Philadelphia Weekly

Doug Glanville was a pretty good ballplayer. He spent almost a decade in the major leagues, including six years with the Phillies. He hit .300 twice, played in a few playoff series. Then, when he was 34 and trying to catch on with the Yankees, he got called into then-Manager Joe Torre’s office—he’d been cut. He’d been, as he says, “put out to pasture.”

Many athletes flounder once out of the spotlight. Despite wealth, accolades and status, they have a resume with very little real-world application. Out of the spotlight, multitudes of “everyday players” fade back into reality, searching for the next step. Welcome to your new life, Doug Glanville.

Fast forward to 2009.

On the back dust cover of my new book there’s a quote,” says ESPN.com writer Jayson Stark. “It’s by Doug Glanville, New York Times.”

The onetime Phillie is now a columnist in the nation’s newspaper of record—a columnist of such repute that his byline on the back of Stark’s book about the 2008 Phillies doesn’t even deign to mention the fact that he was once the Phils’ longtime centerfielder.

In telltale sportswriter-speak, Stark gives the up-to-date scouting report on Glanville:

"He’s got the brains, he’s got the form, he’s got the personality—he’s got it all. His platform is unlimited. He fits fine in the New York Times world but he could fit fine in any world—that’s the beauty of Doug Glanville. He’s just a remarkable guy.

I don’t know where this is leading but he could turn out to be one of the most visionary, well-read, highly respected voices on baseball. When you read the stuff he writes, he lets you in … on a level that only a former player could get to, as hard as anybody else could try.”

To lifelong Phillies fans, the transformation from “Doug Glanville, Centerfielder” to “Doug Glanville, New York Times” is hardly a surprise. Glanville took seriously every mother’s advice that education provides a safety net. He graduated from Penn with a degree in engineering. He’d written a few pieces during his playing days, but his “break” came in December 2007. As Glanville read the media’s coverage of the blockbuster Mitchell report on steroids in baseball, he felt moved to speak.

"I chose to play clean but I wanted to talk about the difficult choices that players face,” says Glanville, who resides in Chicago, “so I wrote a piece for ESPN.com about my personal thoughts.”

A friend of Glanville’s who wrote for the New York Times suggested Glanville draft a similar piece for the Times.

The resulting work was an evocative description of Glanville’s arc from blue-chip rookie to aging roleplayer. It described the fears that characterize a ballplayer’s quick slide toward retirement.

"There is a tipping point in a player’s career where he goes from chasing the dream to running from a nightmare,” Glanville wrote. “At that point, ambition is replaced with anxiety, passion is replaced with survival. It is a downhill run and it spares no one.”

The piece was a hit. The Times gave Glanville a column, called Heading Home.

"I met a woman who was a journalism professor at Northwestern and she told me it was the only piece she’d cut out of the paper in like three years," says Glanville. "At that moment I knew I was on to something trying to just humanize the baseball experience.”

Since then, Heading Home has been a reliable source for serious and not so serious insight into the game and the business of baseball. Reliably, Glanville tries to draw on common ground he has with his readers to make baseball more accessible. He’s currently assembling a book that walks the reader through a “universal season.”

"[Cubs 3B] Aramis Ramirez had a baby last year during the season, what happened there? What was that like? You were on the disabled list … you ran on an underwater treadmill?”