Fields of Dreams

I invited Alex Perez and Ross Barkan to join me for this episode of the podcast because I’d seen both of them write essays or posts recently reflecting on their days as baseball players.Ross, as you’ll hear, topped out as a decent high school player. Alex was recruited to play for a top college team, and for a while had not implausible dreams of playing professionally.Both have experienced an intimate relationship between baseball and their lives and identities as writers.We talk about that. We also talk about the locker room culture and camaraderie of sports teams in general, its complicated set of pros and cons. We talk about the rival cultures of sports and literature, and how class status and mores play out in these two domains.One of my old friends who listens to the show said to me once that it’s all really just about men and masculinity. I don’t think that’s quite true, but it’s not totally untrue either. I could easily assemble a playlist of episodes of the podcast that deal either explicitly or heavily implicitly with the topic, and this one would certainly be on it.Ross is a writer and author who writes most often for New York magazine and also frequently for the New York Times Magazine. He is the founder and co-editor of the Substack native publication The Metropolitan Review, and his latest books are a novel, Glass Century, and a nonfiction work, Fascism or Genocide: How a Decade of Political Disorder Broke American Politics. He’s working on a book about presumptive New York mayor Zohran Mamdani.Alex is an associate editor at Panamerica Books, which is the new publishing imprint of County Highway. He’s also an editor for Real Clear Books, and has written for Tablet, County Highway, Compact, and other places. My opening anointment of him as an eminent America “by the power vested in me by the white women of publishing,” is a reference to a notorious interview he did with the Hobart Review (which I would link to except that it’s been taken down from their site) that featured a great deal of his unvarnished thoughts on issues of race, gender, and class in publishing. It led to a total meltdown of that journal as well as the creation of a general aura around Alex as a kind of barbarian of the literary scene.It’s a fun conversation. Hope you enjoy. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit danieloppenheimer.substack.com/subscribe