Heart of America. Tully’s a very good columnist at the Indianapolis Star, and while Searching for Hope isn’t great, it’s almost certainly the only book anyone will write about Indy’s inner-city schools for a long time.

The review isn’t online, so I’ll put the full text after the break. One more thing:when I write about Indiana, it’s normally to write about high school basketball. Well, the high school Tully covered just sent its team to regionals. This story didn’t get much attention, but it does line up with the few brief moments of hope in Tully’s book.

“There’s the dude who thinks we’re all stupid and poor.”

Matthew Tully was talking to the teacher in a welding class at Manual High School when he heard a couple of students muttering.

“I hate reporters,” another replied.

Now, technically, Tully is a columnist at The Indianapolis Star, but you can see the kid’s point: Reporters and columnists both love swooping into troubled schools where they can chat up a few teachers, observe some dysfunctional kids, find an inspirational underdog, and call it a story. But Tully was doing something different — spending an entire year inside Manual in order to write an excellent series about the school’s problems. This spring, Tully has turned that experience into a book, Searching for Hope: Life at a Failing School in the Heart of America. Unfortunately, it doesn’t measure up to his columns. Still, there’s at least one surprising reason to read it.

Early in Searching for Hope, Tully calls Manual “a school on the edge. It wasn’t in chaos, but if school police and administrators let their guard down for even an hour or two, Manual would descend into that.” The school, which sits a couple miles south of the Soldiers and Sailors Monument, used to max out its 2,000-student capacity. When Tully arrived, in the fall of 2009, it enrolled only 947 students – and by the end of the year that number would drop below 750.

Even getting to 947 took work. When Tully accompanies Manual’s principal, an uninspiring bureaucrat, on his visits to absentee homes, they meet a mother whose son missed the first nine days of class. “He’s left for school every morning,” she says through her barely cracked apartment door. “He’s got a backpack, that’s all I know.”

The kids who make it to school don’t fare much better. Tully describes Manual as a place plagued by entropy and apathy. There’s no student council and no student paper. The yearbook folded a long time ago because most kids couldn’t afford one. School administrators, like the dean who drives a Hummer and tells girls to “keep an aspirin between your knees,” seem less lazy than actively sarcastic. It’s as if they’re contributing to their students’ problems instead of helping to solve them.

And then there’s the actual educating. Manual’s graduation rate bottomed out at 39 percent, and it’s easy to see why. Tully watches one math class where the teacher teaches for barely 30 minutes in a 45 minute period — and by “teaches,” he means that she reads from the textbook and scrawls on the chalkboard. “Of 18 students in the class,” he writes, “only four paid attention. The others slept, talked, or texted.”

Some Manual teachers do try hard. One spends her own money to keep the theater program going. When only a few kids try out, she rewrites Twelve Angry Men as A Jury of Six. When the crowds are small, she closes the curtain and moves the audience onto the stage — that way her students won’t have to stare into an empty auditorium.

But most of the people in Searching for Hope seem happy just avoiding chaos. That might explain one of the book’s problems: its story doesn’t develop and its characters don’t deepen. Tully never returns to that asleep-at-the-chalkboard teacher (or to her struggling students). Even his positive people never change or become more complex.

The other problem with Tully’s book is the way he keeps injecting himself in the story. Want to know why I hate reporters? Because they write far too many sentences like this: “I had spent a career bugging people for information, and I’d been in tougher locales than this, so I wasn’t too worried.” Tully never misses a chance to describe “jotting in [his] notebook” or to lament the decline of the newspaper industry.

Searching for Hope, in short, fails to capitalize on the things that can make nonfiction narrative so powerful. But there is one reason we should be glad this book exists. While Tully’s columns made a big difference at Manual — his Star readers helped restart the student paper and yearbook, among other projects — the school continued to struggle. In fact, last year the state decided to take over Manual and to turn it over to Charter Schools USA.

This fall, Manual will reopen as a for-profit charter, and it will be fascinating to see how things change. Tully’s book has given us the bleak before photo; Charter Schools USA will give us the after. But what we may learn, in the end, is that no one can fix Manual. After the state’s decision, the city sent students a simple form where they could mark whether they wanted to stay at the new Manual or to transfer to a different Indianapolis school. A third of the students never even bothered to fill it out.

In Sunday’s San Francisco Chronicle, I’ve got a review of Jonathan Franzen’s new collection of essays, Farther Away. While I liked it less than most — I call it “the book of a writer who’s calming down” — that’s only because I liked Franzen’s earlier nonfiction so much. I especially admire “Why Bother?,” which revises and improves on Franzen’s “Perchance to Dream” (better known as “the Harper’s essay”). While researching the review, I found an interesting parallel between “Why Bother?” and “Pain Won’t Kill You,” the first essay in Farther Away, and I’d like to flesh it out here.

But first, it’s worth noting how “Perchance to Dream” became “the Harper’s essay.” As I explain in my review, this happened largely during the publication of The Corrections. Inteviewers kept asking Franzen whether the new novel made good on his promise to “revitalize modern fiction,” as the New York Times Magazine put it in a big profile. The Times traced this back to “Perchance to Dream,” but the essay never made such a promise. Indeed, Franzen has blamed this line of questioning on the Times — and on the interviewers who hadn’t read his essay or his novel. I suspect there’s some truth to this, though I’d also note that the essay’s list of things to stop fretting about (TV, politics, whatever) is presented with such persuasive grumpiness that it’s easy to focus simply on that.

Anyway, when it came time to publish How to Be Alone, Franzen’s first collection of nonfiction, he decided to revise “Perchance” — reordering some paragraphs, removing sour tangents on lit theory and Hollywood screenwriting, cutting a long quotation from a letter by David Foster Wallace. This last edit is pretty interesting, given the competitive relationship between the two authors. One way to understand Farther Away is as a reflection of that relationship — not only in the title essay, on Wallace’s suicide, but in subtler echoes like the fact that Franzen gave “Pain Won’t Kill You” as the commencement address at Kenyon, where Wallace also gave a widely-admired address.

But the larger point is that Franzen’s revisions (and his renaming, from “Perchance” to “Why Bother?”) clarified his essay’s argument. In the introduction to How to Be Alone, Franzen positions the book as “a record of a movement away from an angry and frightened isolation toward an acceptance — even a celebration — of being a reader and a writer.” The Harper’s essay records that same movement. It’s the story of how a person went from caring so much he began to despair to caring just enough that he wanted to do better.

What caused Franzen to change? In his essay, it’s a conversation with a linguistic anthropologist who helped him understand the history and reality of literary reading. In his life, it seems to have been the end of his marriage. Franzen told the Times that he and his wife had lived in ”shared monastic seclusion” — sharing a tiny apartment where they both wrote eight hours a day, then read another five. After his divorce, he began making more of an effort to get out into the world. “It would be easy to cast him as the ink-stained wretch who lives in an oubliette and come out blinking into the sunshine every once in a while,” Wallace told the Times. “But Jon finds contact with humans nourishing.” I’d also bet that Wallace’s friendship and letters had more to do with Franzen’s growth than we currently realize (and vice versa).

Whatever the causes, Franzen did change. He describes this in the Harper’s essay as “the shift from depressive realism to tragic realism — from being immobilized by darkness to being sustained by it.” It was this sustainable worldview that allowed him to finish The Corrections.

And that brings us back to “Pain Won’t Kill You” and Farther Away. Late in that address-slash-essay, Franzen talks about how he became an enviornmentalist in college. “The more I looked at what was wrong,” he writes, singling out overpopulation and SUV-style consumption, “the angrier and more people-hating I became.” As his marriage began to dissolve, Franzen decided it best to ignore the environment since there was nothing he could do. “I still tried to keep my carbon footprint small,” he recalls, “but that was as far as I could go without falling back into rage and despair.”

“But then,” he continues, “a funny thing happened” — and that thing is worth quoting at length:

It’s a long story, but basically I fell in love with birds. I did this not without significant resistance, because it’s very uncool to be a birdwatcher, because anything that betrays real passion is by definition uncool. But little by little, in spite of myself, I developed this passion, and although one half of a passion is obsession, the other half is love. And so, yes, I kept a meticulous list of the birds I’d seen, and, yes, I went to inordinate lengths to see new species. But no less important, whenever I looked at a bird, any bird, even a pigeon or a sparrow, I could feel my heart overflow with love. . . .

[By] not merely liking nature but loving a specific and vital part of it, I had no choice but to start worrying about the environment again. The news on that front was no better than when I’d decided to quit worrying about it — was considerably worse, in fact — but now those threatened forests and wetlands and oceans weren’t just pretty scenes for me to enjoy. They were the home of animals I loved. And here’s where a curious paradox emerged. My anger and pain and despair about the planet were only increased by my concern for wild birds, and yet, as I began to get involved in bird conservation and learned more about the many threats that birds face, it became, strangely, easier, not harder, to live with my anger and despair and pain.

Franzen’s point in this essay is that love — ugly, messy love — improved his relationship with the world. But it makes me think of his earlier essay, too. It’s not for nothing that Franzen’s description of love (“a bottomless empathy, born out of the heart’s revelation that another person is every bit as real as you”) sounds a lot like his description of fiction. And I think this shift — from anger-driven environmentalism to love-driven environmentalism, or from depressive realism to tragic realism — explains much of what makes Franzen such a powerful and exasperating writer. It’s why he can seem so cranky and ambivalent. (With categories like these, you’re never entirely one or the other.) But it’s also why he can be so moving and provocative.

In Sunday’s New York Times sports section, I’ve got a long feature on the closing of the Wigwam, the 8,996-seat arena in Anderson, Indiana, that ranks as the second largest high school gym in the world. Or ranked, rather: Anderson’s school board closed the Wigwam last summer, in a decision that frustrated many fans and seemed to strike another blow to the city’s struggling self-image. Those elements certainly belong in this story, but I also tried to focus on the positive — the way the Anderson Indians got a chance to create, in the words of their coach, Joe Nadaline, “a new tradition.” I also took Nadaline’s idea one step further. What could the Wigwam’s closing reveal about the current relationship between Indiana and high-school hoops? Short answer: while it’s taken a few steps back, it remains powerful and pretty much without compare.

That doesn’t mean we should lapse into lazy “Indiana basketball” rhapsodies. (For example.) But it does mean the state continues to offer a surprising level of passion, quality, and, given its smallish size, talent. One way to see this is in the person of John Harrell. I quote Harrell briefly in my story, and his delightfully lo-fi website offers an indispensable resource for any local fan.

Harrell started writing for the Huntington Herald-Press while he was a senior in high school. He migrated to the Bloomington Herald-Times‘ sports desk in the early 1970s. Around the same time, Jeff Sagarin, a sports stats guru who now helps with the BCS rankings, also moved to Bloomington. Harrell started delivering him hand-written lists of Indiana’s high school basketball scores; Sagarin started churning out professional-grade rankings for the state’s programs. (Another reason to be optimistic about Anderson going forward? They played one of the 20 toughest schedules in the state, according to Sagarin.)

“It all developed into this website eventually,” Harrell told me. “I had all these records laying around.” In 2000, Harrell started uploading those records (and the latest scores and schedules) to his personal website. It became crucial for coaches, ADs, journalists, and super-fans, with data that goes back to 1993. Harrell says he still has the earlier stuff — it’s just stuck on a computer that can no longer transfer files to more modern machines. He may get around to transferring it by hand now that he’s retired. ”I haven’t been as busy,” he said. “I’ve had more time to devote to the site.”

Like any longtime observer of the Indiana hoops scene, Harrell brought up class basketball and attendance numbers before I could even ask the question. He admits the switch has hurt attendance, but also points out that fan interest has been slowly, steadily declining for decades. (I agree: when you crunch the numbers, you see that class basketball, more than anything else, provides an easy scapegoat for angry nostalgics. See this terrific Indianapolis Monthly story for more.) One thing’s for sure, according to Harrell: class basketball is here to stay. “The small schools have gotten a taste for Indianapolis now,” he said with a laugh.

Mack also had nice things to say about his former boss. (“He’s one-hundred percent basketball,” Mack said. “He doesn’t have any other interests. I feel bad for him.”) One place where Mack’s emphasized continuity is Xavier’s defense, which continues to deploy a man-to-man scheme known as “the pack-line defense.”

In Miller’s first season as head coach (and Mack’s first as his top assistant), Xavier ran a number of different defenses, depending on match-ups, in-game strategy, and so on. But this meant Xavier didn’t develop much of a defensive identity, and for that reason Miller spent most of his first offseason watching film of — and making phone calls to — the sport’s best defensive coaches. Eventually, Miller decided Xavier would become a pack-line team, emphasizing the scheme’s principles and philosophy at every opportunity. He brought in a new assistant, James Whitford, to help with the transition. Whitford had played for Wisconsin’s Dick Bennett and coached for Miami’s Charlie Coles, both of whom favored sticky, lane-clogging defenses. In other words, Whitford also offers an example of coaching continuity, and he’s now Miller’s top assistant at Arizona.

So, what is the pack-line defense? I asked Mack for a layman’s definition, and this is what he said:

It’s a defense that stresses keeping the ball out of the lane, being a team that doesn’t get spread out defensively, that isn’t denying in the passing lanes, that isn’t taking chances and trying to make the game chaotic, that’s more worried about keeping the ball in front of them. We want to have a little more organization to us on the defensive end. We want to make sure every shot you take is outside of the lane and is contested.

If you read my profile, you’ll see why this scheme appeals to the hyper-organized Mack. The pack-line defense still demands intense individual defense — ”We’re going to pressure the ball really hard,” Mack says — but it forces the other players to think about their positioning. “I came to believe in the pack-line defense because it gave answers,”  Mack says. The players knew what they needed to do, the coaches knew what they needed to teach, and the team knew how it could get better. In fact, Basketball Prospectus has demonstrated that Xavier’s defense got better every single year under Miller. Mack remembers Miller’s final 2009 Xavier team that made the Sweet 16: “We were so doggone good on defense. We weren’t the most talented team, but we had kids who’d been in the system three or four years, who knew how to defend.”

You can see, then, why Mack wanted to keep the pack-line defense — and why that continuity between Coach Miller and Coach Mack mattered. “I was teaching a system, as an assistant, that I completely bought into,” Mack told me.

One final point: this is not to say that all coaches are the same, or even similar. In fact, Mack and Miller couldn’t be more different in terms of personality, if not intensity. All the info in this post came from my interview with Mack. I asked Miller the exact same questions, and here’s what I got: “The pack-line defense was my contribution.” That’s it. Even when I asked about Mack’s role in defensive gameplans, Miller stayed terse: “He contributed, in my mind, to every aspect in the development of our program.”

So while coaches may share strategy and tactics, they remain different people, and those differences surely inform their strengths and weaknesses. In fact, I’d planned to ask Thad Matta about the relationship between him and Miller at Xavier, but, in an outcome that will surprise very few Xavier fans, he ignored my multiple requests. Matta, it seems, had completely moved on.

In the March issue of Cincinnati Magazine, I’ve got a long profile of Xavier head coach Chris Mack. It centers on the lead up to the Xavier-Gonzaga game on New Year’s Eve, and while we continued to tweak the story as Xavier’s season progressed, that lead time makes it feel a little . . . strange, especially since this week Xavier pretty much ended its NCAA hopes by losing to St. Louis. I hope the access and the reporting help compensate for this lag. One thing that definitely helps is Mack himself. He was the most honest and upfront interview I’ve encountered in the sports world, and I’ll try to do a couple follow up posts with stuff we couldn’t fit into the profile — especially his discussion of the theory and praxis behind Xavier’s pack-line defense.

Before getting to that, though, I want to highlight (and substantiate) what I suspect will be the most controversial part in the profile. It deals, to no one’s surprise, with the Xavier-U.C. brawl at the end of this year’s Crosstown Shootout. Near the end, I write:

But there’s a bigger problem here, and it gets at Xavier’s dirty little secret: The brawl has been a long time coming.

From the beginning, Mack’s been up front about wanting a nasty team. That’s why he practices the way he practices. (Mack pushed his players so hard in a January practice that he blew out his knee again while attempting a motivational dunk.) That’s why he recruits the way he recruits. You can find evidence of this from former players and coaches, from on-court incidents, and from opponents. But here’s a particularly telling example: In October, before the season even started, Jeff Goodman of CBS Sports stopped by a Xavier practice and noted how the team relied on a potentially combustible edginess. “We’re straight tough,” guard Mark Lyons told him.

The profile makes lot of the comparison between Skip Prosser and Chris Mack, and I should say that Prosser also ran a tough team. In Michael Perry’s excellent book Xavier Tales, he quotes the following Prosser pep talk: “You’ve got to hit them first; don’t give up a step.” Perry also quotes former Xavier player (and later, assistant coach) Pat Kelsey on Prosser’s practices: “It was three hours of just up-and-down the floor, bodies flying around; it was almost like you needed helmets and shoulder pads.”

Still, I think Mack (and, as we’ll see, Sean Miller before him) took this nastiness to a new and more intentional level. There’s nothing wrong with that, of course, but I believe it created a tension with the Prosserian classiness most people associate with Xavier — and certainly, it made the fall out of the brawl that much worse.

So, what’s the evidence I alluded to above?

• Former players: Before his first Crosstown Shootout, Mack showed his team a five-minute montage of previous Shootouts — the fights, the shoving, the dirty plays — to motivate them. After the game (and I’m drawing all this from Scott Gaede’s book NeXt in Line), Jordan Crawford said that U.C. “tried to come in and be the bullies, and we wanted to be the bullies, too. We ain’t going to back down from nobody.” Later that year, in the Butler game that ended with a bizarre game-clock error, Tu Holloway had to be restrained from charging into the crowd. Afterward, a Xavier player allegedly tore a water fountain off the wall of Hinkle Fieldhouse. I mentioned this to one of Xavier’s media guys, and he maintained that the player meant to slam a table but hit the fountain instead; the age of Hinkle Fieldhouse did the rest. That may be true, but as far as defenses of militant behavior go, it seems a little lacking.
• Former coaches: This seems like the most telling evidence, to me. When an Arizona reporter asked Sean Miller about the brawl, he said this of his former team: “They’re deep, they’re tough, they don’t back down. If Cincinnati tries to do what they did today, they’re going to get a fight. That’s what happened. So I’m proud of those guys.” The reporter followed up with Miller after he’d seen the tape: “Happens every game,” Miller reaffirmed. “I’m proud of those guys, I really am. I would fully expect there to be a fight.” Miller tried to walk these statements back the next day, but I think they reveal how central this nastiness was to his team’s culture and to his coaching identity. Remember that in one of Miller’s Crosstown Shootouts, Derrick Brown started a small fight and was ejected. It seems clear that Miller expected the Musketeers to react this way because he (and later, his former assistant Mack) stressed these qualities on a regular basis.
• Opponents: On his radio show, to take one instance, Matt Painter said of Xavier that “right away from watching film, they talk! And they talk a lot. So that was one of the first things we talked in a scouting report was that, ‘Don’t get caught up in that.’”

I asked Mack about the Painter example. “That’s Matt’s opinion,” he said. “That’s not who we are nor who want to be. It has nothing to do with the talking on the floor, the false bravado. It has everything to do with being the first person to dive on a loose ball.” Again, this may be true, but I think it also creates a tension with Xavier’s broader image. That tension was really the only thing Mack was less than candid abut.

Let’s end with a great example of what I’m talking about — and an example that suggests this tension bothers Xavier’s administration, as well. Almost a month after the brawl, a university dean announced mandatory “reflection sessions”  for the student section based on their behavior at the game. Xavier cancelled the sessions, after they were widely mocked, but what’s truly interesting is that the university decided to react to the student section only post-brawl. After all, Matt Howard of Butler, who was surely one of college basketball’s most widely traveled players, called the Cintas Center and Xavier’s student section the most hostile he’d ever experienced. That’s the way Xavier has grown used to doing things, and while there’s nothing wrong with it, it does seem odd to freak out, but only after being caught.

In today’s Los Angeles Times, I’ve got an op ed on the Jefferson Bible — back in the news, thanks to a new edition from the Smithsonian, and more relevant than ever, thanks to the Republican presidential primary. I could say a lot more about the history of the Jefferson Bible, and somewhere down the line I will. For now, though, I’ll write about something else — another recent story in the Times, this near-crazy column about Lakers reserve Josh McRoberts.

The column comes from Bill Plaschke, a Fire Joe Morgan favorite who’s made a career out of getting things wrong. In fact, I single this instance out only because it reveals a lot about how the media continues to mythologize “Indiana basketball.”

Plaschke starts with a promising topic — how a prep and college star handles being a role player in the pros. There are some good details, too, like the fact that McRoberts moved to L.A. so quickly that he’s been taking an airport shuttle to games. Where the column goes off the rails, though, is when it addresses McRoberts’s Indiana roots. It doesn’t help that Plaschke relies on one of those lazy, column-by-number structures that FJM loved to hate. McRoberts is Josh McRambis, he’s Josh McFly, and, now, he’s “Josh McHoosier”:

He grew up swallowing wood chips that landed in his mouth from his splintered driveway backboard. His other childhood gym was a goal hammered to the side of his grandmother’s barn. He was the nation’s top-ranked player as a senior at an Indianapolis-area high school where, during the recent NBA lockout, he served as an assistant coach. And, oh yeah, he can’t stand to watch the movie Hoosiers anymore because, basically, he lived it. With his Indiana twang, he even sounds like it. “Where I came from, all I’ve been through, that’s made me who I am,” he says. “Hoosiers is about right.”

This is absolute nonsense. That “Indianapolis-area high school”? It’s Carmel High School in Carmel, Indiana, easily the richest city in the richest county in the state. The 4,600-student high school boasts a national reputation for college prep. The city just built a fancy concert hall known as The Palladium. Carmel isn’t famous for its hardscrabble Hoosier-ness. It’s famous for its roundabouts.

Now there’s nothing wrong with this. But McRoberts talking about the goal on his grandmother’s barn — and let’s note that his dad played basketball at Butler and his mom teaches at a Carmel school — makes as much sense as me talking about the rusted-out combine on my grandfather’s farm. Does it exist? Yes. Does it mean I deserve a Walker Evans portrait? Hardly.

It’s interesting that McRoberts can no longer watch Hoosiers. I heard the same thing from several high schoolers in Milan, Indiana, when I did a story on the town’s basketball legacy. In both cases, it seems like the natural, reasonable reaction of people who’ve seen the same lazy story line projected on them way too many times. If it’s basketball and it’s Indiana, then it must be Hoosiers — underdogs, outhouses, twangy accents. Honestly, I don’t even blame McRoberts for mentioning his grandmother’s barn. I’d bet you a pile of wood chips Plaschke was gunning for details of just that sort.

In Sunday’s New York Times Book Review, I’ve got an essay about how more and more novelists are selling the rights to their work to cable networks — and in many cases, even helping adapt that work, as well. Since many of the projects I mentioned remain in the pilot stage (and since the odds that a pilot makes it to air remain terrible), it was tough to get interviews. But I did talk at length with Jonathan Ames, a novelist who’s already adapted his work into a show, Bored to Death, that just finished its third season. Ames made for a great interview — a metaphor machine who balanced deep knowledge with deep-ish pessimism. Below are some interesting quotations I couldn’t fit into the essay.”

On a TV show’s financial benefits: “I got paid much more for the show’s pilot script, which took me six days to write, than I’d ever gotten for any of my novels. The economy of scale is just absurd.”

On a TV show’s collaboration: “HBO was very kind to me — they gave me a learner’s permit. . . . I don’t have much time to sit on a script before I turn it over to other people. It’s a very vulnerable moment. It forces you to be imperfect in front of other people. I need all these people to be, in a sense, editors. Sometimes it’s difficult. But most of the time everyone makes it better.”

On the value of TV versus literature: ”In all the media, my goal is to entertain and amuse — to, for a moment, give someone some relief, perhaps, and to make someone feel less alone. . . . There are certain things I smuggle into the show,  things that you might not find in a typical comedy. I want there to be some gravitas, some sorrow and despair — for a moment, it’s not clearly just a joke, and that feels more in the realm of what I can do in my novels and my nonfiction. But prose makes it much easier to toggle back and forth from lightness and darkness.”

On returning to writing: “Over the course of writing the show, I’ve written a handful of essays. I’ve kept my hand in prose. But I’d like to return to books, if I’m lucky enough to be able to. I can imagine a future critic saying, ‘Ames has clearly been writing for TV.’”

In Slate today, I’ve got a story about Major League Baseball’s new CBA — and about its changes in how teams can acquire (and compensate) amateur talent. Among baseball pundits, a sturdy consensus has formed: these changes will make it even harder for small-market teams to compete. I try to show how this analysis overlooks a few key ideas, including the lessons of Michael Lewis’s Moneyball.

The gist of my argument is that spending tons of money on amateur players does give small-market teams an advantage — but that it’s such a big advantage everyone else will catch on and catch up, leaving the draft as stratified as every other element in baseball’s economy. It’s the classic Moneyball narrative: team exploits undervalued asset until it becomes properly (even overly) valued. One of the funny things here  is that Billy Beane and the A’s themselves undervalued draft picks. After all, a big part of Moneyball centers on the 2002 draft in which the A’s had a whopping seven first-round picks (and 35 picks overall). Instead of loading up on high-ceiling, high-cost amateurs — the kind of players you have to pay “over slot” — the A’s looked for players who would sign under slot. Now, as Lewis tells it, the A’s didn’t have much choice since their owner had allocated only $9.4 million for draft bonuses. But that was a terrible move. Bargain-hunting makes sense with big-league players, not with amateurs.

In the last few years, other teams — and, crucially, other owners — have wised up. The Royals provide the best example. But even now you’re starting to see big-market teams invest more and more money in amateur players, players they can keep or trade. The Tigers used two “over slot” prospects to trade for Miguel Cabrera; the Red Sox used two more to get Adrian Gonzalez. And if baseball’s new CBA hadn’t better regulated the draft, this trend would have only increased.

*  *  *

N.B. If you’re a baseball-slash-economics fan, you might enjoy a long feature I wrote this summer on the Cincinnati Reds and their fans. In it, I erroneously predicted that baseball “has too many people making too much money for anything major to change [in the new CBA].” But there’s lots more I did get right about small-market teams and how they can (and can’t) compete. A .pdf of the story is here.