About The Guest:
John Miller is a journalist, author, and baseball historian. He grew up in Belgium with American parents who were professional musicians. With a deep love for journalism and baseball, he pursued a career as a journalist and eventually landed a position with the Wall Street Journal. After leaving the Journal, he produced a PBS documentary on a mining town and is currently working on a book about legendary Hall of Fame manager Earl Weaver.
Summary:
John Miller, a journalist and author, shares his journey from working at the Wall Street Journal to pursuing his passion for storytelling and baseball. After leaving the Journal, he embarked on a six-month wandering period, exploring different career paths and finding clarity in his desire to continue working as a journalist. He produced a documentary on a mining town and began writing for America, a monthly magazine. He is currently working on a book about Earl Weaver, a legendary baseball manager. Through his experiences, John has learned the importance of embracing failure, adapting to change, and finding meaning in his work.
Key Takeaways:
Quotes:
Becoming Undone is a NiTROHype Creative production. Written and produced by me, Toby Brooks. If you or someone you know has a story of resilience and victory to share for Becoming Undone, contact me at undonepodcast.com. Follow the show on Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn at becomingundonepod and follow me at TobyJBrooks. Listen, subscribe, and leave us a review Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.
About The Guest:
John Miller is a journalist, author, and baseball historian. He grew up in Belgium with American parents who were professional musicians. With a deep love for journalism and baseball, he pursued a career as a journalist and eventually landed a position with the Wall Street Journal. After leaving the Journal, he produced a PBS documentary on a mining town and is currently working on a book about legendary Hall of Fame manager Earl Weaver.
Summary:
John Miller, a journalist and author, shares his journey from working at the Wall Street Journal to pursuing his passion for storytelling and baseball. After leaving the Journal, he embarked on a six-month wandering period, exploring different career paths and finding clarity in his desire to continue working as a journalist. He produced a documentary on a mining town and began writing for America, a monthly magazine. He is currently working on a book about Earl Weaver, a legendary baseball manager. Through his experiences, John has learned the importance of embracing failure, adapting to change, and finding meaning in his work.
Key Takeaways:
Quotes:
Becoming Undone is a NiTROHype Creative production. Written and produced by me, Toby Brooks. If you or someone you know has a story of resilience and victory to share for Becoming Undone, contact me at undonepodcast.com. Follow the show on Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn at becomingundonepod and follow me at TobyJBrooks. Listen, subscribe, and leave us a review Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.
My boss got moved to Toronto and so I had a remote situation and I just got very lonely and I was turning 40 and things started stirring in my heart and the paper offered these buyouts, which were meant for older people, not really for me, but I took it as, okay, I do wanna quit now. I've been there 13 years and just in my heart, I wanted something else and it was a very tumultuous process. I left the paper and I just wanted to do something that was different. I wasn't quite sure what that was. So I had a six month wandering period where I thought about everything from becoming a Catholic priest to becoming a private investigator, spend time in a monastery, lots of just sorting it out. Pretty good moment of clarity this monk in Belgium said, you're really miserable and you're gonna keep being miserable if you try to give up your life. You have to go back to what you were doing before and just do it differently, do it better. Basically said get a job and a girlfriend. I still believe in storytelling and journalism and as I always tell younger people can only ever tell a story one word at a time. I'm John Miller and I am Undone. Hey friend, I am glad you're here. Welcome to another episode of Becoming Undone, the podcast for those who dare bravely, risk mightily, and grow relentlessly. I'm Toby Brooks, a speaker, an author, and a professor. Over the past two decades, I've worked as an athletic trainer and a strength coach and over the years I've grown more and more fascinated with what sets high achievers apart and how those failures that can stink in the moment can end up being exactly the spark we need to launch us on our path toward success. Each week on Becoming Undone, I invite new guests to examine how high achievers can transform from falling apart to falling into place. This is your first episode. I really hope you enjoy it. I hope maybe you'll poke around in the archives and find some other guests, each one a high achiever who didn't let failure or setbacks stand in the way of their eventual victory. And if you're a regular, I'm forever in your debt. Launching a podcast has been one of the most gratifying yet challenging things I've ever done. Some days I felt like I was changing the world. Other days I felt like absolutely no one was listening. And some days, both of those were probably true. So from the bottom of my heart, thank you for joining me on this journey and for being an encouragement and inspiration to me along the way. I'd like to emphasize that this show is entirely separate from my role as a professor, but it's my attempt to apply what I've learned and what I'm learning and to share with others about the mindsets of high achievers. Journalist and author John Miller grew up in Belgium with his American parents, both professional musicians. And without a TV in the house, his regular copy of the International Herald Tribune served as his connection point to the outside world. With a deep love of both journalism and baseball, playing collegiately and professionally overseas. While also he pursued a career as a wordsmith, eventually landing a position with the Wall Street Journal. However, as much as he grew to appreciate his career as a renowned expert in minerals and mining economy, when an opportunity came to leave his job and chase his dreams, he took it. Eventually, he produced a PBS documentary on a mining town before tackling his latest project, a book about legendary Hall of Fame manager, Earl Weaver. I hope you'll enjoy my conversation with author, journalist, and baseball historian, John Miller, in episode 68, One Word at a Time. Sometimes guests I've known for years and other times guests just have stories that just fall in my lap. And John Miller reached out to me last week. He's working on a project. We'll definitely dig into that in a minute, but John is an author and formerly of the Wall Street Journal and has a storied career as an author and a journalist, so John, welcome. Glad you're here today. Thank you. It's nice to be here, Toby. Yeah. Let's start with you. I always start with a little bit of an easy one to begin. What'd you want to be growing up and why? Uh, I wanted to be what I'm doing now, which is a journalist. I grew up overseas in Belgium and both my parents were classical musicians and we had no television. So the newspaper was the hottest thing in the house. It's what gripped me, it's what seemed like the most interesting and exciting. I love good writing and stories. And so when I was six or seven, I remember thinking, man, I want to be a part of this. This is like something that is so alive and so interesting. And the newspaper that we got was a paper called the International Herald Tribune, which was basically a joint venture between the New York Times and the Washington Post of their best articles. And so they would often take this baseball writer named Tom Boswell, who was a great baseball writer for the Washington Post. And Tom Boswell covered the Orioles and he was obsessed with Earl Weaver. So from the time I was six or seven, I thought two things. I thought, I want to be a journalist. And wow, this guy Earl Weaver sounds pretty fascinating. Then parallel to that, I played baseball in the eighties. There was a big American community in Belgium and had a really good, strong baseball leagues. The first girl ever to play in the little league world series in Williamsport was on a team from Belgium, Victoria Roche and in 1984, her father was my coach. And so I grew up with these kind of twin passions of journalism and baseball. That's great. It's not often that people answer that question with much that relates to what they're doing today, but it hasn't been a direct line and it's taken you a bit to get there. And so I guess before we look at what you're doing currently, growing up in Belgium, obviously you're based out of Pittsburgh now. So talk us through that process. Start at the beginning, wherever that was. So I knew I wanted to be a journalist and I also wanted to play baseball. So I ended up going to college in America to play baseball at a small school in Western Maryland called Mount St. Mary's and was the editor of the college paper. So I did baseball and journalism. Moved back to Brussels when I was 21 and got a job at a small magazine called the Bulletin and things worked out really smoothly for me. I'm 46, so I was, this was 1999, my first job. And after four or five years, somebody, as a bureau chief for the Wall Street Journal read a piece I wrote and basically wandered it off the street and offer me a job. I was 26. So I had the kind of career where it was like a dream. Everything worked out very smoothly. So I joined the journal in 2004 and then I was in Brussels for seven years covering trade, economics, moonlit for different projects. Like I covered the soccer World Cup in South Africa. When they, if they need an extra reporter, cause it's a global newsroom, you just get caught up for stuff like that. So that was very thrilling. And I covered the Tour de France, bicycle race, and I moved to Pittsburgh in 2011. So I had a first, the early reset or crisis. I had been married to a Belgian woman and we got divorced. And so I wanted a change of scenery. I'd been in Brussels my whole life and this marriage was falling apart and I needed a different place to go. And so the journal offered me this job in Pittsburgh covering mining. And so it was a job in metals. I was based in Pittsburgh and covering everything from coal in West Virginia and Illinois. I've been to coal mines in Illinois to iron ore in Brazil and diamonds in Africa and really fascinating job. I loved it. In 2016, the paper cut back on expenses. So there was not as much money to travel. My boss got moved to Toronto and so I had a remote situation before COVID. And I just got very lonely and I was turning 40 and things started stirring in my heart and they offered, the paper offered these buyouts, which were meant for older people, not really for me. I was in good standing and young and not that expensive and they didn't really want me to quit. But I took it as, okay, I do want to quit now. I've been there 13 years and just in my heart, I wanted something else. And it was a very tumultuous process. I don't know if I'm getting ahead of myself there. I left the paper in the end of 2016. And probably too was the crisis in journalism and politics where it was that very bitter election and there's just not a lot of thoughtfulness and people are calling each other names. And I just wanted to do something that was different. I didn't want to be one of those reporters going into a diner in a small Rust Belt town and buttonholing people and saying, why'd you vote for Trump? I wanted to do something deeper about the country and for my own kind of journalistic journey. I wasn't quite sure what that was. So I had a six month real wandering period where I thought about everything from becoming a Catholic priest to becoming a private investigator, spend time in a monastery, lots of just sorting it out. Pretty good moment of clarity. This monk in Belgium said, you're really miserable and you're gonna keep being miserable if you try to give up your life. You have to go back to what you were doing before and just do it differently, do it better, or do it in a way that's more authentic to your heart. Basically said get a job and a girlfriend. So I went back to Pittsburgh and I cooked up this idea for a movie, which is the profile of a small town in West Virginia. And I'm very proud of it. It's an hour long movie. It's an oral history of the town, but it doesn't have any outside experts or academics. And there's no talk of Trump or opioids or coal. It's basically take away the stereotypes about a small West Virginia town and who are the people there and what do they do for a living. I just want to relate a little bit to what you did with your book because it's a town that benefited a lot from this boom time and when it was, it hosted the world's biggest toy factory, they made Rock'em Sock'em Robots, it was this very thriving little town and then as the sort of winds of consumer taste and all kinds of reasons, kids started playing video games, they stopped buying toys. Like that wasn't any politician's fault, that wasn't China's fault. That was just things change. The film John's talking about here is called Moundsville and you can find it on YouTube or at moundsville.org. It's a fascinating glimpse at the tough spot many towns in rural America find themselves. Hope and optimism interspersed and tempered with other periods of loss and sorrow. Its population density has shifted due to things like air conditioning, more intricate supply chains, and a whole bunch of social and economic factors, it's led many small towns to wonder what happened to a once promising outlook. Many drives through small town America with long-term residents can be narrated with reminders of what buildings used to be, and what businesses used to be there. Moundsville is a fantastic and well-done piece, and while it focuses on just one small town in West Virginia, themes that John raised are consistent in so many other places across the country. Not only did the effort give John experience as a filmmaker, it also whetted his appetite as a historian, which ultimately opened the door to his current project. And so I wanted to capture that complexity. So I did that and it got picked up by PBS. At the same time, I started writing for America, which is a monthly magazine run by the Jesuits, people are, and your listeners are Catholic, which lets me do like very thoughtful, long form pieces. I did a piece last year that went viral about privatization of youth baseball that won an award from New York Press Club and that was pretty neat to tackle that. I coach for a travel team. I work for this company in Switzerland that does economic analysis. I've done a lot of like really interesting things and now I'm working on this book, which is about Earl Weaver, my lifelong hobby and fascination. And probably too, as being a fan of the Baltimore Orioles, which in the 1970s were the best team in baseball. And then when he left, they fell apart basically. And so I beg the question too, does the baseball manager make a difference? And what's leadership? How does that work? There are all kinds of deeper questions I found. His life kind of illuminates. And so that made it fascinating to me. And so I went down to Florida three years ago and hung out with his son and compiled enough reporting to write a book proposal and then spent six months writing it, six months getting rejected by agents until finally somebody believed in it and sold it to Simon & Schuster. So now it's a proper book and it's going to be out in the world in about a year. I think I still have another year of process. That's great. Lots to unpack there. And certainly things to align with the theme of this show, which is how sometimes setbacks are things that happen to us. Other times they're choices that we make. Sometimes they're somewhere in between. So let's go all the way back. Baseball had been a critical part of who you were. Many of my guests are former athletes and they talk about that struggle from transitioning out of sport into all things after. It's almost like the seminal defining moment in a lot of people's young lives, especially then is I was an athlete and now I'm a former athlete. So what was that transition out of baseball like for you? It happened late because I ended up playing until I was 33 in a semi-pro league in Belgium and I feel like I got my fill. I played 40 or 50 games a year and I didn't play much in college. I rode the bench a lot. So it was really fun in my 20s and early 30s to play with a pretty good league. Every team got two ex-professionals. So I was the catcher. So I got to catch these often pitchers they were, coming over from America, who had just got out of minor league baseball. And so I feel like I scratched that itch. And when I left, I was a bit burned out from the baseball too. I, I was like the super volunteer who would show up on a Saturday morning and umpire and then coach the kids and then play in the men's game. Cause European sports, it's very club structured, but it's, it's a nonprofit. It's basically you have a nonprofit, the minimal fees, it's like travel sports here, except there's no owner who's paying into this 401k. It's like a public structure almost. And so we had teams from ages five to seniors, 60, 70 year old guys. And so I did all of that. I was like the super volunteer. And so when I quit, I was tired of it. So I moved to Pittsburgh. I think the answer is for your mental health, you have to do other sports and stay on some kind of journey. Like you want some kind of journey of achievement and accomplishment because you just need it. It's just a habit and just makes you feel good. My thing now is I cycle. Pittsburgh is very hilly. And so I do long distance uphill and uphill road cycling. Great. You find yourself at the Wall Street Journal and maybe in an area that just happened, you didn't purposefully seek out being an expert in this mining industry. Correct. What do you think that taught you during that season that previous experiences hadn't? That's a good question. I was, I don't think I could do any kind of work if there wasn't some kind of deeper meaning. And I remember thinking this, like I actually was really touched by the deeper nature of mining, which is that it's where stuff comes from and that unless you want a world with no cars and no airplanes, you do need mining and it's never going to be zero impact, uh, it doesn't have to poison our water, like, but it's very complicated, but I was really attracted to this notion of finding out where stuff comes from. Like the computer that I'm using to talk to you on is made out of a zillion parts, aluminum, probably come out of sand in Australia, zinc out of a mine in Brazil. And I know a lot about how this, how supply chains work now and about how, again, this question of the fundamental nature of things, that really attracted me and I learned about that, about how the world is built and yeah, about how the complexity of modern life. And I really, my favorite saying as a journalist is many things are true at the same time. And you can't, it never makes sense to me if somebody says I'm anti-mining or I'm pro-mining. Like there has to be, every question has infinite shades of gray to me and a journalist's job is to properly illustrate that in a way that's nuanced and presents reality without disgracing or defaming anybody. Yeah. So you've been a biographer or a historian of sorts in looking at West Virginia and now Pittsburgh and those kinds of things. What have been some of the take-home lessons that those people have taught you that maybe you didn't expect going in? It's a very complicated question. There's a kind of tragic nature in some of these places where old industrial jobs were good jobs. I think you point this out in your book that unions and just supply and demand labor economics have meant that being a coal miner, being a steel worker, it pays well and it has costs which are often environmental. And I remember being in a small town in West Virginia, which was a big chemical producer. And somebody told me, I missed the stinky air because that stinky air was the smell of good jobs. And now we got is 12 bucks an hour at the casino or at Lowe's. And those are not unionized and they don't pay as well. And yeah, to my first point, I guess I learned that economic questions are complicated and people need a good paycheck. And I think now it's very interesting moment with unionization of service sector work and healthcare workers and people at Walmart who make $11 an hour. I don't really see why they don't deserve enough to live on it. Nobody in this country should live in poverty. I know that's a separate question, but I think there was a battle that was won for worker dignity and worker pay in industrial sectors. And there's a lot of pride in that. And there's a lot of grief, a loss of that dynamic, even if there was a cost. In this town I went to, in Nitro, West Virginia, they had made Agent Orange there, which is the chemical dropped during the Vietnam War, nitro, and Monsanto had not cleaned up properly and had left behind dirty soil and they had won the settlement. But there was nobody in town who would criticize Monsanto because their attitude was they gave us jobs and they came here and employed us. And it's too complicated to say, yeah, but it was wrong to drop Agent Orange on the Vietnamese, obviously it was. But not every person is responsible for everything in the world. And it's righteous to want to feed your family and work for good pay. Yeah. And I think embracing that complexity, again, it's not something we do very well in this country, but we could. It's so much easier to think of these things as binaries, right and wrong, left or right, conservative, liberal. And this is not a political show by any stretch, but I think it's important for us to recognize that the feelings, the emotions, the beliefs that we bring in can weigh into decisions like this. I know when I was researching my book and I may have mentioned this to you when we spoke the first time, I really patterned it after Buzz Bissinger's Friday Night Lights, where he talks about the oil industry. And it's representative. It's faster to pump things out of the ground than it is to dig them out of the ground. And I think the volatility in the petroleum market that in the Permian Basin, where house prices might double in 18 months, and then they just collapse 18 months later. Mining towns experienced that, but it's a much slower change. And I can remember watching the movie cars with my kids. And this is the town that time forgot because the interstate bypassed it. And I remember thinking that this is so many mining towns. There was promise. There was hope. There was this idea that we're going to leverage this success and grow into bigger and better, and that never happened. And so all the buildings are about the same age. And a lot of the old timers around town can tell you about, in the case of my book, there were four movie theaters and a train, and none of that exists anymore. And I think West Virginia has probably experienced this on a scale grander than what Southern Illinois mining industry is, a little isolated pocket. It's not like Appalachia or maybe even the West. So I guess all that to say, during your time with the Wall Street Journal, do you feel like being immersed in that environment influenced or informed where you personally stood on these issues? And if so, how? I'm not a very political person because I don't like not being able to admit when I'm wrong and I'm wrong a lot. So I prefer to be inquisitive and withhold my judgments. I guess the point I would make is that I respect the grief a lot more. And if there's anything that people, the so-called coastal elites, don't understand about places like Southern Illinois, is that grief is very powerful and very raw. And I don't think you can understand the politics of this country without understanding that grief. I'm talking about the loss of industry, manufacturing, mining jobs. It's not just the paycheck, it's cultural. And a good illustration I show is that in this town in Moundsville, they have the world's biggest toy factory. They employ like a hundred designers and those people are the people who put on the local theater. They were like the arty people. And when the factory closed, then all of a sudden the people who were designing or doing the plays moved to New York or Pittsburgh or somewhere else. And so then you lost your community theater. And so little by little, there's a kind of cultural impoverishment that it happens in the baseball is a good example too, that you need a base of economic support when that goes away, then the baseball team has a harder time supporting itself. And again, it's, it's crushing and it's, it makes people feel alienated. It makes people feel like people don't understand them. And so, yeah, I think I have grown a lot by listening to people in this part of the world. And it's very different. I grew up in downtown Brussels on cobblestone streets. My dad was a conductor in the opera house. So I grew up far from West Virginia. My movie and the movie is called Moundsville. And if you go to moundsville.org, there's a lot of pieces I've written. And I try to profile local people on the site and honor their work, local historians like you, and just engage in this act of listening, which is where my politics are. Basically, I defend journalism and truth-seeking and listening. And my only real issue is if you criticize hard-working journalists who check their facts and print corrections, then I'm not on your side. Right. No, I completely agree. I have intentionally steered clear of political debate on this show. It's really more about how viewing our own experience, maybe with a lens toward the back and help us understand how we've been through things. And I think the same thing could be said for viewing how people who are different from us have influenced and guided us along the way. And I really think growth is a, it's a circle and far too often I don't close the circle by not reflecting on things. And so I think that's an important aspect. You mentioned how baseball was one of the the social aspects of many of these small towns and I had never really considered how the advent of air conditioning actually played a role in the loss of many of these minor league teams. And so I guess that's where baseball comes into the equation. When you stepped down at the Wall Street Journal, did you have it in your mind that you were going to focus on this Earl Weaver bio? Was baseball part of the equation at that point or did it take a little longer for some clarity? Baseball is definitely a part of the equation. I wanted the coach again, so I got a job as a coach. I guess I'd written Earl Weaver's obituary when he died in 2013. And by the way, he died on the same day as Stan Musial, which is incredible because Stan Musial, the great Hall of Fame outfielder, was Earl Weaver's childhood hero. And then they ended up playing in the same series of games in spring training in 1952, which was Earl's only big league spring training invite. And he and Stan Musial were in the same lineup for a couple of, like two dozen games and they died on the same day. And so on that day, a sports editor at the Journal who knew I was still the mining and metals correspondent, but he knew I was an Orioles nut. And so he called me and he said, Earl, we just died. Would you like to write his obituary for us? And I really had this very strong feeling of yes, this is something that I feel called to do. And so I did it and pretty quickly and it was pretty good. And I sent it to Tom Boswell, who was my childhood hero as a journalist. And Tom wrote back and said, this is really nice, Earl would have loved this. And again, I thought, maybe there's something here that I'm seeing that is mine to present to the world. Hit the brakes here, friend. I love how John frames this. And I think I felt the same stirring in my soul before. He says, I thought maybe there's something here that I'm seeing that is mine to present to the world. In the year I've been doing this show, it's crossed my mind that my guests have been through some stuff. Sometimes it was bad timing. Other times, poor decisions. Still others, completely unpredictable and unpreventable tragedy. Regardless, so long as we emerge from those seasons, we haven't merely survived. We've equipped. We've learned. We've leveled up. John may have grown up in Belgium, but he was a Baltimore Orioles fan and eventually a fan of their manager Earl Weaver from the age of seven. He'd cultivated a lifelong love of baseball as a player and a coach, while also honing his skills as an author, historian, and a biographer. Only a doubt and second guessing had accompanied his decision in the months following his departure from the Wall Street Journal. But in the end, he was now the world's best prepared person to create the art he is now creating. And despite the pain or setback associated with that leaving of a steady job, he also now had the time and the opportunity to make it happen. So the lesson here is, maybe that something you've been craving to see or hear or read isn't just your own yearning to consume it. Maybe what you need is a yielding to create it. It's your assignment to birth it and present it to the world, just like John's doing. And I kept on thinking about it and I read all these baseball books and there's a whole page in Moneyball by Derral Weaver. There's a whole page in every baseball book in the last 30 years will have a page about Derral Weaver. But nobody had examined his legacy in the light of Moneyball and analytics and all these changes to the game. And so then the seed kept on germinating. And I guess after I was finished with the film, I needed like a new big project. And I had this idea of doing the book. And yeah, after that, I've been on this ride ever since. Yeah, I think another important part of your story that I wanted to spotlight, you mentioned it. You have this idea and you're absolutely right. In this day and age, Moneyball, analytics, you're a fool as a GM or as an organization, we're seeing this trickle down all the way to the high school level here in Texas and not just baseball, but football and many sports have really leaned on the data sciences. And Earl was, if he wasn't the first, he was definitely one of the early adopters of tracking everything. And you even asked me and I'd never made the connection. Did Hal Contini, Earl's first minor league manager. He kept, yeah, he kept a notebook. He kept stats on everybody. I guess the important thing for me is understanding that you've got this idea for a book and initially you pitch this. You're an established journalist at this point, a decade in the industry. And you pitch this idea and the initial response is lukewarm to just outright no's. You said six months of pitching this. Talk me through your thought process during this time. Did you second guess yourself on this idea or were you just dead set that you just hadn't found the right person yet? I think one thing that baseball has taught me, which has been great in my journalism career, is how to handle failure, that if you play baseball, that there'll be days when you're going to fail. And baseball has this particular element of isolating the individual so that when you strike out, there's only one person at that moment who has failed, and that's you. It's not like in soccer, you do a long pass and the guy doesn't quite get it, or the girl doesn't quite get it, and you both messed up. And it's moving fast and nobody quite tell here. It's not you're you blew it So I learned that through trial and error as a player and as a coach It's one of the main things I say like part of the reason we play is there's this Psychological journey, which is rich that teaches you that fail better and you you learn and you keep on improving and figuring it out So I had that mentality that I was gonna keep grinding Just to use the ballplayers favorite word keep grinding until things worked out. And it was really nice. So I had 21 rejections that were just like, didn't even answer the query. So the query is a 300 word introduction to the idea that says, would you like to see this full proposal? So 24 just ignored it. Three said, yes, they would like to see the full proposal. And when I sent it to them, they wrote back saying no, but with a paragraph or two about why. And that was really good because I was able to take that and then recast it. And then along the way, there's a guy who used to work at the Wall Street Journal named Jonathan Eige, he just came out with a new biography of Martin Luther King and is a really accomplished book writer. And I sent it to him and he's, you're making it too much about Earl Weaver's successes. This is too much of, look how great this guy was. I'm going to show you why he was so great. Making it about his failures. And all of a sudden it changed everything. Cause I realized the arc there is this 20 year period where he signed at age 17. He didn't reach the major until he was 37. And those 20 years were all over America. They were in places like West Frankfort. They were in places like Thomasville, Georgia, Rochester, New York, Aberdeen, South Dakota. And he had this odyssey throughout the minor leagues of the forties and fifties. And that story was really interesting and it hadn't been told yet. And so those two things, like finding a new story that hadn't been told and then making this arc of like struggle and the point of your podcast, he became undone. Like he really lost it. He had won major leagues in training and played really well, got cut and then entered this time. And it's not often an athlete memoir will use the word depression, but in his 1982 book, which is called, It's What You Learn After You Know It All That Counts. He talks about becoming depressed and drinking too much and just being unmoored. And so that story, and so once I recast it, this agent I queried wanted to see the proposal. He immediately said, I like this, let's do it. And then within 10 days, I had a book deal with Simon & Schuster. And it went that quick. Lesson for all of us is that, yeah, I think perseverance does not make sense if you're not willing to adapt and change. But if you are, then even if you don't get a book deal, you're still growing. Like I learned a lot about storytelling and I've been doing this a long time, but I learned a lot about storytelling. Again, just the idea of making it about his failure and drawing out that tension and the journey part of it, as opposed to, I'm going to show you why he was so good. Again, great lesson in storytelling that would not have happened without failure. Yeah, that's a fantastic point. And it's certainly one I learned. I spent one season in minor league baseball as an athletic trainer, and I was just so amazed by the story. Some of these guys were highly sought after, drafted out of high school, and I was on an independent league team. And so many of them had stories where things didn't go according to plan and yet they were still showing up to practice every day, showing up for games. They were still chasing down this dream in the face of this adversity. And when you mention someone like Earl, I think baseball is, it's more endemic than most other sports because there's this elaborate minor league system and it's rare that a talent or even a coach or a staff member starts at the top. You have to navigate your way through. And for some, that's a couple of seasons. And when he started there, there were 15, like the Cardinals had 15 minor league teams. Yeah. And just the resilience that it takes to do that personally, what it means for your family, for you to be gone all summer. If I've got younger listeners that don't know who Earl Weaver is, go to YouTube and maybe turn down the volume if you're at work, because he is well known for his fiery tirades against umpires, but this is a guy who's really well known and really well established, but that came through family who understood that his drive to reach the highest levels didn't just cost him, it cost everyone around him. And so- And there were like a lot of, like a lot of baseball families, there was a divorce, his first wife and three children, and then they reconciled, but there was a lot of stormy times because yeah, you, you commit to life on the road and life playing this difficult game that makes you frustrated and angry a lot. And it's difficult. And there's a price to pay for show business people, whether it's the circus or, you know, concert performers or baseball players, they're out there entertaining us in our evenings, which means they're not spending time with their families. Right. So you left the wall street journal and jumped over, you get your book deal. At any point during that time, did you second guess your decision? Was there? All the time, because I love the wall street journal job and it broke my heart that I didn't like it anymore. It didn't make sense to me. And I had to fight that. And then for a while I was struggling. I wasn't getting steady income and I was freelancing and I felt like it was in my twenties again. And it's interesting the psychology of that. I left the journal by choice. As I was leaving, I got like half a dozen job offers from all kinds of newspapers, magazines. And then after six months when I had that time off, it was like, I was damaged goods. Like nobody wanted to talk to me or hire me. And that's pretty interesting. And I also thought about the second guessing of my own decision. And I basically don't, except that I do realize I did make some mistakes. I think a lot of people make this mistake, which is that when you work for a big employer, this is, if things have gone, you think that you're owed a certain kind of treatment or that they're going to love you back as they say. And big institutions don't. And that's just the way it is. And so you have to find your meaning within the work itself and within the camaraderie of your coworkers. And I did for so long. And then when things didn't go well, I thought, they don't appreciate me anymore. And that was a mistake to take it personally like that. And I think that's the one thing I look back and think, ah, I could have handled that part better. But for the most part, these journeys I've been on have been so interesting and rich. And a lot of my friends who stayed are, they wish they had chosen a path that was a little more diverse and not so straightforward because the place like the Wall Street Journal, it is great and you're paid well and it's great opportunities, they say jump, you do have to say how high and there's a kind of lack of freedom sometimes and if budgets are getting cut and you can't travel anymore. I found myself stuck in Pittsburgh writing about steel prices and just being very stir-crazy and lonely. And there was nothing I could do about it and it's just the way the things have been structured that way. And I was one of a thousand journalists. So if things were going to change, it was going to take a long time. And it was never going to be personal. Yeah. Again, I think that's a mistaken approach. Sure. I think one of the themes that's emerged in the first year of this show is that a lot of times we wouldn't have chosen that setback or that adversity, or sometimes it's just second guessing, but it's a necessary step in our own development and evolution as people. What do you think setback or adversity has taught you that success wouldn't have? kind of. I think that my own failure to find clarity in my twenties, I knew exactly what I wanted and because things worked out professionally, I couldn't really sympathize with people going through their own vocational crises. I just thought, just find something you like and do it. Yeah, when I left the journal, I was, I was very lost. I was very, it was kind of a breakdown. It was, it was very painful and very dark night of the soul. And, and yeah, I've learned to be more self-sufficient and not attach, I'm the oldest of six kids. I'm a high achiever type. And so not construct my identity just based on what have I achieved. It's find a kind of centeredness that's not about just, oh, let me show you how far you hit a baseball or this great story I just wrote. Uh, more centeredness, more empathy for people going through crises. And then, yeah, just the toughness and openness to things happening in a way that you don't expect, but that's okay. And that there's a creativity inherent in, in life that is, is rewarding. And you don't always get to choose everything that happens to you. And that's okay too. Yeah. Yeah. Sometimes it's less about what we've chosen and more about our response to what happens to us. And back to the baseball thing, controlling the controllables and trying to max out best I can on what I can directly control. So your days today, you're working on this bio of Earl Weaver. Talk us through what your days look like today. Oh, I work half time for this company in Switzerland that publishes economic statistics and freelancing doesn't pay well. I write for this magazine, which I love, and I might do a story once every two months for them and they'll pay me $2,000, which is pretty good for a freelance writer. But if I do that every six months, that's only $12,000 a year. So I work for this company that puts me on a paycheck and I have health insurance for them. So today I was doing a report about global high tech trade. So the whole battery supply chain cycle and all the things happening in alternative energy sources. And so it's a report for the World Intellectual Property Organization in Geneva. So I was doing that and then I was doing more research on the Earl book. I have discovered that when he was at Elmira, so this was in the 60s, there was a guy there who gave him special statistical reports, as we were talking about before, he's known as the godfather of analytics. There was a guy named Jack Crandall who had this idea of doing these even more in-depth reports and giving it to them. So that was exciting to me, I learned this yesterday and I've been talking to people who knew this guy, Jack Crandall, and again, it's a big puzzle and I'm trying to put all the pieces together. Yeah, that's exciting. What advice would you give to a child who was in pursuit of your childhood dreams? Be a journalist. I would say to be curious about everything for two reasons. One, the main journalistic skill set. And then if you're curious about everything, you will never be bored. And that's a great gift. And so study something difficult that nobody's going to teach you later is my main piece of advice that this profession is changing so fast and there's so many different things happening and this country needs some kind of creative revolution that will bring back strong local news networks of some sort that are thoughtful and devoted to the truth. I don't know how it's going to happen. It has to be online and entrepreneurial. But my point is that because we don't know how it's gonna happen, nobody can teach it. So my advice would be to study Shakespeare or physics or something interesting that is not, no boss or employer will teach you when you get to be in your 20s. But I still believe in storytelling and journalism. And as I always tell younger people, even with TikTok, you can only ever tell a story one word at a time, and that's not going to change and follow interests and follow stuff that's interesting and rich. That's fabulous. I think we've definitely seen the decimation of the local newspaper. Guess we have. As I was doing research for my book 15 years ago and the small town papers had been gobbled up by these big media companies and a lot of shared content, the uniqueness of the local newspaper really didn't exist. You see when you do research, you find all this coverage from the forties, fifties, sixties, there was like a town like West Frankfort probably had five or 10 reporters, right? And zero today. Then maybe bloggers or I think what the internet has allowed us to do, it's given more people access, but it's also. There's no vetting and it's more about clicks than content. And there's still a place in this world for quality investigative journalism. So I applaud you for the work that you've done and that you're doing. Or just, I'll give you an example, Toby. In Moundsville, there was this local bakery store called Quality Bake that I put in the film. And last year, Dunkin', so Dunkin', what people mostly know as Dunkin' Donut, put in a Dunkin' Donuts in Moundsville. And I just called the owner of the local store And I said what are you doing to prepare for Dunkin Donuts coming? So he told me he's buying a new coffee machine And he's like doing all these things make new kinds of donuts and I published it as pretty simple story not crazy investigative stuff But it got this is a town of 4,000 people. I got 5,000 clicks overnight and This town has no reporters left so in my mind This is like an example of doesn't have to be like a deep dive investigative journalism, it has to be a curiosity in service of the public good. And people do want to know what Jerry at QualityBake is going to do. It's an interesting story. And it's not like a deep dive trying to find secrets. It's like being curious about our neighbors in a way that is, and it's an ethical code, like I quoted them accurately, I didn't make mistakes. Like there's a kind of ethical code that has to be implemented there, but I think we need more of that than of the more ambitious, sort of investigative journalism. Yeah, totally agree. Next to the last one, I love music and the emotions that it can frequently represent. If we were to watch a biography of your life, what soundtrack would you pick to play in the background and why? I think my favorite album of all time is Paul Simon's Graceland. I am basically an optimist and I basically think life is a wondrous miracle that deserves celebration and not to say that I haven't experienced true sorrow and feel that note too. And as a Belgian musician, I don't know if you've heard of Jacques Brel. Jacques Brel sings very mournful, sorrowful songs about the pain of life. So I think if I can have two, it would be one Jacques Brel song and then probably Boy in the Bubble off the Paul Simon Grace Line album. Awesome. All right. Last one. What for John Miller is left undone? A lot of things. I don't have any children and that's something that my wife and I are talking about. I haven't published a book yet. I think the third part of that is planting a tree, right? A man should not have to tree write a book and have a child. I've never planted a tree. I think doing a good job on the book. I think one good book would be pretty cool. I think I don't need to do five. I think if I can do a good job on this book, I'll be happy with myself. But yeah, hopefully at least 40 more years. Yeah. John, it's been a pleasure. I appreciate you dropping by. Thanks again. Thank you, Toby. Yeah. Yeah. I'm John Miller and I am, I'm done. For more info on today's episode, be sure to check it out on the web. Simply go to undonepodcast.com backslash EP68 to see the notes, links, and images related to today's guest, John Miller. I know there are great stories out there to be told and I'm always on the lookout. So if you or someone you know has a story that we can all be inspired by, tell me about it. Surf on over to undonepodcast.com, click the contact tab in the top menu, and drop me a note. Coming up, I'm working hard to close out the year and hit my goal of 75 episodes and 5,000 downloads in year one, so I've still got some work to do. I've lined up some fantastic guests to try and help me hit that mark, but up next I'll take a quick diversion down a little bit of a rabbit hole as I consider the symbolism and the darkness in the 1984 classic movie, The Never Ending Story. Then I highly sought after helmet artist Noah Ennis of Shellshock Graphics. So stay tuned. This and more coming up on Becoming Undone. Becoming Undone is a Nitro-Hype Creative Production written and produced by me, Toby Brooks. If you or someone you know has a story of resilience and victory to share for Becoming Undone, contact me at undonepodcast.com. Follow the show on Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn at becoming an unpaid and follow me at Toby J. Brooks on X, Instagram, and tick tock. Check me out on link tree at link tr.e. Backslash Toby J. Brooks. Listen, subscribe, and leave me a review at Apple podcasts, Spotify, I heart radio, or wherever you get your podcasts till next time, everybody keep getting better. Outro