Reading ‘Ball Four’ and ‘Boys of Summer’ changed everything for Buffalo columnist.

Sean Kirst works as a columnist for The Buffalo News and is a writer-in-residence at Le Moyne College, near Syracuse. Kirst’s five-decade journalism career includes more than a decade as a sports columnist and reporter.

A collection of Kirst’s columns about baseball, titled “The Ashes of Lou Gehrig,” was published by McFarland and Co. in 2003. Like much baseball writing, the tales hold a timeless quality. Several of Kirst columns – all of which were previously published in the Syracuse Post-Standard – center on the later years and death of Mickey Mantle, a true baseball idol. A story about a dispute over where to keep the ashes of Lou Gehrig provides the book’s title.

Kirst also co-wrote a book with Earl Lloyd, the first Black man to play in an NBA game. “Moonfixer” was published by Syracuse University Press.

Kirst, who won the prestigious Ernie Pyle Award from the Scripps Howard Foundation in 2009, took part in a five-question Q&A over email.

Five questions with Sean Kirst

You worked as a sports columnist in Syracuse and sports reporrter in Dunkirk, N.Y. Who were the authors or sportswriters who inspired you in your younger days?

My earliest memories of reading, at least beyond the comics, in the paper – which to me meant The Buffalo Evening News, The (Buffalo) Courier-Express and The Dunkirk Evening Observer – involved sports, spreading the section on the floor, looking at box scores to see what Willie Mays or Reggie Jackson did the night before.

I have particularly powerful memories in the early 1970s of Steve Weller and Larry Felser and Milt Northrop and others at The News (I was a Braves fan, and it was moving almost a half-century later to become Milt’s colleague, to shoot the breeze with him at midnight in a quiet newsroom) and Phil Ranallo in particular at The Courier and most intimately, Bill Hammond and Jerry Reilly at The Observer. They were terrific, intuitive and keenly observant sportswriters, and Bill gave me my first paid job, at 14, writing sports.

As for authors, my mother – as a carrot to get my older siblings reading – filled the house with books like “Greatest World Series Thrillers” by Ray Robinson and “My Greatest Day in Baseball” and some of the classic kid biographies, like Arthur Mann’s “Jackie Robinson Story.”

We also subscribed to Sports Illustrated and Sport, and those magazines – distinct in personality – were the greatest sportswriting teachers any kid could have. The wait for SI, every week, was a big deal, and those were the years when I began to really understand the greatest stories about sports were intertwined with the great struggles and wounds and triumphs of national experience, specifically race, culture and who has money, and who doesn’t.

How about sports books – do you have some all-time favorites?

That’s one of those questions of such scope it almost stops me. My brothers left “Ball Four” around the house when I was 11. Eleven! To paraphrase Springsteen, I learned more from a three-minute chapter, baby, than I ever learned in school. But it was an early lesson, a profound one, about avoiding canonizations – and in seeing ballplayers as human beings, with human struggles.

A couple of years later: “The Boys of Summer,” which a childhood buddy whose family was from New York City – Thomas Rogers Riley – urged me to read. It changed everything for me about the way I saw sportswriting, and what I wanted to do. The sense of passage and loss about Brooklyn and the 1950s plugged into some larger raw sentiment that already existed – that I felt but was trying to figure out – in my own family and in Buffalo and Dunkirk, which were the central cities in my life.

Since then, a cascade. As I write this, I’m reading “Path Lit By Lightning,” by David Maraniss, whose Vince Lombardi biography was so stunning. Gerald Early’s “The Muhammad Ali Reader” – I grew up with a dad, raised in an orphanage, who loved and respected boxers and did some fighting in the Civilian Conservation Corps – has some stuff in there, like the haunting Geoge Plimpton interview with Malcolm X, I never forget, that I think of all the time.

My dad also worked for a bookie as a kid and had this particular feeling for Seabiscuit, which I didn’t fully grasp until I readLaura Hillenbrand’s great book. I loved “The Boys in the Boat,” by Daniel James Brown. And David Halberstam’s magnificent books on the Portland Trailblazers (particularly aching for Buffalo Braves fans) and the pilgrimage to see Ted Williams. I feel guilty stopping because of everything, shelves upon shelves, I’m not mentioning.

Talking to the legendary baseball manager Joe McCarthy when you were 9 years old must have been amazing. Is there one interview you have done in your career, in person or by phone, that gave you the biggest thrill?

Slam dunk answer for that one. Through an I-still-can’t-believe-it sequence of events – having far more to do with my work with youth baseball in city neighborhoods than what I do as a writer – I began some correspondence many years ago with Rachel Robinson, whom I revere.

Through that connection, when she visited Cooperstown in 2007 or 2008, I brought a vanload of kids from our league in Syracuse to meet Rachel and Roberto Clemente’s widow, Vera. The only time I asked Rachel if she would speak with me as a journalist was right before President Obama’s election in 2008 – just reflecting on her husband, what he faced and endured and what he changed, and how she saw the election, in that context. She thought it over, agreed to do it, spent a long time on the phone – and that was my column for the morning after Obama won. I understand, and will always understand, how that conversation was a lifetime treasure, a gift.

You wrote several columns about Mickey Mantle’s final years and his death. Was Mantle an idol of yours?

Kind of. I have to be honest: I was a Roger Maris guy, loved him for breaking Ruth’s record, understood from early childhood how Maris got burned by a culture that saw this great, quiet ballplayer as the wrong guy, somehow, for hitting 61 home runs. And even as a kid, I considered Willie Mays to be the greatest baseball player ever.

But I was born in 1959, came into baseball consciousness at the tail end of Mantle’s career, and simply understood – even as a child – the massive cultural spotlight he commanded, the triumph and awe … and later pathos … his trajectory evoked. And yeah, somehow I felt for all of it. As a guy who went into recovery long ago, felt in a big way what alcohol did to his life, and the might-have-beens – it always seemed to me that Mantle stories can reverberate, and matter.

If you could spend a few hours – say at a relaxing dinner – with any athlete, living or dead, whom would you choose and why?

Can I cheat and pick two? Hank Williams and Earl Lloyd, both gone. In 1935, in Buffalo, Williams, a Burgard grad, was the first Black player in the old Midwest Conference, which became the National Basketball League, which in 1949 merged into the original National Basketball Association. Think of that, what that says about Hank’s significance. Twelve years before Jackie. But he died a few years later, at 24, at the tuberculosis sanitarium in Perrysburg, and we know so little about him – not even where he’s buried. I would just want to hear his story, and his dreams.

Earl would want to be at that table, to hear Hank’s tales. I love and miss Earl. Tell you what: I would stretch that meal out for as long as I could.