Newsmakers: Jeff Passan discusses release of ‘The Arm’
More than three years of thorough, and occasionally gruesome, reporting came to fruition for Daily Orange alumnus Jeff Passan (’02) this month with the release of his new book, “The Arm.”
The Yahoo national baseball columnist examined the most polarizing body part in the game, and how the fixation on the arms of pitchers has affected the sport and the medical field.
The Daily Orange: How did you decide this was a book topic you wanted to pursue, and what was your thought process going into it?
Jeff Passan: The book itself came from a simple question: Why does Major League Baseball spend $1.5 billion a year on something it doesn’t understand? And the goal was to figure out what’s wrong with the arm, what (MLB) is doing wrong and to find a solution. As I found, that’s a really difficult thing to do.
There are people a lot smarter than me who have dedicated their lives to trying to figure that out, and still aren’t anywhere close. So the story morphed from a search for a solution into a search for what might be the solution, but more than that, what the lack of a solution is doing to the entire baseball world.
The D.O.: What was your reporting process for such an elaborate project?
J.P.: Daniel Hudson with the Diamondbacks and Todd Coffey, who’s about to play independent ball, are the main characters. They are the ones whose journey readers really are invested in. I sat in on Coffey’s surgery and I was there the night Hudson blew out his arm for the second time — and then at the bar with him trying to tell him everything was going to be OK.
When you spend three-plus years with someone, you get invested in their lives. It becomes one of those situations where they gain enough trust in you where they’ll call you to talk about things. One of the things that is so vital for a good journalism education is understanding how sourcing works. And just how imperative it is not to have people you go to for quotes, but to have people you go to for knowledge.
And that’s how I approached them at the beginning. I said, “I want to understand what goes into this. I want to tell the real story of this with all of its grim details and all of its great triumphs.” Thankfully, the two of them were amazingly open and vulnerable and willing, even at their nadirs, to cooperate. I think that was just because I had built up trust over the years in dealing with them. There were so many threads with “The Arm” that were worth tugging at, and I found with one little tug, brought you into this incredible world where everything is connected to this one very complicated, yet simple limb. The fact that all of these things could come off that one idea, is what I think made the experience of reporting this book so rich.
The D.O.: As a columnist, how challenging was it to put together something of this length?
J.P.: That was part of why this book was so appealing to me, because I don’t write long very much anymore. Between chasing news and writing news of the day, that occupies most of my time. What I’ve always loved to do is just write stories and explain to people what’s really going on. I feel like sometimes I can do that with my current job, but the demands are totally different to write 10,000-word chunks at a time and do it with something that I truly did enjoy reporting. That was maybe the most gratifying part of this all. I reminded myself that I haven’t totally forgotten how to write long stories.
The D.O.: How did The Daily Orange shape you as a reporter?
J.P.: The Daily Orange was the single most important thing for my entire career. It teaches you how to be a journalist. It teaches you more in one week at 744 Ostrom than I learned in four years of classroom work. And that is not to demean the education that Newhouse gives you, because I think parts of it are vital. It’s to say that when it comes to working in daily journalism, hands-on experience is more vital than anything you can learn (in a class).
Editor’s note: Some questions and answers have been edited for clarity and brevity.