Self Proclaimed Scholasticism Presents:

Interview with Nationally Honored Sports Columnist and Best-Selling Author:

Scott Pitoniak - Part One

Writing Advice and Talking Ball

The “we made it” moment. The mountaintop. The pinnacle. I don’t care what you want to call it, but we all have those incidents that make us feel like we’re on the right track - doing what we want to do, and doing it well, at that. So you don’t have to guess that I felt pretty smug and confident - even grandiose for a day or two - when one of the most influential authors towards my writing endeavors agreed to an in-person interview. I told myself that I’m only a month into this newsletter, and I’m already amassing “cosigns” from highly established writers. Basically, I felt like a future Jack Kerouac (maybe a little exaggerated, but you get the gist). However, they say that the evidence of pride is only the beginning of the fall, and my situation was no exception.

Throughout the week leading up to the interview, my pride casually shifted into something deeper, allowing myself to casually expose the flaws in my processes, my lack of a defined niche for example. Doing some “soul-searching” led me to realize that realistically, I don’t know the first thing about real writing or interviewing. We all have that memory of sitting in class, learning about sentence structure and prose. To put it in a language we all understand, watching paint dry. However, one can only use the tools learned in surface-level classes to really understand the grammatical component of writing, and not how to get an audience to read your work. I watched my viewpoint shift, switching the interview process from a rigidly defined list of questions to trusting that I could come up with talking points on the fly (fortunately, Mr. Pitoniak did the heavy lifting during the interview, taking the weight off my shoulders). The day before, I added another question into the memory bank that transcended any run-of-the-mill questions that I had written down before. In short, I really wanted to get something out of this that could propel myself as a writer, and who’s better to inquire than an established member of the community that’s seen it all? Therefore, I led off by asking what Scott Pitoniak wished he knew about writing when he was in my position. The inquiry paid off, and I came out of the interview possessing an arsenal of not just literary, but also engagement techniques that will help me make the jump from personal writing to projecting my work for an audience to see. I don’t want to give too much away, and I know I will if I keep writing, so I’ll let Scott’s knowledge speak for itself. Here’s what y’all have been waiting for, and as usual, hope ya enjoy.

Syracuse University graduate Scott Pitoniak is a nationally-acclaimed bestselling author and award-winning journalist, writing for Democrat and Chronicle, USA Today, Rochester Business Journal, and The Baseball Hall of Fame’s “Memories and Dreams” magazine. He has written over 30 books, and The Associated Press Sports Editors named him one of the top 10 columnists in the US. Scott taught sports journalism at my school, St. John Fisher University, as an adjunct professor. That’s one of the parallels we share, as we are both fans of the Bronx Bombers Syracuse basketball, along with being established card collectors.

Joe DeGroat: All right, so obviously, know about my newsletter. You read it, I really do appreciate it. Thank you so much for that by the way. I did have a few questions, because obviously, I'm only 20 years old. I don't know the first thing about the newsletter world, and really not too much about writing in general. So I was just wondering if you had any advice that you wish you knew when you were 20 years old? 

Scott Pitoniak: Yeah, there's a couple of things, as I was growing up, and people said I had an aptitude for writing and storytelling. I tended to pick the brains of people. I had what I would call sounding boards, and there were people whose writing I respected, and I would often,  , ask them, bug them, to read my stuff to give me suggestions and look for different approaches. So that would be one thing. I would always try to have other people read it, people whom you respect, and maybe talk to them about the writing process. Because there's not just one way to do it. That's the beauty of writing and the curse of writing. On the other hand, if you're going to be an accountant, two plus two equals four, it doesn't change. 

Joe: Right, you’ve got to find your niche.

Scott: So with that, I would urge that another thing is very important, I think, and unfortunately, it's becoming less and less a priority in our educational system. But I would read writers I admire, not to copy their particular style, but to kind of read it asking “what was the strategy here? What was he or she trying to do to get me into the story?” And after you've written and read one of your own pieces, read it over and understand that you may have to rewrite it several times. Yeah, so you gotta rewrite it and ask “does my leading make sense? Or am I just making sense to me, but it wouldn't make sense to somebody else?” And I think the other, one of the other important things is that you need to know your audience. So, again, you're looking for a niche and,  , that's an important thing, because now everything's so fragmented, right? I was writing for newspapers. I was writing for a general audience at a time when I was writing for The Democrat and Chronicle here in Rochester, we had a circulation on Sundays of 260,000 people. So you're writing for a much wider audience then, but you’ve gotta identify. Knowing your audience is one of the most important things for any writer. Because if you're writing me an email, you're going to communicate something specifically to the audience of one me, whereas you're looking to grow your audience, but yet, you've kind of identified what you want to write about, and that's a good thing. That's definitely a good thing. So   many of these people are going to be interested in baseball and how it relates to our culture and that sort of thing. So that's a key to know that. Ernest Hemingway said somebody asked him,  “what's the secret to good writing? And he just blurted out, “rewriting.”

Joe: One of my favorites! Roger Angell said something similar, too. 

Scott: And one of the things I do, I'll start writing a lead and whatever. And I may wind up writing like, 30 or 40 different versions of the lead, and maybe a totally different lead, and maybe the lead winds up becoming what we would call a “kicker”. I think the best stories often are circular. 

Joe: So come up with a compelling starting point, and revisit and wrap up that starting point at the end?

Scott: Yeah, a starting point. Somehow you're bringing it back. And sometimes, it's interesting, you want your riveting, dramatic stuff, pulling people in. But there can be occasions where that kicker, that final line, in a story, a book, whatever, can be the most impactful, like driving it home. And it's true of any type of storytelling or songwriting or anything. There's a structure to it, there's a strategy. So often, I don't necessarily outline certain things. I mean, if I'm writing a book, I have to provide a summary. But I put down keywords, things I write down before the story, and it might just be certain words. I want to make sure that I remember that these things need to be in the story. And I don't know necessarily how they're going to go, or necessarily the order, but I want this story for this audience. In this theme of the story that I developed, I want to make sure that I touch upon all those things. 

Joe: So it's kind of like a loosely defined story, for example, if someone were to make a movie or TV show, they make a storyboard before writing and shooting.

Scott: Yes. So, for example, I had a friend of mine who's a professor at Syracuse University. We did this historical novel on Wilmeth Sidat-Singh, who was this lost in history, tremendous athlete at Syracuse University. He was a Tuskegee Airman who wound up being killed in a training mission. He was a brilliant student while at Syracuse, he was a two sport star, and he's been lost in the dustbins of history. And so anyway, we had to decide, in structuring this story, how are we going to tell this for a guy who died in 1943, and how do we make it relevant to a modern audience, to pull them in? So what we did was we created a fictitious character, a female sports writer, who could relate to the story, and so you wind up having parallel protagonists. When you're writing nonfiction, I always try to do this, and I kind of gravitated toward this while I was reading writers who I admired in magazines and so forth. You can use a literary approach. You can use a kind of dramatic scene and anecdote to lead into the story. There was a star football player from the Rochester area. He was a top player in Section Five here. He was an all American at Penn State. Big offensive lineman that went on to play in the NFL, and then he wound up going back to his hometown of Cornell, and he was busted for selling drugs. So this is the fallen hero story, so and so. He was in prison, and I contacted the corrections facility to get a letter to him, like, would he be willing to sit down for an interview? Because it has to be cleared through. So when I got there, it was a maximum security prison in Elmira, and I mean, for real, hardened criminals and drug dealers, whatever. Probably over the top, and he probably shouldn't have been there. And he was moved to another person not before long. But anyway, I showed up there and they put us in this room, and when he introduced himself to me, he goes, “I used to be number 78 and now I'm a prison number.”

Joe: That's a perfect line to build off, right?

Scott: Yes, it's like, you know, divine intervention, like somebody gave you the lead. It's not always that easy, of course, but part of that is in the interview process. And when I was teaching at Fisher, I would spend like, three full classes on interviews, and I had the students practice. I created a scenario like, this person's a star athlete or whatever, blah, blah, blah, and you're the reporter, here's the background story on this person. Like, it's not just, you know, he averaged 30 points a game playing high school basketball. But there's some other element here that you need to develop. 

Joe: Right, it’s more than the story, you need to develop them into the actual person behind the story. 

Scott: Right, so I would work on that. But anyways, sorry if I'm rambling on. 

Joe: Not at all, this is perfect stuff. 

Anyways, as I tell people, it's 53 years this June, since I had my first byline in a newspaper. And you’ll never have writing licked, like, you'll get a little bit more comfortable with it as you go on, like anything else, and you practice it and whatever. But, you always have to keep working at it. I still work at it. I still struggle with it at times. When you feel that you've nailed the story, it can be a tremendous feeling, but it's also a very neurotic thing. And I would have a thing when I would write, when I was working with the Democrat and Chronicle and also do some writing for USA Today and other places,I would always say, out of the 200 something columns during the year, if I had six to 10 keepers that stood the test of time, that was a good year, right? And that's a very small percentage. You think about it, of all the ones I would be so disappointed in. With the others, I always would go back and say, like, I should have done this. I should have used this line. I should have twisted this line this way. I should have ended this way. 

Joe: For me, that’s my blessing and my curse. I always have to remind myself not to get complacent. That's my problem. Like, if I feel like I nailed something completely, I won't even go back to it most of the time. Won't even look at it at all. Eventually, I realize, for example, there are some typos in there, lines that don’t make sense, and there are some sections I could change.

Scott: Yeah, I'm always rewriting right to the bitter end until I have to send a thing like that. When I do, for example, the “Memories and Dreams” (Hall of Fame Publication) stories are different from when I was writing a column off of a game with a tight deadline, and I'm constantly rewriting. I mean, right up to that final day when they tell me it's due “this day”. You can feel like you have it nailed, like you can feel good about something, but you'll always find something out that you can always do better at, right? And that's and that's a good thing. Like, I call it self editing. You have to be your harshest editor. You have to be your harshest critic. And that's a good thing, because it'll keep you improving. But like, talking about earlier, I had great influences in my life, and they never knew it, where these writers were writing for Sports Illustrated, or way back to Sport magazine, or the Sporting News. I read it from cover to cover, and I looked again at what they were doing, like, and how did they get to that point, wow. And  , some of it is getting these fabulous quotes, and doing what you can with the ones that can't. Some people you interview are not going to be great quotes  . And you don't want to be overly reliant. Some people are really great. And then you kind of get out of the way in writing the story and putting it together.

Joe: Now, this seems like one of those heavily quotable situations, you’ve given me some great lines this early on! (laughs)

Scott: (laughs) I’m just rambling, but yeah, you have to like good writing. you should be a prolific reader, and you should not restrict yourself to just necessarily the writers you like. I think you should always keep going back to them and seeing old stuff and saying, like, wow, that's really stood the test of time. 

Joe: Yeah, exactly.

Scott: But it's also you should never stop trying to introduce yourself to new writers, and you may find out like, now, this person is just not for me, and that's fine. It's just like you're watching a movie and you're trying to get into it, or you're watching a series, right? You're saying I gave it three or four episodes, and it's just not doing it. And why?   Life is short. You got to move on. But if you don't, you don't introduce yourself to different writing forms and so forth, you're really not going to improve. So if you're interested in baseball, like, I mean, read people like Joe Posnanski. I don't know if you're familiar with him, but he also does podcast. He's a great baseball writer and a great writer overall. And then, if you're going back to the older ones, check out really talented writers like Frank DeFord from Sports Illustrated. 

Joe: Sports Illustrated used to be great. I’ve always been a big Steve Rushin fan.

Scott: Steve Rushin is great. He's a big baseball fan as well. Kirby Puckett, the Twins, etcetera.

Joe: Yes, the Hee-Sop Choi article is my favorite, where he’s using the euphemisms and playing off different names.

Scott: Yes. Sports Illustrated used to be really good, it’s not anymore! So, there's a lot of great baseball writers, Roger Kahn who wrote “The Boys of Summer,” for one. If you haven't read “The Boys of Summer,” you really should. It’s about the Brooklyn Dodgers.

Joe: I gotta check that one out. My grandmother grew up right by Ebbets Field, so I’m surprised I haven’t!

Scott: Right. Luckily, I had the opportunity early in my career. I was working in Utica, and I forget that newspaper there. We had a minor league team at the lowest rung, a New York team, the Utica Blue Sox. And one year Kahn purchased the team with the express purpose, that he was going to write a book about what it was like to be an owner at the lowest rung. He wrote a book about it called “Good Enough to Dream.” There's a lot of stuff about the old Brooklyn Dodgers that he calls from in his own career and whatever. But “The Boys of Summer” is a fabulous book, because what he does is 25 years later, after they've left Brooklyn and tore the heart out of that community, - ripped the soul right out of that community - He catches up with members from the boys and from everything, from Jackie Robinson, you know. But also, he weaves himself in there, from how he has changed and what he was influenced by. And his mother never wanted him to become a sports writer - that was low, beneath him, or whatever. And they always fought about it, whatever. But anyway, it's a great idea to see the impact the ravages of time had on these men and their and their lives and different things in different ways. I mean, Carl Furillo, the great right fielder, he catches up with him. He's working construction. He's working on the elevator shafts of the World Trade Center, both towers.

Joe: And on the other side of it, (Gil) Hodges was already a fully established manager, right? And we all know what happened with Campanella.

Scott: Yes! But think about it. There are guys like that. I mean, by that time when the book came out, Jackie Robinson had died, but he had a chapter on him, because he had that relationship with him as a whole

Joe: Such a great influence.

Scott: Yeah, and, and also the struggles with that, his son committed suicide, and things. It's just a fabulous book. It's one of the most influential books on my career. I mean, I loved Steinbeck and Hemingway and so on and so forth. But I mean, this book, it was literature, but it was a true story, and he was such a gifted writer. So again, it's a long way of telling you that,  , look at writers you can, you read for enjoyment and for information and stuff, but like, wow, I see how he or she got me into this story, and how they took me through this story, and how they made me feel something when I was were done reading the story.

Joe: Like you said, he put himself into the story too. That's what I try to do with my pieces. I like to think that I have a voice in there and enjoy writing about my family’s experiences when talking about a greater narrative.

Scott: Yes. And a lot of times with things that I write, I can't do that. I'll give you an example. I just wrote a story like the most recent issue of “Memories and Dreams,” which, again, I would encourage, they have really good writers.

Joe: I’m subscribed to it as a member of the Hall. Probably my favorite magazine that I look forward to. We got the Athletic the Atlantic, but I never look forward to anything like Memories and Dreams. It’s awesome, that’s my niche, you know?

Scott: I had taken my son, just as a civilian, to game three of the World Series. He's 11 years old, game three of the World Series at Yankee Stadium after 9/11, six weeks after, so I had proposed the idea to the Hall of Fame. But again, I have a great relationship with them and their people that run the magazine, and they said they were looking for stories for the 250th anniversary. And also, I told them, This is also the 25th anniversary of 9/11. They said, “Well, we're going to throw it into that issue that just came out on the 250th anniversary. And you know, it was about George Bush, George W Bush throughout the ceremonial first pitch that night.

Joe: My dad sent me that exact article, actually, like, super recently. Realistically, I think he's just as excited as I am!

Scott: Really? (laughs) As much as I wanted to, I couldn't put myself in the story, because they don’t want that, and that's fine, but I lived that story, and I felt all the emotions in the stadium that night, so I had an upper hand. And it's probably one of the 1000s and 1000s of games and events I've covered in my career. It was probably the most emotional night ever spent in the ballpark.

Joe: Oh yeah, for sure.

Scott: And just the whole thing. I mean, we were sitting in the upper deck at the old Yankee Stadium, and I could see the snipers up by the lights and the Bronx County Courthouse, which is the biggest building in the Bronx, is like two or three blocks from Yankee Stadium. Can see snipers up there, attack helicopters, just getting into all the background, I talked to Andy Pettite, I interviewed Joe Torre about it. I couldn't get Bush. It's really, really tough, but just recreated that story of how this was arguably the most pressure packed pitch ever delivered in baseball, and it was delivered by a guy who never played a single day of professional ball, and a guy wearing a bulletproof vest, and they didn't want him to go out there. Like, nobody wanted to be there at the state of that, but he saw the symbolism of that, here's a wounded city. There's people that are still frightened about going out. I mean, people in New York who've never looked up in the sky, looking up and see, well, they're looking up just walking the streets and seeing a plane, which they would never think anything of. There's planes over New York all the time, but now, everything in the sky had taken on a different meaning there. So you try to weave all that stuff into an 1800 word story. And again, you may not have constraints, so you can write as long as you need to, but what I would also encourage, when you're doing the editing process, say, for example, “I can cut this out.” And I think, I think, sometimes us writers will write extra words and stuff when you don't really need to do it. There's a power in it, if you say, like, Hemingway, he started as a newspaper correspondent, so his year during World War One, and his writing style was more sparse as a result, because he grew up in newspapers. Self editing is really important to go back and challenge yourself and say, “What do I want people walking away from this story, feeling and knowing? What do I want them to get from the story?” And sometimes you got to be harsh on yourself. Like, I've had times I thought, like, wow, I turned a phrase fairly well there. And then after I thought about it, it doesn't really fit. Yeah, it really doesn't fit. It doesn't move the story along. It's a nice anecdote, but it doesn't capture the essence of whom I'm writing about. So there's a lot of things, again, I get back to the neurotic thing about it. It's like red Smith, who was a great, great columnist for the New York Times, a sports columnist. I mean, he was cited by Hemingway, and in “The Old man and the Sea,” the old fisherman says “If we could only write like the great Red Smith.” I mean, that's really how good he was, and if you ever want to, he has so many books around, but you can go back and get a collection of these different columnists and their best stuff. And it's always good to read them, and you'll get ideas. And again, there is a strategy for writing. It doesn't just magically happen. Sometimes it does, but mostly you're working on it and thinking “What do I want to convey?”

 Joe: You had to spend a lot of time researching, for sure. That's a tough part for me. I feel like I always go off personal experiences, and I don't have enough research in there, so I tried to do that with the Art Shires piece, Gates Brown, alongside my personal experience, right? I was combing through SABR, some Cieradkowski pieces, and spent a while researching, which paid off.

Scott: And that’s good, you’ve got to love research.

Joe: It’s my weakest point, and I’m working on it.

Scott: Yes, even the great novelists, they're just sitting down creating things, but no, they're going back. Like I said when we did that historical novel, I wanted to make sure that it was true to everything, growing up in Harlem during the Harlem Renaissance, and all these incredible artists and writers in Harlem, and it's the epicenter of black America. And, you want to be accurate, like, my vision is not as good as it used to be, in large part because I probably did so much like going on microfilm and going back. I was doing Syracuse University stuff, and stumbled upon, like, wow, this is a great story. I want to incorporate this, whatever. So yeah, research can be tedious at times, but don't get away from that. It's great, like The Athletic is really good. There's a lot of very, very talented writers working for The Athletic. They've kind of filled the void that was left when they just really destroyed Sports Illustrated, but, yeah, read different styles and see how people come at research.

Joe: For sure, reading other works has the most influence. I can get diversified myself, and I can actually see the standpoints of the author and how they were feeling, even in nonfiction.

Scott: Yes, and again, Joe, it's not to try and copy someone's style, because then it can never be authentic if you do that. It could be playing sports or playing the guitar, or whatever. It's you just, it would come across as mimicking. But what you find is when you experiment more with the writing, you look and you start realizing what different writers are doing, and you'll develop your own style.

Joe: Subconsciously, too. I pick certain things up from authors without realizing.

Scott: Another thing too is, I noticed even as a writer in newspapers and even books or magazines, I've noticed over time, my style will change, and sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse. (laughs)  But, I've tried to be more and more sparse, with my prose, like a professor and some editors in my career told me. Verbs are the muscles of writing. We tend to throw all the other things, like, all these superlatives and whatever. So do that. One thing I will say - I haven't done deep, deep dives. I've read a couple of things that you've written. And one thing you do, you have a tendency to write from the heart, which is good. That's authentic. You also try to think, again, going back to the audience. Things like, with what I'm writing, does it have some sort of universal appeal? Now, again, I'm not saying for the world, but for even for your newsletter audience. Like, all right, yeah, they'll understand that. And sometimes you like to go beyond that. I’d say, I guess, go beyond your audience.

Joe: Thank you, and I’d say it's all loose at this point. Like, I'm all over the place. I don't really know what I want to write about, fully. Like, I have a lot of baseball pieces. I emphasize that, then I have other pieces, for example philosophy and ethics. And I want to make it like one broad standpoint where I can blend them all together.

Scott: Yeah? Well, one of the things, one of the reasons why I really enjoy writing for Memories and Dreams is that they often take an approach. It's not just history, although I love history and I minored in it, but, but it's baseball and its impact on culture. Obviously Jackie Robinson is the most obvious example of transcending the game

and what he had to deal with and so forth. But, there are other things like for example they said, look, we want you to write something about the impact historically black newspapers had.

Joe: I did read that one!

Scott: And if you watched 42, you know that Wendell Smith, right, is a confidant. 

Joe: Favorite movie! He was originally a Negro League writer, correct?

Scott: Right. And what's interesting is, he and Sam Lacy were maybe the two most prominent black sportswriters and for black newspapers, which were very powerful back in the day in creating and influencing. But they were both advocates, as early as in the 20s, they were advocating for integration, and so, well, well, long before the great experiment that was Jackie Robinson, they were pushing for that. 

Joe: So for the Jimmie Claxtons, the Charlie grants, and even the Moses Fleetwood Walkers.

Scott: Yeah! There was integrated baseball - like, when people say that, that Jackie Robinson integrated baseball, it's not entirely true. It's like he reintegrated, he broke the color line in the 20th century. And that's not taking anything away from that but that we don't want to forget Moses Fleetwood Walker, who played in Syracuse, and we don't want to forget:

Joe: Bud Fowler. 

Scott: Bud Fowler! I went to his grave on one of my research trips. He's in Frankfort, New York. And you can go visit. They redid it as part of SABR, as part of their projects, they redo forgotten ball players' gravestones or ones who never had gravestones, particularly Negro league players. And so they refinished the whole thing there in Cooperstown. And so I stopped. It's on a hill, the middle of nowhere, but you can find it if you Google and look, it'll take you there.

Joe: That’s great I never knew that, I should check it out eventually. Speaking of, have you been the the new Negro League exhibit at the hall, “Souls of the Game”? 

Scott: Oh yeah.

Joe: It's awesome, even before it was amazing. But they just added all those archives recently. 

Scott: Interactive stuff, too! Just like the Yakyu baseball.

Joe: My new favorite exhibit, I got to check it out recently and loved it.

Scott, Yeah, I was there for all that. I wrote stories on that too, and it was great. You know, the timing was perfect with Ichiro going in. I'm going down for the military classic, and the storefront that was next door to them, they're gonna move their store. There's a brand new Hall of Fame store that's right next to the Hall of Fame. It was the old five and dime store there. They call it a department store. And now, you know, it looks like the brick facade.

Joe: So I thought that was gonna be an extension of the gift shop, I didn’t know that, so it’s like a whole new, different type of store?

Scott: So that's gonna be the gift shop. And now the gift shop is going to be turned into an exhibit. It's exhibit space. So they'll be connected, and you can go in individually, like, you know, just off the street or whatever, yeah. So they're, they're doing all these different things, and they constantly try to change certain exhibits, you know, which

is great. With the museum, they've got to become more interactive, and they've got to become more visual, which is what has been done. And in the Yakyu exhibit, you can put your hand on the ball and try to do Hideo Nomo’s pitch. I'm going, like, I need bigger hands. 

Joe: Yeah, I don’t know about that one (laughs)

Scott: (laughs) I don't know how he, like, stretched his fingers over, you know? 

Joe: I mean, I just love the Japanese game overall, like, their approach with the singles-hitters, contact hitters, like that new guy on the Dodgers. What's his name? Kim, right? Yeah, something like that. But I was just watching him play the other day. His swing, it's like, downwards. He undercuts the ball. He just hits a single nearly every time he comes up, and he’s hitting around .330. So I'm excited to see what he does, along with the other overseas players. 

Scott: Yeah, it's in the history of the game, and how, you know, it was brought over. 

Joe: You can't tell the full story without talking about Japanese baseball, like Saduharo Oh. 

Scott: Oh yeah. 

Joe: I just love that they're globalizing it now and actually paying homage to a lot of those guys.

Scott: Yeah, and the other Asian players as well, you know, in South Korea, and so the other thing I had a lot of fun just doing recently was, and I'll get you a copy, it's part of the military classic game program. They gave it to me at the last minute. And it's about Nettuno, a city south of Rome in Italy, that is the baseball capital of Italy. It's more popular in that town than soccer. 

Joe: I studied abroad in Rome, got back a few months ago, back in December. Greatest 3 months of my life. That’s interesting to hear about, I wish I checked it out! 

Scott: Oh really? My wife and I are going in September, late September. We're doing all of Italy, but we're starting in Rome. 

Joe: Well if you need recommendations, give me a shout! I went all around Europe, pretty much.

Scott: Yeah, that's a great experience. Also, the GIS during World War Two, when they were on the beachhead for Anzio, which was one of the bloodiest battles of World War Two, tried to take over Italy and push the Germans out there. This little town became like the baseball capital there, and it became a sister city with Cooperstown. 

Joe: Really, I didn’t know about any of that. That’s interesting. 

Scott: You know, it kind of comes back to during the World Baseball Classic, the run that the Italian team had was really cool.

Joe: (laughs) With the espresso machines in the dugout.

Scott: And they really do that over there! I did the research and study and talked to people about it. And, you know, they drink wine during games, they have pasta dishes, at the ball park it's not hot dogs or whatever, you know?

Joe: Carb load! (laughs)

Scott: (laughs) Yeah, and they have espresso machines. By the way, speaking of collecting and so forth, I don't know if you saw but the espresso machine that team Italy used, they were sold at auction for $16,000 

Joe: That’s awesome!

Part 2 coming soon…