Discovering Vulnerability
Underdog Brad Balukjian lays out the premise of his bestseller The Wax Pack, talks about the danger of expectations, and describes how discovery and vulnerability came together on his journey to discover baseball’s afterlife.
Episode Notes
(4:12) Brad describes the origins of his passion for baseball, and the contrarian criteria he used to identify his heroes
(8:37) Art and science, connecting: How the premise of The Wax Pack was linked to Brad’s study of Tahitian bugs, and the parallels Brad sees more broadly between science and journalism
(15:46) Refusing to be taken out of the game (as a character in his own book)
(19:30) Journalism as therapy, and discovering the power of embracing vulnerability
(22:59) How to write the telling details
(27:26) Some of Brad’s favorite (and surprising) moments from his time on the road with retired players: Rick Sutcliffe, Don Carman, Rance Mulliniks, and others
(32:10) Giving yourself the freedom to let go of expectations
In 2020, Brad Balukjian’s first book The Wax Pack reached #7 on the Los Angeles Times bestseller list and was named one of NPR's Best Books of the Year. The book was formulated on a breakthrough premise, evident by its universal reception––lifelong baseball lovers and the merely curious followed Brad as he tracked down all the players in a single pack of 1986 Topps baseball cards, drawing unexpected connections between their lives and his own in the process.
In his talk with Jesse, Brad dishes on his unconventional journey to becoming a celebrated chronicler of the remarkably human 'afterlives' of uniquely talented athletes. You’ll hear about the early connections he made between the scientific method and journalism, how he’s currently embracing what he calls a 'hybrid career,' and of course: scores of anecdotes and special insights from his time on the road with retired major league ballplayers.
Guest Bio
Brad Balukjian teaches natural history at Merritt College in Oakland, California. He is pursuing a hybrid career of teaching, writing, and research to get the word out that science is accessible and (gasp!) fun.
Brad, a Filipino-American, studied journalism and island biogeography (yes, that's a thing) at Duke University and earned his Ph.D. in Environmental Science from UC Berkeley.
Helpful Links
Brad’s past work for Rolling Stone, National Geographic, and more
An interview with Brad on MLB.com
+ Episode Transcript
Brad Balukjian [00:00:00] When it came to my book, I met a lot of resistance, part of why it was so hard to get it published, and why it got rejected so much was because I was taking this discovery-based approach where I didn't necessarily know what the whole story was going to be. I went out with this very general premise of what happens to these baseball players once they're done playing? And I had the confidence that by taking this journey, I would find answers.
Jesse Purewal [00:00:35] Hey, Builders. It's Jesse. The voice you heard at the top of the show today belongs to Brad Balukjian. I first learned of Brad when I read his outstanding debut book, The Wax Pack. If you are or were a fan of baseball cards, well, of course, the book title needs no explanation. If you weren't into collecting cards but you love stories of discovery or human authenticity or you like rooting for the underdog or if you've ever wondered whether professionalathletes are just like the rest of us, you're absolutely going to love this interview in Brad's book.
Brad's a writer and teacher of natural history at Merritt College in Oakland, California. A Filipino-American, Brad studied journalism and island biogeography at Duke University and earned his PhD in environmental science from UC Berkeley. In 2020, that first book of his, The Wax Pack, reached number seven on the LA Times' Bestseller List and was named one of NPRs best books of the year.
In today's conversation, Brad and I discuss how he got into baseball and why he connects so deeply with the underdog, why he wanted to go on an adventure to discover baseball's afterlife with 14 former Major League players and what he learned by doing it, the parallels he sees between scientific discovery and the journalistic process, the power of being personally vulnerable as an author and as a human being, the unique role of the written word in helping people express themselves more fully and authentically, some of his favorite moments from visits with former players and their families and his view on the importance of letting go of expectation and of recognizing and serving our prismatic identities.
Brad started out reflecting on how he sees his identity in a professional sense.
Brad Balukjian [00:02:19] I use the term hybrid career to describe my professional life, and I've had traditional office jobs and nine to five jobs in a traditional setting. And I realized from doing that, that's not really what I wanted to do. So I've basically carved out a life and a profession where I can more or less be my own boss and do a lot of different things.
So I teach biology at Merritt College in Oakland, and until recently, I created and directed a natural history program. I'm a freelance writer. I write about science and travel and sports at times and have stitched together a combination of journalism and teaching and science for my career.
Jesse Purewal [00:03:05] Your book, your debut book, The Wax Pack is, to my mind, a work of heroism and discovery and bravery and empathy and connection and also fulfillment and disappointment. It's a really incredible read. And if I had gone no further than the back cover to see the names, George F. Will, Jason [inaudible] , and Rob Neyer, among others as endorsers of the book, I would have wanted to pick it up, but those endorsers went on to include my mother, and so I picked it up at her behest and was so glad I did. For the record, I have to say it's one of only three books that I have read more than two times in my life.
Brad Balukjian [00:03:42] Wow [crosstalk] .
Jesse Purewal [00:03:42] The other is the Steve Jobs biography by Walter Isaacson, And the second one is a book by Eric Siegel called The Class. So it is with no small degree of gratitude that I am in your company today.
Brad Balukjian [00:03:55] Well, thank you. That's very high praise. Appreciated that.
Jesse Purewal [00:03:59] So talk a little bit about angles you had into baseball when you were growing up. Who introduced you to the game, who ignited a passion and an interest in it, and what was the intersection between Brad and baseball when you were younger?
Brad Balukjian [00:04:12] Like a lot of people, I got into baseball through my dad, growing up in Greenville, Rhode Island, age five. So as soon as I could really start to watch games and start to read, my dad introduced me to looking at the box scores in the daily newspaper and listening to games on the radio. And it was his favorite sport. He was a big, he still is a big Dodgers fan, and I was always someone that didn't want to follow the crowd or even follow my own dad.
And so when it came to what was going to be my team, the obvious choice would have been the Red Sox because they were the local market, but I never wanted to just follow the crowd. So I ended up settling on the Philadelphia Phillies for the ridiculous reason that I thought it had a lot of F's in it, and my favorite letter for whatever reason was F. I heard the name, Philadelphia Phillies, and I thought, "What better name could you have?"
Once I had my team, that kind of gave me the focus of, "Now I want to listen to their games. I want to read their box scores. I want to track their statistics, collect their cards," and the cards were the way we got to know the players and their statistics and really engage with the game.
Jesse Purewal [00:05:22] So let me jump into the specific player on the Phillies that would go on to become your favorite player of all time, Don Carman. I guess in my mind, there's two ways to fashion a favorite player. One is to be able to have that person be part of your hometown team and you root for that person. The other is to just pick the super player, right, like people who are LeBron fans living in Mississauga, Ontario.
Don Carman on the Philadelphia Phillies for a kid growing up in Rhode Island seems like an unlikely choice pre-internet, so how did you even discover what Don was up to before you would go on to have this favoritism and this kinship with him?
Brad Balukjian [00:06:02] Some of that is still unknown. The fact that he was middle, back of the rotation guy, he wasn't a star player. I always liked the guys that were the underdogs, the more marginal guys. And I think the reason why is because at that age, I identified as an underdog. I was always a late bloomer. I was picked on and bullied a lot in junior high. And I think in a weird way, I probably felt this kinship with the players that were not getting all the attention. And so Carman was one of those guys on my favorite team.
It's one of those innate things. Again, why do I like the letter F, or why am I obsessed with islands in my career? I don't know. These were things that just were there to begin with, and that's how it felt with Don Carman was I just liked him.
Jesse Purewal [00:06:49] What's so beautiful about that is the way that you got to complete the picture or complete a picture of him in your own mind and in your readers' minds? If I remember right, his career record was 53 and 54, and he had something like a 411 ERA. And so you're like, "Let's play mediocre players of the 80s." He's in the top 10, but then you go to unlock the truth on what is, by rights, just a beautiful life. And for those that are listening, if you Google "Don Carman," you'll see he's become a quite successful professional in a way that is actually deeply resonant with you and the journey you went on.
Brad Balukjian [00:07:31] And as a scientist, I'm not one who likes to say everything happens for a reason or it was fate. But I do have to say that after meeting Don Carman as an adult, as part of this book project, spending time with him, getting to know him and then still being in touch with him now, there's a little bit in the back of my head, it does seem like it was meant to be in some way because also as I got to know him, I realized how much I had in common with him and how much identified with him as a person, not as abaseball player.
But learning about his upbringing and childhood and how he felt alienated and like an outsider and his very thoughtful approach to everything in life and going on to basically become an academic which is very rare for ex-baseball players to go on and get his bachelor's and then master's degree in psychology and to take a path that is very unusual for baseball players. I definitely relate to him in many ways.
Jesse Purewal [00:08:26] Talk, if you would, about just the premise of the book, how you got started, how did it come to be that The Wax Pack became a story within your life and then ultimately, a story that you wrote about?
Brad Balukjian [00:08:37] Well, I was coming out of graduate school. I had just spent seven years toiling and laboring over a project where I discovered all these insect species that live in Tahiti and similarly, was a project that no one else believed in. These insects that I studied were not a group of insects that anyone knew anything about, but I was really passionate about finding out what they were and describing them.
Jesse Purewal [00:09:01] What is it about those insects? Was it the fact that they were in Tahiti and Tahitian insects is just a neat Venn diagram? What was it specifically about this group?
Brad Balukjian [00:09:09] Couple things. So we often call anything that fits under our shoe a bug, but technically, bugs are eating very specific type of insect, and they have these long mouths like a straw. And so in the insect world, most people, I guess you could say the LeBron James of insects, are butterflies, things like beetles and butterflies, and everyone thinks they're pretty, and they collect them and there's a whole following to them. But the Don Carman of insects are what are called the true bugs. No one gives them much attention, I think, largely because the most commonly known two types of bugs are bedbugs and stinkbugs which don't have the best PR situation.
Jesse Purewal [00:09:50] No, they don't.
Brad Balukjian [00:09:51] So part of it was, again, this underdog thing of I read a report that there were a bunch of these bugs that no one knew what they were in Tahiti, and I said, "I want to know what they are." And this is a thread that runs straight from my PhD research through The Wax Pack is I really believe in a discovery-based approach to science and journalism. Science and journalism actually have a lot in common. I would never have thought that doing a PhD on Tahitian insects would have prepared me to write a book about 1986 baseball players, but it did because in both science and journalism, you're trying to answer some question, and to do that, you are collecting data and then drawing some conclusion to test your original hypothesis or to answer your question. People in science are taught or trained to approach it from a hypothesis-driven paradigm which is that you want to go out there and you have an idea already in your mind of what you're looking for and what you're testing. That's the easier, more common way to do it.
I have always liked what they call the discovery-based approach which is riskier. You don't know necessarily what you're looking for. And so when it was studying these bugs in graduate school, just the thrill of the discovery, just figuring out what these insects were, to me, was justification enough for studying them.
Just like when it came to my book, I met a lot of resistance. Part of why it was so hard to get it published and why it got rejected so much was because I was taking this discovery-based approach where I didn't necessarily know what the whole story was going to be. I went out with this very general premise of what happens to these baseball players once they're done playing? And I had the confidence that by taking this journey, I would find answers. I would figure it out. I was willing to take the risk of uncertainty in order to be open to whatever would emerge from that process. And a lot of, as it turned out, a lot of things that I never would have expected came out of the whole road trip and research process.
Jesse Purewal [00:11:48] Was it the kind of thing that once you had the idea to do it and the basic trappings of a plan that you couldn't unsee it and you just had to make it happen, or was there always the sense that you had to wake up the next day and motivate yourself around is this really possible? Can I pull this off with a 2002 Accord? Do I have enough time to do this zigzaggy route across the country?
Brad Balukjian [00:12:10] So coming out of grad school and being also a freelance writer, I had this inspiration that a single pack of cards, to me, was the perfect device for writing a book because you got a discrete number of players. I love the randomness of saying, "Whoever is in this pack of 15 cards are going to be the guys that I write about," and thatconceit of structuring of a road trip and then a book around one pack was, to me, so strong that yeah, I had that unwavering belief that this is a really great idea that I can pull off.
Now, on a day to day practical level, there were many moments of extreme self-doubt and because remember. I conceived of this in 2014. I take the trip in 2015. I didn't have a book deal. I didn't have any connections,really, in the sports writing industry. So I'm having to do this kind of all on my own without any great help. And so there was no guarantee that these players would talk to me or that any of this would work.
Jesse Purewal [00:13:14] And that's where when you talk about the distinction between the hypothesis-led approach and the discovery-based approach, as a reader, it is a blend to me because you make presumptions about what will happen, let's say, when you arrive in Houston to try to get an audience with Gary Pettis, and there's a null hypothesis that it ain't going to work because of the prohibitions on coaches talking to people on game days and so on.
There's an altogether different hypothesis that one has with somebody like Rance Mulliniks who, by rights, appears to be a little more into the idea and wants to explore and kind of go deep with you that maybe at the overall level, there's an umbrella of discovery because, of course, you can't know what you're going to get and what people are really going to do. But that absentsome thesis, you can't really come in to someone and just say, "Hey, start talking to me. What's been going on since 1986?"
Brad Balukjian [00:14:06] No, I mean you're right. Really, both science and journalism has to be a blend of both. And when I say discovery approach, I don't mean you really go in blank slate. I had to go in and do a lot of research ahead of time about each of these players, and I had a limited time with them, so I definitely had preconceived notions, hypotheses in my head about what I was going to find. But I also wanted to be nimble enough to adapt on the fly when something unexpected turned up. And I think that's the sweet spot in breakthroughs in coming up with something creative is to know how to combine those two approaches.
Jesse Purewal [00:14:47] So to me, the secret sauce of the book is so much about the personability and the relatability and in some cases, even the vulnerability of what you do. Sometimes, there's something that might seem trivial like when you're finishing up your visit with Stevie Yeager and you're sitting in your car and you're 20 some miles away from an apartment that you shared with a girl who was really important in your life and you're reflecting on the so close, yet so far elements of the things that happen. It's even if someone hasn't had that exact experience, there's the parallels to a struggle that someone went through or a time when they were working on something else and had a memory and, "Gosh, I really can see myself in this person's shoes."
I can imagine it was probably not a popular choice amongpublishers that you talked to to put yourself in there as such a protagonist. So maybe before we go into the vulnerability components of this, just talk about that decision to make yourself an essential character in this book and whether that was easy or whether that was a struggle.
Brad Balukjian [00:15:46] That was one of the things that I really stuck to my guns on. In my opinion, including my own story and myself in the narrative is what made it the success that it became because in the development process, yeah, like you said, most agents and editors were dissuading me from that, saying, "We don't like when the writer's in the story. Stick to baseball. Stick to your core audience." And as I developed the book, I felt like the book needed some connective tissue between all these chapters.
I look in a book, the end of every chapter is like a potential exit on the highway. They can bail. So how do I keep them going to the next chapter, past the next exit? And in order to do that, I felt like the book needed a character that was an overarching presence that would tie it all together. And I felt that there was enough that was germane in my own life that some of the themes that I explore like the father-son theme or our relationship with fear and anxiety, there were enough parallels between my own life and the experiences of the players that had justified having both of them in there.
Jesse Purewal [00:17:06] It's really, in some ways, if you take the player's perspective on it, it's a story, it's an archetypal story, and the characters that happened to be cast in it are those players and you and, of course, some others, the family members, the agents, people from your personal life. It was never meant to be about a set of people as individuals in my read of it. Now, you even use the phrase, "In search of baseball's afterlife," and it's precisely the mosaic of different experiences that the Carlton Fisks and the Doc Goodens versus the Stevie [inaudible] versus the Pettises and the [inaudible] I've had, that you go, "When I step back, it's such a simultaneously expected and unexpected, interesting, galvanizing set of experiences," versus, "I'm reading this book because I want to understand what Randy Ready is up to these days."
Brad Balukjian [00:17:58] I think that was a challenge because a lot of baseball fans and baseball readers, they do expect and want that because they can be so obsessive about the statistics and the numbers in the baseball. Well, tell me about just Randy Ready. And this is where I risked alienating those fans because I wanted to bring... I wanted to have a bigger tent. I wanted to get people that may not even be baseball fans to realize there's a lot of commonality and there's a lot of resonance you'll find in a book about these old baseball players. These themes are universal about the human condition.
Jesse Purewal [00:18:36] 100%. So let me talk about this piece that I'm characterizing as personal vulnerability. This strikes a cord with anyone who's struggled with things like OCD or relationships with parents. Not only do you draw parallels to the experiences you have in your life to things that are ostensibly or obviously happening with these players, you're having dialogue with them straight up about their father, a second or a third marriage. There's even one case where someone talks about a daughter that heretofore nobody knew they had.
Through your own personal vulnerabilities, get to this unlock where, from my perspective as a reader, it's like, "Wow, how did he do that? How did he develop the courage to do that with himself?" How does somebody who struggled, to your point, with being the underdog, growing up, build the courage to go do something like that in the public domain in a first book?
Brad Balukjian [00:19:30] To me, it goes back to our relationship with fear and in a way, I think by... I talk in the book about my own lifelong, I like to say, relationship with OCD versus necessarily fight or struggle because it's part of who I am and part of the way you deal with something like that is to accept it and not look at it as this enemy. And in my OCD therapy many years ago, when I was really getting my kicked by OCD, and I got really great treatment, this sort of gold standard for therapy is a mix of medication and cognitive behavioral therapy where you do this thing called exposure and response prevention, where you're basically exposing yourself to whatever that fear is and not engaging in the compulsive activity to neutralize it, which breaks the cycle of the fear.
So for me, I had a lot of, we call mental compulsions, where I would mentally go through these checklists and reassurance that I was going to be okay, whatever it was that I was worried about. If I was spinning about having gotten HIV, for example, even though there was no rational basis for that, my exposure therapy was to literally listen to a tape of me reading out loud the scenario where I get HIV, give it to my girlfriend. She breaks up with me. My parents disown me, and I end up homeless and alone. It sounds terrible. But when you bombard your brain with that over and over again, you desensitize yourself to it, your own irrational fear.
So I think having had that intense experience in therapy where I was told to lean into the fear is what I call on whenever I'm in a situation in life now where I am experiencing fear and anxiety. So if I'm about to ask Gary Templeton about having an illegitimate child, there's a lot of anxiety there. And... but what I do in that moment is just a little exposure therapy of I'm going to ask him this, and he's going to be angry. He's going to kick my ass, and then I just let that sit there. And by just exposing it like that, it gives me the ability or the willingness to go forward and do it because I've done that so many times and seen that fear is worse than the worst possible, actual outcome.
But I think also that I just want to say that there's something special about the print medium that allows you to do things that you might not do if you were on camera. There's something... even though these guys knew they were being tape-recorded, when you don't have a camera on you, I think you can get one extra level of intimacy and honesty and sincerity because even the most comfortable person in front of a camera, when you watch a documentary, there's a giant boom mic and there's... you can't possibly shut all that out.
Jesse Purewal [00:22:14] You're also on their turf. It's not like you... to your point, you didn't have connections. It's not your studio, "Hey, come visit me in Oakland where I'm renting a room, and I'm going to interview you for my book." You would've gotten exactly zero replies. Instead, you meet them on their turf. You're in their homes. You're in bars with them. You're in franchise restaurants that they own. You try to engineer a meetup with Carlton Fisk by being at a club where he's a member and pretending that you want to potentially buy a house in that community. There's all these ways that you creatively, interestingly, and hilariously get onto people's turf. And so that's got to be something that lets a subject's guard way down and in fact, just pulls you in.
Brad Balukjian [00:22:59] I think people that love books like the fact that it's not as direct as watching something on TV. In other words, as a creator, when I'm writing a scene, let's say I'm writing about meeting Don Carman. I'm in there in person interviewing him and recording. But while I'm with him and I'm have my notebook out, I'm taking notes the whole time not on what he's saying, but on what he's wearing, on the I met him at the zoo, so the giraffe in the background, and what I love about writing versus visual is that you can paint a picture with the words that creates that relatability you were talking to with the reader, that the reader... they don't need to see it on a screen because I'm able to create an environment with language.
Jesse Purewal [00:23:46] So it's precisely the give and take between what the player is saying when you're in a meetup with them, when you're in their home, when you're in a dialogue with them, or when you're talking to one of their parents and what you're thinking in your brain that makes it so interesting because as a reader, then, what I'm doing is I'm saying, "What is the comparison between what he's now writing and what I would be thinking if I was interviewing Steve Eisenmann right now." If I was sitting in Southeast Michigan on a golf course with him and I was asking him about what it was like when players started coming over from Russia and what it was like when Scotty Bowman asked him to become a more defensive player and what it was like when he got swept in the 1995 finals, there's a reaction that I know I would have, and I get to vicariously live that through you as the writer. And I'm imagining hundreds of thousands of other people are having that reaction as well.
So I think that's where there's some magic here that it's a story that many people resonate with deeply, not just because it's interesting, but because they can see themselves through you.
Brad Balukjian [00:24:45] And that was always... I appreciate that because that, when I was writing it, was always in my head, was like, "I am the proxy for a generation of similar or like-minded people in terms of their interests" and what do I include here that is going to maximize their entertainment and their enjoyment?
Jesse Purewal [00:25:09] So let's talk a little bit about hindsight. So you did the trip. You had no crazy shakeups, right? At some point, you have to get the car worked on. There's little things along the way that are more or less kind of expected, but at no point is it like, "I'm bored. I have to go back home or what have you."
But knowing what you know now about the journey and the mission you were on, whether it's about the route you took or the way you approached players, what would you do differently with the benefit of hindsight?
Brad Balukjian [00:25:37] I don't know that I would change anything. Where I failed with meeting with a player, those are some of my favorite chapters. So it's like I think the story was better for Doc Gooden and Carlton Fisk. Some of these near misses or... I knew that if every chapter was on Carman, it wouldn't be a very good book because you have to have the ups and the downs, andthe book has a kind of ebb and flow and a certain emotional journey that the reader goes on with me as it starts strong and then it kind of dips and then it finishes strong.
And if I could go back in time, I don't know that there's anything that I could have done that would've made that aspect any better.
Jesse Purewal [00:26:17] Tell me about the little moments that stand out, right? So there's obviously the arc of the story is memorable in and of itself, but there's just these little chuckle worthy or sometimes laugh out loud worthy stories that stand out.
A couple for me: you're sitting with Rick Sutcliffe, and Ryne Sandberg calls his cell phone, and he deflects the call, sends Ryne Sandberg to voicemail. It's just epic. And then there's another one where you talk Randy Ready, after teaching him what Tinder is, into playing a game of bowling against you with no socks, and you beat him by one.
Brad Balukjian [00:26:53] No, he beat me by one.
Jesse Purewal [00:26:54] He beat you by one.
Brad Balukjian [00:26:55] Which I thought was really good for me. To me, a professional athlete should be able to beat me in any sport. I mean, he did, but only by one pin.
Jesse Purewal [00:27:01] And was it fair? Was it legit like he beat you, or did you jump on it, throw it into the gutter.
Brad Balukjian [00:27:06] No, I mean, this was one of these fancy bowling alleys that actually had the automated scoring on the screen, so you couldn't just cheat the score book.
Jesse Purewal [00:27:14] Wow.
Brad Balukjian [00:27:14] So it was legit 130 to 129 that I lost.
Jesse Purewal [00:27:18] That's pretty amazing.
So give me your top two or three moments like that where if you had to just identify that moment stands out.
Brad Balukjian [00:27:26] There were a lot of surreal moments because remember, these are the guys that I collected as a kid, they were my heroes as a kid, and now, I'm meeting them as an adult and to know them. Being at the zoo with Don Carman, my childhood hero, and then the next day going to his house and playing catch with him was the Field of Dreams moment, right? We go out into his driveway in Naples, Florida and just have a simple three-minute catch. And I actually asked him to kind of just throw the ball as if with his windup and just seeing this now 55 year old guygo into that same windup and throw a ball to me, it was just one of those surreal moments where I could see the guy from when I was 9 years old, watching him live in front of 35,000 people with Rance Mulliniks.
I went and watched him give a fielding and hitting lesson. In giving the lesson to this high school kid, he demonstrated how you [inaudible] the double play. And again, Rance, now being 58 or however old, the athleticism, the muscle memory that even 30 years later showing how to pivot, it's like they never lose that special quality that enabled them to be Major Leaguers. So those were kind of the moment where I was sort of geeking out as the fan, seeing these guys actually in action in baseball.
And then there were the funny playing Cards against Humanity with [inaudible] Cocanower and his wife and their lifelong friends at the 4th of July. That's just like... that's just crazy. And then watching him open fanmail and [inaudible] as I, as a kid, would write those letters and the autographs and now seeing that 30 years later, this obscure player is still getting several letters a week and seeing him actually open it, so I'm witnessing the other end of that.
There's this moment in the Steve Yeager chapter where I say... he says to me self-consciously, "If you had been here when the Dodgers were in town, I would have gone to the stadium. You could have accompanied me and seen me talk to the players." He's like, "Today, I'm just going to go get my car washed." And I said, "No, I want to see you go get your car washed." What he found incomprehensible, but I wanted them let me be a fly on the wall with what your life is now. Don't try to recreate something that may not be there anymore or try to perform for me.
Jesse Purewal [00:29:44] This is back to the discovery thing. You can, with no offense to Steve Yeager or anyone else, you can go have a ballpark experience if you want to, but it's all, again, back to this mosaic of what's normal, what's ordinary for people in these normal lives after they've lived such abnormal lives?
Brad Balukjian [00:30:02] We all have a lot more in common with Major League baseball players than we ever realized, and they have a lot more in common with it. The whole book is about lowering the barrier between them and us, and we are them. They are us. And I think there's a very Zen quality to what I learned from this book which is that you have these baseball players on the one hand that are generally well adjusted to their post-baseball lives, and they're really good at accepting the present moment. At the same time, they also talked about missing the game and Rick Sutcliffe openly saying, "I'll never get to do that thing again where I dig out the dirt on the mound," right, or Lee Mazzilli saying, "I'll never be the guy that I was, and I have to accept that," or Don Carman saying, "It's like when I retired, I just woke up from the greatest dream, and I can never go to sleep again." Two apparently contradictory things can both be true at the same time. They can be adjusted and still miss what is gone forever.
Jesse Purewal [00:31:01] Well, and you bring that to life quite well as the protagonist in the story, right? Anybody who can self-organize around a mission like this where you're taking yourself across the country, you're taking these huge risks, you're walking into a lot of uncertainty and also sort of be living with the three, four beers in, sometimes sitting in an Airbnb like, "What's going on? What am I doing?" It's just like it's all on display.
Brad Balukjian [00:31:23] And the loneliness, right? It's like... I mean they don't... one of the parallels that I like is I kind of lived the Major League lifestyle for seven weeks. I mean, these guys were on the road all the time, and here I am on the road in a different hotel every night, often just with my... swiping on my phone or my iPhone for company and experiencing that loneliness and eating the McDonald's food and living out of a suitcase. I got to kind of live what they talk about in terms of what the grind is.
Jesse Purewal [00:31:51] So what advice would you have for people who have some vision of what they might want to do, whether it's a book or a story they want to tell or a journey they want to go on, but there's the question of taking the first step? How do you advise people to think about getting unlocked and just saying yes to an opportunity like this?
Brad Balukjian [00:32:10] I think the first thing to do is to let go of any expectations. Just kill them because with this book, I had to let go of any expectations that this was going to amount to anything other than seeing through something that personally meant so much to me and if you have a passion or a vision, by definition, means a lot to you. So I think the first thing to do is to just let go of any outcome that you think you need to have and just go in and start doing the work, that there's a certain nuts and bolts aspect to anything creative that just requires discipline and organization and you have to just start doing.
And I would say that if you are guided by your passion, regardless of the outcome, then you can't fail because the worst case scenario, you've just indulged something that means a lot to you.
Jesse Purewal [00:33:07] Let me go deeper on that because you write that expectations can be dangerous, right, so equating expectation and danger is an unusually high bar that suggests some potential risk of expectation.
Brad Balukjian [00:33:23] You are making your future happiness contingent on something that you may not actually have that much control over. I think that there's a distinction between an expectation and a goal. I would say a goal is healthy. An expectation is not. But as soon as you make a goal an expectation, it basically says, "If I don't accomplish that, then I'm a failure." And even the most talented, lucky people cannot possibly make everything that they want come true.
It's a bit counterintuitive because I think as a society, in our society, we're raised to have expectations of ourselves and to think that I have to do this to be considered a success or to be happy, and we train people that you can be whatever you want, you can accomplish anything if you want it enough and believe it enough. Now, I just don't think that's true. I think that's actually dangerous because you'd never have 100% control over anything, I would say, other than how you react to a particular situation.
So I think that I say it's dangerous simply because you're potentially setting yourself up for discomfort or a sense of failure if you don'taccomplish that thing that you've deemed as an expectation.
Jesse Purewal [00:34:33] It also sounds like the commitment you have to make as a professional, if I'm extrapolating what you're saying, is to not push your chips all in on one thing which could be counterintuitive for some listeners as they reflect on other guests, going, "I made XYZ company, project, initiative my whole life, and it worked out well, so I'm here talking to you." You're not talking to the 97 out of 100 other people that it didn't happen to. What you're saying is it's not at all about keeping expectations low. It's just about not having a high specificity of those expectations.
Brad Balukjian [00:35:07] Well, it's also not tying your identity to your professional world. Life is a pastiche of all these different hats that we wear, and you want to work on all of them. When any one becomes too much, then you are in dangerous territory. Even in my case, there was a lot of serendipity, a lot of good luck.
Jesse Purewal [00:35:28] So being comfortable with varyingexpectation, but I think having a high bar for yourself, the perseverance, I don't want that to be underrated in this. The University of Nebraska Press probably did not expect to have one of its titles show up in the LA Times Bestseller List right near the Obamas and their books. So as an underdog, it's still like, "You done good." And in some ways, you're busting the expectations, in some ways now reforming them.
Brad Balukjian [00:35:54] And I don't want to undervalue hard work and perseverance, but where we get into trouble, I think, is when we have a success, and then we started to think that we're special. The next thing is going to be a success. And I have other book ideas. I'm thinking about other writing projects. And I openly will say, "I may never write a book that's as good as The Wax Pack." I think a lot of writers who have a more traditional ambition, they will, "How can I scale this to be the next big thing and become Michael Lewis," and I'm like, "I don't care." I want to make a living. But I recognize that the conceit of The Wax Pack was so strong that my next book may not... I hope it does well, but it may not, and that's something I'm going to actively, again, that exposure therapy, remind myself of so that I don't get over my skis the way that I think a lot of people can.
Jesse Purewal [00:36:40] So tell me what has got you most excited about what you've got in the hopper right now, whether it's on the academic side or on the authorship side.
Brad Balukjian [00:36:48] I like to tell stories. And I hope that the topics that I find interesting will coincide with other people's interests as well and that my voice is compelling enough to get them to go on the journey with me. So the things that I'm drawn to are usually, again, not the most obvious or commercial things, but the personalities that may have been under-appreciated or the underdog stories.
And so right now, I'm developing an idea around professional wrestling in the same era as The Wax Pack. And some of the guys from that era, a lot of people that loved baseball cards also loved 80s wrestling, Saturday morning wrestling back then, and so there's a lot of overlap there. And I was a big wrestling fan, and I briefly mentioned in The Wax Pack about my favorite wrestler, the Iron Sheik, how I tried to write a book about him many years ago and he threatened to kill me, and it was this completely anti-Don Carman experience. So I'm working on some ideas around that, and we'll see where it goes.
Jesse Purewal [00:37:47] Thanks for making our show a part of your story, and thanks for letting us tell it. Namaste for being here, and I look forward to what's ahead.
Brad Balukjian [00:37:54] Thanks, Jesse.
Jesse Purewal [00:38:01] Thanks for listening to Breakthrough Builders. You can subscribe to the show wherever you get your podcasts. If you enjoyed the show, I'd be grateful if you could spread the word by leaving a rating and a review. It really does help other people find us. And please, tell your friends.
Breakthrough Builders is a Qualtrics Studios original, presented and produced in collaboration with StudioPod Media in San Francisco. The show is hosted and executive produced by me, Jesse Purewal. Our writer is Todd Bagnull. From StudioPod Media, Deanna Morency is our show coordinator. Editing and production by Katie Sunku Wood . Additional editing and music is provided by Nodalab. Our designers are Baron Santiago and Vinsuka Chindavashak. Website by Gregory Hedon. Photography by Christy Hemm Klok .
Special thanks to the entire Breakthrough Builders crew at Qualtrics, including Ali Rohani, James Wadsworth, John Johnson, and Kylan Lundeen.