About a week and a half ago, I talked with Matt DeSalvo, a pitcher for the Richmond Braves who has spent time in the majors with the Yankees. DeSalvo is an avid reader, and I was talking to him for this feature that ran on MiLB last week. I thought we had a really interesting conversation that spanned over 45 minutes, and DeSalvo was very candid with me throughout the interview.
Since it’s so long, I’ve split it into a few parts. Here’s Part I, which focuses on his reading habits.
TIM: What are you reading right now?
Matt DeSalvo: I just finished three books, but I’ve got five of them right now. Constellation of Philosophy, One Heart, The Beast in the Jungle, Day of Doom, and Discourse on the Origins of Inequality.
It’s kind of tough to balance five. How do you do that?
Well, I don’t watch much TV. I like Lost, that and Family Guy, cartoon network—that’s kind of an awkward set of things. I usually just have them almost like I’m watching TV: I’ll read a chapter from each book. I’ve always been able to do that, and it’s interesting to me to do it that way. I get bored easy believe it or not. I don’t particularly enjoy reading; I like to learn. And it’s not like I have a teacher who can follow me to all the crazy places I go, so I just prepare reading. I’m a slow reader, too. Very slow reader. I take my time and try to understand everything. When I do read, I come up with my own ideas of stuff, and it’s a very slow process. It takes me a long time to read.
Those aren’t exactly James Patterson, summer-reading type things.
I read a lot of fiction, too. Not any new-age stuff. Like Beast in the Jungle, it speaks to me right now because it’s a very powerful story. It’s a short story; it’s only about 40 pages. Some days some books just speak to you. Some days they’re boring, and you say, ‘What the hell was I doing trying to read this book?’ But in the end, there’s some reason I picked them. This is something I did five years ago, and it’s kind of fun to look at the books that I’ve chosen for myself. But I’ll start off and it’s, ‘What the hell is this book about? What am I reading this for?’ and by the end I’m like, ‘Oh, okay.’ I knew what I was trying to tell myself way back when.
How’d you come up with that list of about 400 books?
I read two Encyclopedia of literature. One was Encyclopedia Britannica. I just went through and I read; it basically had a summary of each book, it had a lot of authors in it and what they had written. If there was a book I wasn’t sure about, I went on amazon.com and looked it up, read the summary on amazon.com. Some books were very similar. A lot of the romance stories were very similar, so I just picked one I thought that I would enjoy more and just dotted off the other one. I eventually narrowed my list from like 1200 books down to 400 I really would want to read. For instance, I can’t stand mystery novels. To me, they’re all the same. When I initially did my list, there’s like 1200, and a lot of them were mystery, and I was like, ‘I can’t deal with mystery.’ To me, they’re very similar. Someone does something, someone finds out. I like books that teach lessons.
The Beast in the Jungle is about a guy who had a girl in front of him his whole life, and he thought his life was meaningless. And the woman is on her deathbed, and they were best friends all their lives, and he goes to her house, she’s deathly ill, and he’s thinking to himself, ‘What am I gonna do when she’s gone?’ like a very selfish person. And she had been in love with him his whole life, ever since they were friends. And eventually she tells him that ‘I hope you never realize the worst thing you’ve ever done to yourself.’ And he’s like, ‘What are you talking about?’ And he knows that she knows him more than he knows himself. She’s just like, ‘I hope you never find out.’ She ends up dying, and he’s sitting at her tombstone one day, and he figures out what she said. And it was the fact that he didn’t love her—that was the greatest fault of his life. She was there in front of his face his whole life. He just never pulled the trigger on it.
Things like that, there are plenty of books that talk about that kind of thing, but there are very few that are very powerful and speak to you like that. It’s kind of like love. There’s plenty of hot girls you’re gonna see out there, but which one is gonna speak to you out of a crowd of hot girls. There’s only one or two that actually would, and that’s how we fall in love. You go into a roomful of 100 models and you’re like, ‘I’m taking all these girls home.’ But eventually you’re like, ‘They’re all the same.’ You’ll come across that one that blows your mind. Her looks won’t knock you off your feet but her total personale will just knock you on your ass. That was a very powerful book for me.
Do you have a favorite book?
I do. I don’t know, Beast in the Jungle is kind of at the top of the list right now. My second one would be–this is a book that was my favorite book until this road trip, and it had been that way for about 10 years–My Struggle to Become a Person by Hugh Prather. That was my favorite book. It’s a guy who picked up a book–I forget who wrote it–he’s a psychologist who wrote a book called On Becoming a Person. Hugh Prather, he wasn’t an author, he wasn’t a psychologist or anything, but he asked himself questions like, ‘Why do I do things? Why does that guy over there piss me off when I don’t even know him?’ And he realizes that it’s things he finds fault with himself. It’s in poem form, like 80 pages with 10 lines on a page. So you just float through it. But it’s very powerful in that it asks you to ask yourself questions, like, ‘Why the hell do I act this way? Why am I not this happy person?’ That’s why that was my favorite book.
Do you ever return to that and read it over?
The funny thing is I don’t like reading books over again. I think that’s why I read them slow and make sure I get it the first time. But I understand the idea that going back and reading it again, you probably find stuff you missed. But I can’t—like with movies, it’s a 2-hour movie, and I just can’t do it. With that book, for some reason, I’ve read it twice. It’s the only book I’ve ever kept. Usually with the books that I read, I make notes in them, put them in a little journal I keep with things that authors have spoken to me and stuff like that, and then I throw the book or give it away.
So you’ve got your favorite passages in there?
Yea, I hate to have things. I’m the complete opposite of a pack-rat. When I was a young kid, I always consolidated my things, so if I needed to get out, I’d be able to carry everything I needed with me. That’s the way I’ve always been, which fits my lifestyle perfectly. I have a suitcase full of clothes, a bookbag with my electronics—my computer, my iPod—and then I have a lockbox in my car with my financial stuff that I need. So that’s my life: three bags of luggage, a car, and no place to go.
Did you run up a big bill buying all these books?
Well, Christmastime, everyone just gets me gift cards to Barnes & Noble. And a lot of the short stories that I’ve read I can just get off the internet. And some of the poetry and a lot of the books are in libraries. I don’t take out books during the season. I use my gift cards to buy books for the season I’ve planned out. And in the off-season, I go home and I read books from the library. So I really don’t spend too much money on them.
How do you order what you read? Is it preset or is it, ‘I feel like this today’?
It’s kind of both. In the off-season, I’ll go home and I’ll try to pick one book to read a week, and maybe for the month I’ll pick four books. So it’s kind of randomness but also planned out. For the regular season, I’ll pick out spring training books and then I’ll order them and wait to where I go, and then I’ll go to Barnes & noble there and order like 20 books for the season. I’ll just read those whenever I get there. So I’m not carrying things with me. I’m only carrying the small stuff.
How big a dent have you made in the initial list?
I’m down to 123 right now. I just finished a book today. My goal this year was to read 50 books, and I’m down to 22.
That’s a pretty good pace.
Yea, it’s not bad.
And you said you read slow.
I know. First of all, downtime in baseball…. Right now, I have to look like the weirdest guy that’s ever played minor league baseball, sitting in a staircase, sitting here reading a book. People keep walking down the stairs looking like [laughs]. It’s kind of awkward.
Do you ever get teased in the clubhouse?
I do all the time. I get called “Psycho,” people think I’m building a bomb and stuff like that. It’s funny to me, I don’t really care. You find you surround yourself with people that are very similar to you, and I bust balls a lot. Everybody in the locker room—I’m that kind of guy where crazy stuff just comes out of my mouth all the time. I get that shit all the time. It doesn’t really matter what people say. For Christ’s sake, I was booed out of Yankee Stadium, 60,000 people telling me I suck. I think I can take a handful of guys telling me I’m weird because I read.
Does anyone give it to you the worst?
They all do it playfully. I don’t think anyone takes any offense to it. It depends on the day. I’ll be sitting there by the locker reading, and whoever’s first in will probably say something like, ‘Oh, fuck DeSalvo.’
Have you always been that bookish type, reading since you were a kid?
Yea, I have. But when I was a kid, you go through high school and college, you’re so busy. And you have to learn what you want to read. The smartest man in the world isn’t a man who’s surrounded by a library; it’s the person who knows how to find knowledge. And it’s not that guy who knows the Dewey Decimal system or the Library of Congress; it’s the guy who knows how to educate himself with what he’s gonna enjoy and how he knows how to learn. Some people can’t do what I do. Some people can’t sit down and read, teach themselves from a book and tie things together. Some people need conversation to tie things together. So I’m fortunate in that sense where I can just read and figure things out for myself.
How much did that help you in school, where if you’re confused about something, you can just read it and get it down?
Well in school, I didn’t really study in college. I was a typical jock, just here to play baseball. But I took the classes I wanted to. I went to a liberal arts college and I had to take certain classes to meet requirements, and I did that, but I did that on my own terms. I took a class called “Philosophy of Sex.” I didn’t take that because it was fulfilling a requirement; I took it because it was interesting to me. The teacher that taught me that was probably one of the better teachers I had at that school, and if I wouldn’t have taken that course, I would have never known who she was. I’m not sure I would have known how to come across the things I learned in that class if I hadn’t taken that class. I went for science, but there’s other things like art, I took piano classes in school. I didn’t take that to fill a musical course; I took that because, ‘Shit, I would like to learn how to play piano one day.’ It’s still one thing I want to learn to do, but it’s difficult to carry a piano on the road.
That doesn’t fit in the three luggage cases and the car.
But people around me know these things about me, and it’s very interesting for Christmas I got a little piano mat with 88 keys. You can roll it up. That’s great. Maybe next year, I have “Teach Yourself Piano Books,” so next year, who knows where the hell I’ll be? I can be at home. But maybe that will come with me.
You gotta throw those on the list.
You never know.
Posted by NPI 
Posted by NPI 
Posted by NPI 
