Sometimes one of the best parts of the journey through life are the unexpected people you meet along the way. Through our work with both the School of the New York Times and at Columbia, we were introduced to Fernando Perez and his circuitous route from the New Jersey suburbs through Ivy league baseball to the Major Leagues and now into the media field, where he is quickly becoming one of the more thoughtful and well-spoken personalities not just in sports, but in everything from race relations to poetry to the way we deal with success and failure.
We captured Fernando’s thoughts on our Columbia University Sports Podcast in a wide ranging interview you can listen to here, but we targeted some additional questions for him below.
Don’t know Fernando? How’s this for size.
Born in Elizabeth, New Jersey. Perez attended the Peddie School before moving on to Columbia where he studied American studies and creative writing, training he later used to become the first Major League Baseball player published in Poetry Magazine. At Columbia, he played baseball for three years before being selected by the Rays in the 7th round (195th overall) of the 2004 Major League Baseball Draft. He ended up being an interesting cog in the Tampa Rays rise to success, and was a late season and important call up to Tampa as they played their way to the 2008 World Series. His MLB career was curtailed by injuries, but his stops through the minor leagues along the way gave him a look at aside of America he had never seen before.
After finishing baseball, Perez has moved on to the media side of the business, working for MLB.com, Vice Sports and a host of other outlets, giving a very unique and thoughtful look at the game, society in America, and the role competitive athletics plays in lives today.
He offered up some of those thoughts below, in addition to an even deeper dive into his experiences, positive and negative on all things in baseball and media.
The traditions past and present of baseball at Columbia are pretty strong. Did you choose Morningside Heights for Lou Gehrig or Pulitzer Prize winners or both?
I chose Columbia for the beatnik poets! I was more interested in Howl and the Weather Underground than I was Lou Gehrig. Ironically, The fabled west end pub became the aspiring yuppie bar of Kerouac’s nightmares.
I dreamed of taking part in the Jazz scene– The village vanguard was entirely preserved, down to the pews, but it cost 40 bucks for an hour set in 2000. Smalls on Christopher Street was as close as you could get to that beatnik nostalgia our generation (Y) was sold–smalls was BYOB and you could hear jam sessions until 10am.
You played for a bit of a renaissance man in Joe Maddon with the Rays just as the team was rising to prominence. What was your experience like around him vs. more traditional managers you played for?
Joe is my favorite coach I’ve ever had in any sport, but I think that it’s very important to highlight the fact that even Joe, when he is praised, continues to try to remind people that he is mostly applying common sense in scenarios baseball people have not.
Joe Maddon’s celebration is as much a function of how talented he is, as it is a function of how averse to being different and thinking differently almost everyone else in baseball has been.
Baseball probably gave you lots of fodder for your writing career which continues to grow. How did your time playing professionally help you grow as a writer?
Baseball gave me a steady job that gave me an opportunity to continue writing just for the sake of writing. I occasionally wrote things professionally but most of the writing I did was just “uncalled for”–maybe it would have been better for my development as a writer to be under the gun but I feel most writers would be grateful for this circumstance.
I wrote more in those first four years of baseball than I did in college.
Who was the biggest influence on your life personally and professionally?
I was very lucky to have a lot of coaches that wanted it for me as bad or worse than I wanted it for myself. Frank Schermerhorn (my HS coach) and Brian Gabriel (now at Miami).
My parents are the most important people to me. I’m realizing the world is literally full of billions of people that love you less than your parents.
Growing up were you driven more for a passion for writing or for playing baseball, and did the two clash that much?
Right now I’m trying to write about the tension between the two worlds–we could call them arts vs sports. It’s something that begins in middle school recess I think. It has always felt natural for me to straddle them– And that has mostly sucked as an experience. It’s complicated. I’m still working on these ideas and I’ve been thinking about this for half of my life. The sides publicly hate each other but secretly love each other; they’re both often right about the other when complaining about the other; they’re both often very boring when complaining about the other.
So much is made of personal brand these days, did your MLB career help you to further grow as a journalist or did it hold you back at all?
When people find out I used to be a baseball player, they tend to talk to me like I’m a cartoon character. It’s a bit like the way Americans treat foreigners with strong accents–an assumption we are stupid and/or living in a still life painting. It’s like, you must be an idiot if you chased a ball around a yard for a decade–who doesn’t love dogs? WTF
For this reason I regularly omitted the baseball portion of my bio when meeting people. I’d even do this when meeting lots of baseball fans! (Another story) I also spent significant time trying to be as far away from the game as possible, which is pretty common for guys whose careers end ungracefully. (also another, longer story)
Unless you played ten years in the big leagues, finding work as an analyst is difficult. As a baseball writer, I’m still sort of unsure about my voice–the market has become dominated by fantasy talk for which I couldn’t care less. There is a certain tone that many sports writers default to: a self-serious expectation of consistency in players and teams (which is mathematically impossible),
Persistent denial of the fact that only one team wins every year (what’s wrong with these bums/we deserve a championship etc.). Players’ experience on the other side of the fence makes them too “down to earth” to take this tone.
We all know about the traditions of baseball, but you were a bit of an outlier. What do you think baseball needs to do more of to adapt to a changing world?
There’s this assumption–which I’ve given in to on occasion–that baseballs problems will be solved if all the players start acting like professional wrestlers to entertain the fans. This baseball etiquette thing is certainly holding the game back, but the obvious answer to your question–to which “baseball” continues to somehow be aloof–is that baseball should try to REFLECT the changing world. The league is almost a third Latino and the only Latin culture you’ll come across in baseball stadiums is maybe a Taco Bell night or something awful involving sombreros.
Baseball would be served to embrace uniqueness and celebrate what is different about its players, but unfortunately, it is a sport obsessed with homogeneity.
What advice do you give young people starting out in careers, whether it is in sports or the media?
Play baseball, But PLAY OTHER SPORTS.
Write about sports but WRITE ABOUT OTHER THINGS TOO FOR THE LOVE OF GOD BASEBALL IS ONLY A GAME AND SPORTS’ PRIMARY FUNCTION IN SOCIETY IS TO DISTRACT US FROM WHAT IS REALLY GOING ON!
