Interview #61: Zak Ford
Author of Called Up: Ballplayers Remember Becoming Major Leaguers
Zak Ford is a baseball writer who focuses on the human part of the game, in a day and age where players are increasingly reduced to their stats and attributes. No seriously, you can now see baseball players turned into AI robots and judge their swings with cold, ruthless efficiency. At least baseball cards used to have little personable facts next to the stats on the back. Look at Oneil Cruz now, he’s just a stick figure!
Anyways. Zak published Called Up: Ballplayers Remember Becoming Major Leaguers in 2023, featuring accounts from over 100 players recalling their experience getting brought up to the big leagues. These days, call-ups are almost made-for-social-media moments with videos posted regularly of prospects called into the manager’s office and being told they made it (they never show the clip from the Major League clubhouse of the guy getting sent down to make room for them). Seeing how the times have changed through the eyes of various rookies and their experience through the decades makes for an entertaining read.
He’s now in the process of wrapping his next book, Next Up, telling the stories of players after hanging up the cleats, which is due for publishing in 2026. You can check Zak out at his website: zakford.com and on Twitter @zakford.
Candlestick Park Memories
So you're from Northern California?
Since I was a kid, I've lived up in the Sacramento area.
What is the vibe for having the A's in town?
I went to a game about a month ago. Keep in mind that I had been to Sutter Health Park probably over 100 times. I'm familiar with the park. So that newness or that novelty isn't going to be there for me. I had attended Major League exhibition games there in the past, I've attended spring training games. To me it gave me the vibe of a spring training game, if that makes sense. I know that there are quite a few people that are interested in it. This is just me speaking. I'm more of a Giants fan.
I don't know if it really is something that's a huge turn on for people who are huge baseball fans. I think it's more the novice that's going to games more than anything else. That's just based upon what I saw out in one game so it's definitely not a comprehensive evaluation of the situation.
I wonder what it will be like in year 2 and 3 when it's not new anymore.
Initially, those tickets were super pricey. Things were filling up. I know that tickets are much more available now, just a month-and-a-half into it. We'll see how the next couple of years goes.
How did you end up a Giants fan?
To give you a little bit of background information, my extended family is divided amongst Giants and Dodger fans. So I have uncles who love the Dodgers. My grandma was a big Dodger fan. For some particular reason, my dad chose the Giants and passed that on to me. Being from Sacramento, just in proximity as well, that helped because we were able to go to a lot of Giants games when I was a kid. Candlestick Park, it's a pretty cheap place to watch a ball game. At that time, more of the excitement was actually along the A’s in the late 80s when you had the Bash Brothers.
It was just a nice cheap family outing. My parents would take me to a half-dozen, 10 ball games each year. We'd sit out in the old general admission at Candlestick Park. And as a young boy, I'd be exposed to things young boys probably shouldn't be exposed to, but there's a different kind of crowd out there. It's not the wine and cheese crowd that's over at Oracle Park now, but I had a blast. I really enjoyed the Giants of that era. They had a really good young team, they had Will Clark, Robbie Thompson, Matt Williams came a few years later. Kevin Mitchell came over. So they were really exciting there for a few years. Even though they tailed off in the 90s, I just always gravitated to the Giants and enjoyed them.
Oracle/Pac Bell opened in 2000, did you like the change in scenery?
I've been to quite a few games at Oracle. I've gone through all the name transitions. I still sometimes slip on what it is. I think this is the fourth name, or fifth name. You got Pac Bell, SBC, AT&T and Oracle? I think it's just been the four. I've enjoyed going to games there as well. It’s definitely a different experience, a little bit more upscale, which is fine. There's part of me that just does miss that blue collar kind of crowd. That's one of the things, admittedly, the last few years the A's were in Oakland, I had almost as good of a time going to games in Oakland as I did going to games at Oracle just because it was a different vibe. But I definitely love a ball game regardless of where I'm watching it.
I've gotten to a lot less games… I've started to go to a little bit more games over the last few years. Oftentimes I'll just go to a game by myself. For the longest time, my kids, I have a kid that's 20 and a kid that's 17, my son, my daughter, they're not overly interested in baseball. I'm not going to go to Oracle Park and buy tickets and parking and food and all that type of stuff, gas, and it would have cost $300+ to go to a game at Oracle Park. And they would have been bugging me by the 4th inning about when it was time to leave. I'm not gonna invest that amount of time and money into a experience like that very often. When the kids were younger, maybe a couple games a year.
Sounds like you grew up in a big baseball family.
Everybody was a baseball fan in my family. I was the biggest nerd of the bunch. Starting in 1987, when my dad took me to my first big league game, I just got hooked. It was just a place where we could go, we could bring in our own food. I have ticket stubs, we tried to go on like Tuesday nights. I think it was Tuesday nights and we would sit in the old general admission and it was like $2.50. This is even before they had the bleachers out there. It's $2.50 for general admission for adults and $1.25 for kids. We’d bring in our own food. Parking, $6 bucks, maybe $7. Gas was a lot cheaper, so my parents probably spent, for the entire experience, I'm sure they spent less than $50, including a trip for fast food on the way there or on the way back. Can’t do that now, even adjusted for inflation.
Have you been to a lot of stadiums?
I've probably been to about 15 to 20 of the active ones. For my level of nerdiness, that's probably not overly high. I've been to most, if not all, the ballparks on each coast, but Middle America is where I really need to pick up the pace. I've been to Wrigley. I've been to whatever it was, US Cellular, Rate, whatever used to be the new Comiskey. When I went there, it was still New Comiskey 20+ years ago. I've been to Minnesota last year. I think those are the only ballparks I've been to in Middle America.
Reaction: I wonder what the long-term effects, if any, will pop up now that a generation or two has grown up basically in the “prestige ballpark era”, without any memory of the old ballparks of the past, from the cavernous concrete cookie cutter era to the crumbling older ones, where anyone could afford to buy or scalp a ticket and take a ballgame in. At some point if you went to enough games, you’d run into all kinds of different people that you might never see at home or school or your main social circle. Especially at AT&T Park, but even at Chase Field, which has been poorly maintained to a degree, there seems to be a less economically diverse crowd at MLB games that lacks some charm.
One thing about Candlestick Park, no one ever says it was the best. But when they look back, they enjoyed being able to attend with large groups of people, tailgate, mingle, etc. even if the team was bad and the wind was freezing. Now that the Oakland Coliseum has been removed from the schedule, there really aren’t any of those kinds of blue-collar stadiums anymore, sadly. Hard to get repeat customers from certain tax brackets when it costs a week’s paycheck to take a family to a game and let them enjoy it.
Baseball Research and Called Up
Are you still with SABR (Society for American Baseball Research)?
I'm still a member. I'm no longer the chair. I stepped aside in December. I was leading the chapter for about five years, a little less than five years. I was co-chair for a year before that, but I've been involved in that chapter for, shoot, almost 30 years, literally since I was in high school.
How did that happen?
Been a baseball nerd since I was a little kid, found out about SABR when I was young. Attended meetings pretty much as soon as I got my driver’s license. At the time, there were no virtual meetings or even emails or texts, so to get your baseball fix, you either had to watch games on basic cable, which is all we had, or go to luncheon gatherings.
How did you get this itch to get into baseball researching?
As a baseball fan, I've always enjoyed the sport and learning a little bit more about it, and loved the historical aspects of it. There's just so much history, trying to learn about how things evolve to where they're at now. I did have a great uncle (Larry Powell) who used to play professional ball, he played in the old Pacific Coast League, pre-Giants and Dodgers. It was almost major league level on the West Coast and he played in that league in the late 30s through the mid- to late-40s. So as a kid, I'd go to his reunions with him and became friends with a lot of his old teammates and opponents. I branched out from there and got to know a lot of older guys that played with Babe Ruth or Jackie Robinson, Willie Mays. They'd be able to tell me these firsthand stories that were just incredible and it just gravitated me to the sport and the history of the sport. It’s something that I've always attached myself to is the history of the game.
So he was there, late 30s? So he missed Joe DiMaggio and Ted Williams then.
He missed Joe DiMaggio; I think Joe DiMaggio’s last year with the Seals was 1935, if I remember right. My uncle, after the 1939 season with the San Francisco Seals, he was purchased in the same deal by the Red Sox as Dom DiMaggio, Joe DiMaggio’s young brother. Dom DiMaggio the next year ended up starting off his pretty successful big league career that a lot of people forget about because obviously his brother Joe was so much of a higher profile athlete and more successful. But Dominic DiMaggio definitely was no slouch.
My uncle played the following year in San Francisco and then ‘41, they kind of knew he was going in the service, so he jumped around a little bit. He didn't make the Red Sox out of spring training, and he came back in 1946 after service in World War II, made the Red Sox out of spring training, but after a couple of weeks, without getting into a game, he actually got released and then got picked up by the Boston Braves for about a week, the same thing happened. So he's what they consider a “phantom” major leaguer, meaning that he's been on a Major League roster but never got into a game.
I got to know ballplayers that played in the 20s. It was crazy. Tony Freitas was the first ballplayer that I got to interview. Tony Freitas pitched to Babe Ruth, Babe Ruth hit a home run off of him. He's telling me these stories first hand, it's just amazing. I got to know Frankie Crosetti, who was a longtime Yankee player and coach. He came up during the Babe Ruth era and stepped aside towards the end of the Mickey Mantle era, so he was there for all those golden years of the Yankees. He's telling me about the 1932 World Series and The Called Shot. He said he didn't call his shot. He told me about the real story behind the myth.
I had a great experience, a very unique experience as a teenager, going around to my uncle’s reunions and getting contacts with the guys and taking the bus to their house even before I had their driver’s license. It always gave me an appreciation for the historical side of baseball and also gave me a little bit more of an understanding of the human interest side behind baseball and the human element, understanding that baseball players are human as well. They were able to accomplish something that all of us dreamed of when we were kids.
Did you have specific time periods you tried to reach for the first book?
The debut ranges, they start in 1961 with Sudden Sam McDowell is the first story. The most recent debut is 2018, which is Patrick Wisdom, who was with the Cubs up until last year. He's in the KBO now, so he's still an active major leaguer. My only criteria was if you're willing to chat with me and you were on a Major League roster, I wanted to include you in my book. I was able to capture 109 stories in the book, and I'm very thankful for that.
We all see these viral videos each year, somebody calling up their mom or an old coach or their dad or whoever, after multiple years of grinding it out in the minor leagues. And it shows the human-interest side of the call-up. I always had been kind of attracted to that. I did a little bit of research and realized that nobody had done a book on that. Nobody had captured a collection of those stories, and I figured, hey, why not be the one that goes ahead and tackles a project like that? So that's what I did. That's what Called Up ended up being.
What kinds of differences and similarities did you notice among the different generations of player?
All of them achieved that dream of becoming a Major League Baseball player. I did breakdown the stories in debut order. With these stories broken down in those particular sections within the book, you can see different themes about what impacted Major League rosters during that particular time, whether it be expansion, whether it be the rise in relief pitching.
How they got the news of their Major League debuts, too. Some of the more recent ones, it's getting a text message and saying, hey, come into the office or something like that. Obviously that wasn't something that was going to happen in the 1960s. So say for example, Jerry Reuss, who's the longest tenured player in the book at 22 Major League seasons, he got his news in 1969 through a registered letter. You wouldn't think that anybody would get a registered letter saying, OK, well, you're going to report to the Cardinals on this particular date. How the game has evolved, into how more pitching is carried by Major League teams right now over the last 30-40 years, all those aspects impacted call ups and debuts. That you could kind of pick up on as you're reading along the book.
What prompted the new book idea? I guess it's only natural that you went on to working on the post-playing days.
I wanted to give fans a better understanding of what baseball players face when they hang up their cleats. A lot of people just think that they could kind of sail off into the sunset and not have jobs and just sip martinis and hang out at the pool. But the vast majority of the guys can't do that. And the reality is, who wants to do that when you're retired, when you're 35 years old, to do that for 40 years. People don't understand that would also get a little bit boring. The vast majority of the guys that I interviewed for Called Up, they weren't guys that necessarily became household names or made millions of dollars in the game. They’re guys like I had indicated earlier who may have spent a half-dozen, 10 years in the minor leagues before getting a few cups of coffee.
The vast majority of these guys do need to enter careers after their playing days and usually relatively quick. A lot of these guys are still somewhere around 30 years old, sometimes younger, sometimes a few years older, so they need to figure out something else for that next career move, that next passion. So these stories for the next book in Next Up will be when they kind of saw the writing on the wall that their playing careers were winding down, how it is that they found that next passion in another follow up career, what they've been doing. Some of it will also be personal life details in there as well. How baseball provided benefits or challenges in their careers post playing.
I couldn't imagine being somebody that’s excelled at something since I was a boy and I reached the pinnacle of my profession and then all of a sudden, I have a little bit of an injury or something like that, and I can never come back, and I've been so focused on achieving that dream and being a success, and let's say I have been a success. But I still have a lot of life ahead of me, right? I still have bills that I'm going to have to pay, so I need to find something else. When it comes to baseball, football, hockey, basketball, the main sports, they're really a young person’s game. I know that. Shoot, just working out is a lot more difficult at 46 years old than it was 15-20 years ago. And obviously I've never done anything at that high of an impact level as some of these guys. And I'm not trying to compete with 20-year-olds or 25-year-olds. If I could feel it through just basic exercise and everything, I couldn't imagine how it impacts ballplayers who have to recover and keep up.
Is there an individual, or a type of, player that you most want to talk to that you haven't or didn't get to for the first project? Do you have like an all-time favorite player you wish you could have talked to?
I was able to capture some great stories, but unrelated to the Called Up book, my first favorite baseball player was Chili Davis. When I was first getting into the Giants, the first couple of years, he was the star of the Giants. And he had a really cool name, too. As a little kid, I'd be lying if I didn't say that his name had a little bit of traction to me as well. I think his last season with the Giants was ’87, so I wasn't too heavy in baseball by the time he actually left the Giants, but he was my first baseball player. I definitely would love to have the opportunity to meet him sometime and chat with him. That would definitely be separate from the writing project, but one of these days I need to be able to shake his hand and take a picture with him.
Red Adams Tribute
I looked up your SABR page and there's you in a Giants shirt under a Dodgers jersey?
Yeah. I told you about how my extended family is divided amongst Giants and Dodgers. To add an additional element to that, when I was first getting into interviewing players of the old Pacific Coast League, my uncle suggested I reach out to a gentleman by the name of Red Adams. Red Adams was also a player in the Pacific Coast League when he was playing. They came from a similar era, kept in contact, they were teammates in 1947 and ‘48 with the Los Angeles Angels of the Pacific Coast League, kept in contact, Red ended up having a pretty successful coaching career with the Dodgers.
So I reached out to Red Adams and Red Adams was very accommodating. I'm not exaggerating, he's probably one of my favorite all time people, just an incredible guy. Went out to his house a few times, we’d trade letters every once in a while, chat on the phone occasionally.
I had lost contact with Red for a decade. Starting my career, having a family, him getting a little bit older, just busy-ness. I talked to him at the end of 2015. I could tell he was starting to lose a little bit of memory, his wife had passed. I sent him a birthday card the year after and it was returned. And then I just assumed that it was kind of done. I kind of lost contact with him, maybe he had passed, something like that.
But in 2016, I was watching, and I've always had an appreciation for Vin Scully, baseball history, etc, and I was watching the beginning of Vin Scully Weekend, his last weekend at Dodger Stadium. I was watching all the festivities Friday night and I just made the crazy decision: I'm going to go down there for the last two games. When I went down there, I actually brought a Red Adams jersey. It was one of his 1980 gamer jerseys that I had purchased on eBay a few years prior. I don't know why I really brought it 'cause it was something I'd definitely want to make sure I didn't lose, figured this would be kind of a way to say goodbye to Red. I considered it a Red Adams jersey, not a Dodgers jersey.
I came back and I decided, well, why not try and track down Red? So I did some Google searching, found some of the names for his surviving family, made some phone calls, and then his oldest daughter actually called me up, probably within a week or so of me attempting this and said, hey, yeah, he's still around. He's at a memory care facility in the Fresno area. So I decided to reconnect with Red in the last three or four months of his life. We were able to have 4 visits and rekindle that friendship.
After he passed that following January, I just decided, why not make that an annual tradition? So I had some additional Red Adams jerseys made. I sent them off to all of his surviving kids and grandkids and made one for myself, because the original one was a gamer I wanted to keep up on my wall. So this year I believe will be my 10th year doing Dodger Stadium and wearing that Red Adams jersey in his memory as a friend. But I always wear a Giants shirt underneath just to make sure I don't end up with a skin burn or anything like that.
Definitely a unique story with me being a Giants fan, but more than anything else, I'm just a fan of baseball and a fan of good, solid people, regardless of whether or not they are with the Giants organization of the Dodgers organization.
You can read that article here, it’s a nice tribute: It’s a Red Adams Jersey, Not a Dodgers Jersey
Thanks to Zak Ford for taking time out from interviewing ex-Major Leaguers to do an interview of himself. It’s still important, and I think people still have a desire for, stories and books and articles that paint the players in those uniforms as human beings, too. We get so bogged down in statistical analysis and reducing players into whatever looks sexy in a database that we forget these are still human beings, just as flawed as all of us are, trying to be productive at a game that involves hitting a round ball with a round bat; and if they do it successfully only 22% of the time, they lose their job, but at 25% of the time and they become an every day player and 30%, a multi-millionaire.
I'll have to look for this book by my fellow Sacramentan. (even though he's a Giants fan) 😂