Baseball buff

Matt Silverman '88 has authored 10 books with baseball themes. His latest is "Swinging 1973."

From time to time, Roanoke College magazine has included news about alumni who have had books published. But in the past year, the number seemed to swell, as did the variety in literary style and genre. Matt Silverman '88 is one of several alumni whose recently released books represent that diversity.

As an English major at Roanoke College, Matthew Silverman '88 once spent money he really couldn't afford to fly to New York for the first two games of the 1986 World Series. 

Since then, Silverman has parlayed that passion for sports - Major League Baseball in particular - into a writing, editing and blogging career. Silverman is author or co-author of 10 books, all with baseball themes. 

His latest, released in 2013, is "Swinging 1973; Baseball's Wildest Season," an entertaining and meticulously researched look at one of baseball's watershed seasons.

Silverman has sobering advice to those optimists who would follow a similar sports-related career path. 

"You have be flexible and you have to be lucky," he says. "To be perfectly honest, it sounds great on paper, but there have been a lot of things that have not gone right."

His latest book was essentially three years in the making, with a substantial part of that time simply finding a publisher. Connecticut's Lyons Press eventually agreed to take it on. 

The result was a history of the 1973 season, as told through the stories of three teams:  the New York Yankees, Oakland Athletics and New York Mets. 

The Yankees, baseball's most famous franchise, were emerging from a long period of irrelevance, under the new ownership of George Steinbrenner, and on the doorstep of a fresh run as a championship contender. The Mets, New York native Silverman's favorite team, were the 1969 champs who would make an unlikely run to the '73 Series. The swashbuckling A's, the eventual champs, were one of baseball's great dynasties but under-appreciated in the day and now largely forgotten. 

Woven throughout the narrative was a timeline of social and cultural history that runs parallel to the baseball story. Anybody who lived during that tumultuous era would recognize the references to "All in the Family," Pink Floyd's "Dark Side of the Moon," and Bruce Springsteen's breakthrough classic "The Wild, the Innocent, & the E Street Shuffle." 

There was also Watergate. Swinging '73's priceless reference to the resignation of tax- offending Vice President Spiro Agnew was through an anecdote of a fan standing in line at McDonald's listening to a game from the National League championship series between the Mets and Cincinnati Reds on a transistor radio and earpiece, and relaying details to the girl behind the counter. The broadcast was interrupted with important news.

"Agnew just resigned," the fan announced. 

"Who cares?" the girl replied. "What's the score?"

Silverman cares about both writing and history. From Roanoke, he went on to use those skills as a newspaper reporter and editor, researcher and publisher. He is working on a book about the famous 1986 series between the Mets and the Boston Red Sox, with an expected release in 2016.

It's been fun but not easy, Silverman maintains. His parting advice to would-be writers and historians: Find a second career to help pay the bills.

"Writing books is not something you can really plan for."

- Ray Cox