Here’s Part II of my conversation with Richmond Braves’ pitcher (and former Yankee) Matt DeSalvo about his love for reading. Part II focuses on his writing career, culminating in a novel. To read Part I, which dives into DeSalvo’s impressive reading habits, just scroll down a little.
TIM: You’re also a writer and you actually wrote a novel?
Matt DeSalvo: Yea, I have a few ideas for writing and after the first one…. I wrote a novel about a girl I was in love with at the time. It’s a story about love and a person’s journey–basically how love changes for a person. When we’re younger, we think that love is gonna be—well it is for some people—for me, I thought the first girl I ran into, and that was gonna be it. That was a mistake [laughs]. You go through different stages of your life where love is different. Then in college, I started trying to map a girl where I wanted to look like this, act like that. You ain’t gonna find a girl that fits your exact mold. You have to give and take. Actually, it’s kind of exciting when a girl doesn’t have the qualities that you thought. Like, I want a girl with blue eyes. Maybe you’ll find some fine-ass young woman that has green eyes that make you wanna be with her the rest of your life. And it may just be her eyes. She may not have any other qualities. Sometimes, love changes for different people. Definitely my previous relationship, I realized that. You may have one girl, one month tell you that she is head over heels and there ain’t nothin’ gonna change. But distance does, and lack of time does, especially when you’re young. And love is constantly evolving. In my mind, in everyone’s mind, it’s just how well does your partner listen to you and keep up with that constant evolution of love. And do they adapt well? You see a lot of people who are in love, and they don’t really listen well to their partner. And, all of a sudden they’re loving that person how they wanted to be loved a year ago, and they require different things. It’s not necessarily a lack of communication; it’s a lack of listening. You can say all you want to a person, but if they’re not really listening, you’re not really gonna get anywhere. So that’s what that’s kind of about.
When did you write that?
My first full year of professional baseball—2004 I think.
About how long did it take? How’d you find the time?
Wrote it on the bus. I shared it with a few guys I played baseball with. Different people deal with their emotions differently. If someone’s angry, one guy may punch a wall, another guy may just seclude himself, another guy might say, ‘Alright, I’m gonna go out and drink my ass off.’ Whatever. I decided I’m gonna try and figure this out. So I kind of tried to break everything down. For the most part, it’s the story of our relationship. And it got to the point where we got up to the present, how’s the future gonna play out? And that’s where it became fictitious?
Happy ending?
There was a happy ending, but in reality no.
Life never imitates art the way it’s supposed to.
That’s true.
Did you ever think about trying to get it published?
Nah. I wrote it for her, and it was kind of her story. She has it. She could have thrown it away, I don’t know. I could probably recreate it, the main plot, from memory. There was a lot of philosophy on love that I was hoping she would get because she wasn’t a girl that ever asked me questions about how I felt. It was something that was for her; it wasn’t really for anybody else to read. I think I sent it in somewhere, or my buddy did for me, but I didn’t really pursue it. There are tons of book ideas that I’ve had that I probably will wait until my career is over to pursue something. Or until I have somebody when I’m in the big leagues say, ‘Hey, you should write a story about this.’ And I’m like, ‘You know what? I think it’s about time.’ Till then, I don’t really give a shit. I definitely have interesting stories but I guess I’m not ready for that yet.
Do you write at all now?
Yea, I don’t keep a journal where I’m like, ‘Today, I…’
[Laughs] I actually do.
There’s nothing wrong with that. In school we had to keep journals when I was in like eighth grade. It is fun to go back and be like, ‘What was I thinking when I was a kid?’ And I would actually read my journals in eighth grade talking about astronomy shit. And I’d be thinking, ‘What the hell is my damn teacher thinking? Everyone else is probably like, “Oh, I love Johnny. He’s so nice.”’ And I’m sitting here writing about astrophysics and shit like that. What the hell was I thinking?
The journal that I keep is things that I read. I have my interpretations or my ideas that have come from what I’ve read, and I keep them down. It’s interesting to me to see how a lot of the ideas cycle through all the different stories that I read. There’s a lot of recurring themes, whether it’s from a love story or a political essay. There’s a lot of themes. I just finished The Discourse on the Origins of Inequality, and his concluding argument was that inequality is found in people in society who try to conform to everyone else. And that was 220 years ago, and we still do the same thing. We try to follow that high-school society. Everyone wants to be popular; everyone wants to have that certain clothing, all of that to fall into certain trends. It’s kind of interesting to think that’s not something new; that’s something that’s followed humanity through millennia. There’s this man 220 years ago and he’s talking about inequality and you can find that in a love story, in a love triangle with some guy who’s in love with a girl just because of what she wears or what she’s showing, but he leaves some girl in the dust who has a great personality and a similar body, but she’s poor or they can’t marry because it’d be a shame to his family. You find that shit all the time. It’s just interesting to see that it doesn’t matter what type of story, where you find that story in the library. They all speak similar themes.
Would you ever consider writing a blog?
No, as much as I read, I don’t know how to use my computer very much. I know how to use it; I don’t know how to do any stuff like that. And my opinion is my opinion. I don’t need to push anything on anybody. I’ve told people stuff before, but I don’t try to force any ideas on anybody. I could have read all this stuff, and I could sound like the biggest idiot in the world. Something I tell my buddies all the time is, there can be a red apple on the table, and a group of us could be around it, but we all won’t see that same apple as red and don’t taste it all as sweet. There maybe be a colorblind person in the group who sees it as gray. That’s why a blog, I would never do that. That would just be inviting somebody to confront me or do some kind of conflict. I’m not putting my ideas out there to change anybody.
