Editor’s note: We’re thrilled to welcome Tyler Kepner to The Athletic. He joins our team as a Senior MLB Writer from The New York Times, where he served as national baseball columnist from 2010 to 2023. He has covered several teams in his career, including the Yankees and Mets for The Times, and has authored two books, most recently “The Grandest Stage: A History of The World Series” (2022). Tyler will answer subscriber questions submitted here in an upcoming mailbag. This is his first story for The Athletic.
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PHILADELPHIA — Imagine turning a corner in a hallway and suddenly seeing your hero. You’ve met before, but you’ll never be peers, and you’ll never be objective about him. Everything the hero says might as well be chiseled in granite, and cannot be questioned.
“There he is again,” said Steve Carlton, 78 years old, greeting me early this summer in a tunnel behind home plate before a game at Citizens Bank Park. “You’d think he’d get tired of this by now.”
That was it, a quick handshake and that fleeting aside, peculiar and mysterious. Did Carlton, the Hall of Famer who sparked my love of baseball as a star for my hometown Phillies, somehow recognize me? I did give him a copy of my book in Cooperstown once, to thank him for our interview about the secrets of his slider. Did he actually read it?
No, I guessed; this was probably just a standard line of his, a throwaway. But I typed it into my phone anyway — the gospel of Lefty, open to interpretation. It makes me smile, especially now, as I start a new job as a senior writer for The Athletic. I’m here again, writing about baseball, and I’ll never, ever get tired of it.
I covered baseball at The New York Times for 24 seasons, as long as Carlton spent pitching in the major leagues. When the company announced in July that it would rely fully on The Athletic for coverage of leagues, teams, players and games, I knew this is where I had to be. I will miss my colleagues and friends at The Times. I would have missed baseball even more.
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When a radioactive spider bit Peter Parker, it gave him special powers. When the baseball bug bit me, around age 7, it gave me a magnetic pull toward everything about this crazy sport. I played, I watched, I listened. And soon I began to do something that would give me a place in that world. I wrote.
In my teen years, I published a monthly baseball magazine: features, opinion, trivia, humor, artwork. I did my first interview in 1990, the day after my 15th birthday, with a rookie Phillies lefty named Pat Combs. The Phillies gave me daily credentials, and soon I was asking so often that they sent me a season pass.
My favorite writer and most important mentor in those early days at Veterans Stadium: Jayson Stark. We’ve become close friends in the decades since — and now, incredibly, he is a colleague at The Athletic, one of so many new co-workers whose writing and reporting I have deeply admired for years.
When I learned that Monday would be my official start date, I knew where to begin: a day-night doubleheader here, with baseball’s best team, the Atlanta Braves, in town. This was originally an open date on the Phillies’ schedule, but they switched a Thursday game to Monday night to avoid overlapping with the Eagles’ home opener. Then they added another game as a makeup for a rainout in June.
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Just like that, a day without baseball became … a day with two games! What could be better? Not much, if you’ve got that magnetic pull to a ballpark. That’s part of the joy of being around baseball: It’s a community of folks who understand why the song says, “I don’t care if I never get back.”
Take Tom McCarthy, the Phillies’ television play-by-play man. When the home clubhouse opened to reporters at 10:10 a.m. ET, Tom was there. No big deal — except that he had been in Denver the day before to call a Broncos game. A red-eye brought him to Philly, where he reported directly to the ballpark, grabbed an hour of sleep on an office couch and showered in an auxiliary clubhouse. Let’s call two.
“These are the days you appreciate,” McCarthy said. “Not the days you dread.”
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In the Braves’ clubhouse, I found a coach, Sal Fasano, whom I covered as a player with the Yankees in 2006. Fasano played for nine teams, and is proud to be a veritable cheat code for the Immaculate Grid quiz game; when he plays it, he said, he recalls former teammates and long-ago faces from his childhood card collection. (We agreed that the 1977 Topps set — signatures on the front, cartoons on the back — is perfection.)
The first game was wild. Ronald Acuña Jr. homered, stole a base and threw out a runner at the plate; Bryce Harper went deep to tie it with two outs in the ninth. The Braves won in 10 innings, 10-8, and as the Atlanta writers spoke with Kevin Pillar, who had the go-ahead single, I said hello to Charlie Morton, the introspective starter who had struck out nine in the game.
Morton has led a fascinating career, first as a miscast sinkerballer and now, deep into his 30s, as a strikeout artist with a wipeout curve. We chatted a bit and then Orlando Arcia, the Braves’ shortstop, came over to hug Morton. He did this four times — hug, retreat, hug, retreat — giggling like a Little Leaguer.
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That’s the funny side of baseball, brought vividly to life in one of my two favorite books: “Ball Four,” by Jim Bouton. The other is “Men At Work,” by George F. Will, which goes deep on the craft of the game. Morton has fun, he insisted, but he is a man at work.
“It’s probably less fun than I would have had when I was younger, because along the way I became probably more stoic, and more of a pro than I was when I was younger,” said Morton, who turns 40 in November and debuted with Atlanta 15 years ago.
“I was never like a crazy, fun-loving guy, I was never like that. But I think when you’re younger and you’re really good, you have less of an understanding of what makes you good. So I’m not sure what I would have been if I’d figured out my arm slot stuff, if I’d been healthier, if I’d figured out my pitch mix or my delivery at a younger age. I don’t know what I would have been like. But I don’t mean to say I’m not having fun.”
Morton is not sure how much longer he will pitch. The Braves have a $20 million club option for 2024, surely a strong incentive to continue. But Morton has a young family and has already achieved more than he ever could have expected. The way the Braves are going — they are 94-50 after losing the nightcap on Monday, 7-5 — he might win a third championship this fall.
“You want to make something of yourself, you want to prove to yourself that you can do it, and then you want to make the most of your opportunity,” he said. “For me, I’ve been fortunate enough to do that, and fortunate enough to get to a point where I feel like it would be my decision and I could go home feeling like I did my job.”
Morton turned almost wistful. He went pro as a teenager — the only player ever drafted from Joel Barlow High in Redding, Conn. — and now, he said, he is almost a middle-aged man. “I’ve done it all in the game,” he said, and it seemed, for a moment, that he could talk himself into retirement.
And yet, this is baseball. The ballpark is a magnet.
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“I love the game,” Morton said. “It’s in me. It’s ingrained in me.”
You’d think he’d get tired of this by now?
Sorry, Lefty — not Charlie Morton, and definitely not me. And I can’t wait to share my passion for this crazy sport with you.
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(Top photo of Ronald Acuña Jr.: Matt Slocum / Associated Press)
