Over the past few days I’ve been toting along one of my two copies of “The Rocket That Fell to Earth” everywhere I go—reading, re-reading, re-re-reading; trying to figure out what will be good to highlight, what will be good to ignore, etc.
The one thing I already regret, in a major way, is not using either a Preface or section of the Acknowledgments to take some responsibility, as a member of the media, for not being more outwardly suspicious of steroids and HGH in baseball. Granted, this isn’t something a writer would normally add to a book. However, within more than one passage I take the press to task for not digging hard enough; for ignoring; even for knowing and doing nothing. All the while, I was actively thinking, “You’re guilty, too.” Yet when writing a book, it’s sometimes hard to finesse first-person elements into the text. I should have, because I’ll soon be fairly open to criticism of “Yeah, where the f#$% were you?”
So, again, I messed up just like everyone else …
** Side note: The above photograph didn’t make my book’s final cut. It’s Clemens as a member of the White Sox, a Little League team, shortly after he moved from Ohio to Texas, in 1979. Some of the pictures in the book (two especially) brought me great joy, research-wise …
