Letters to the Editor: ‘I don’t sleep in October’ — on being a Dodger fan right now
I didn’t sleep last night
What a story I’ve just read in the San Francisco Examiner about writer Stephen Zimny. From his first-person account of his decision to live in the Bay Area, to his life here and his decision to walk away from “the game” after watching a World Series that ended too soon, and his decision to write about it for a newspaper, the story has been a big one. I can see why Zimny chose to write about his time growing up in San Diego County. I can’t really explain why he chose to write about his time growing up in the Bay Area.
I’ll try to explain.
In the Examiner story, as I read Zimny’s story about the decision to move to the Bay Area in the summer of 1974 — and about his first season with the Angels — all of a sudden he seems like the perfect guy to write about his early years. He chose to live in the Bay Area to start writing. He chose to write about baseball because, well, he’s a writer. But he also wanted to make his way in the world of baseball.
What I didn’t see, or didn’t understand, is why a kid who moved from a small, coastal town to San Francisco to write about baseball wanted to grow up in the Bay Area to write about baseball.
In the story, he was a writer. He was a sportswriter. But that writer didn’t want to be a star ballplayer. I didn’t understand his choice. It seemed like a strange one. But here I am, reading Zimny’s article in the newspaper, and I’m thinking, “Well, I can see why a writer would want to live in the Bay Area to write about baseball. I can see why a writer would write about baseball.”
Zimny was a writer, a sportswriter. No doubt about it. And he left that life to pursue baseball, because he was passionate about