[ Music ] >> Robert Casper: We're excited to feature you and your book Buzz Saw: The Improbable Story of How the Washington Nationals Won the World Series. I should note that your presentation at the festival is part of the Family, Food, and Field Stage for all of you here listening in and watching. If you want to see that presentation, just go to nationalbookfestival.com. So let's jump into a conversation about the book and a Q&A. Just want you to give a little background on to -- as to how you found yourself writing a book about the Washington Nationals as World Series champions. >> Jesse Dougherty: Yeah, so I'm a national speedwriter for the Washington Post, and when they won the World Series, quickly after, Simon and Schuster, I was very grateful that they were interested in a book on the season, so, you know, about a week after we were, you know, we were getting down to it and starting to write a narrative on not just the World Series but also the entire 2019 season, some history of the Washington National and also some of the personal back stories of all the players and sort of heroes of the run, so I guess that's the sort of quick and dirty history of how I ended up writing this book, and I want to just say also I'm just so grateful to everyone, you know, logged on today. I know circumstances are odd and weird, but grateful to have everyone here and following along. >> Robert Casper: Yeah, well, and we're excited to celebrate this book and the Washington Nationals with a truly national audience. Maybe you can talk about that move from being a beat reporter to a book writer and how that worked for you. >> Jesse Dougherty: Yeah, I think, you know, the differences, you know, on the surface are that as a beat writer, you're kind of writing the story of the season and in snippets. You know, you're writing 900 words a day, you're writing maybe a thousand words, you're writing the intermittent feature, but it's very much incremental, and if you put that together in a larger stance, then you maybe wind up with a chapter-like story, and I think a beat writer covering a season does wind up being sort of a book in all these little parts, right? It's the articles every day. The difference of becoming an author and writing about the season in book form was that you got to stitch that all together, so a big thing for me was going back in and looking at my articles day to day because writing in that moment, sort of the raw sort of feelings and analysis and reactions to things as they happened to me was the most authentic way to sort of capture what was going on throughout the season, so it was researching both my own writing, my sort of competition on the Nationals beat, the columnists I worked with at the Washington Post, and the differences then was instead of writing in 900-word snippets, you're actually writing 90,000 words, so you're sort of trying to culminate all that information, all those scenes, all those games, all those quotes you've got throughout the course of the year, and then you add some things on top of it with some additional reporting, what you have in the end is sort of this more comprehensive work on the season. So definitely had to learn how to write longer, had to learn how to be maybe a bit more, you know, my prose are a bit more rambling maybe in the book than they would be in the newspaper format, so it was a fun switch for sure. >> Robert Casper: Yeah, can you talk about when you made that switch, how that worked with the Nationals player and -- players and management? Did they treat you differently once you transitioned to becoming the sort of chronicler of this great season and their World Series win than they did when you were just a beat reporter among other beat reporters? >> Jesse Dougherty: I think that's a great question. I think the difference would be when you're in it every day you're sort of needling people about why you threw that pitch or why you didn't hit the [inaudible] and you struck out instead. I think there's a generally adversarial relationship between the beat writer and the athlete in the sense that we are there for their best moments, but we're also there for their worst moments, right? But in chronicling the season in Buzz Saw, what I was actually doing was chronicling largely their best moments, so I don't think it was necessarily different, like now that you're an author, we're going to just open up and give you all these amazing things we would never tell you as a beat writer, but in a sense, like I was coming to them personally and they all wanted to talk about it, so in the 30 or so additional interviews I did for Buzz Saw, I would say they were generally easier to land than maybe the mid-season interview about, you know, a slump or even a hot streak, because when guys are in the middle of a year and they're trying to stay in their rhythm, they don't always want to take a half hour and sit down and talk to a reporter. They're home at their houses in December, January, they will gladly sit on their back deck and chat about the World Series win, which is a culmination of their entire careers. So in that sense, I think maybe the treatment, per se, was different just in that the subject matter meant everyone was super excited to open up about. >> Robert Casper: Yeah, as a follow-up question, Erica writes that her favorite thing about the book was feeling like a fly on the wall hearing secret conversations and she wondered about what it was like to have to go back once you decided you were going to write this book and get all these early stories, sort of fill things in and how that worked. >> Jesse Dougherty: Yeah, I always joke it would have been great if Simon and Schuster had told me before that they wanted a book, and of course, that never could have happened because they don't know the World Series is going to happen, but I would have been way more deliberate in organizing my notes, in recognizing things in the moment. Luckily, I'm sort of, you know, I compulsively write everything down that I hear and see and we run our recorders a lot, you know, for post-game interviews and sometimes you can hear things in the background, so a lot of those sort of secret side conversations or things maybe you, being a fly on the wall, that generally the public doesn't get to see. Those are some of the more fun things to reconstruct, and then you go back later again when you're talking in December and January and you can say to Dave Martinez, you can say [inaudible] or whoever it may be, you know, "What were you thinking in that moment? What were you thinking when, you know, I witnessed x, y, or z?" And then you start to fill in the cracks even more, so I would say the way sort of that was -- those were put together was recognizing in the moment, remembering to go back into my notebook and recorder and my little stories and then using the additional reporting time in the two months I spent working on the book to build those out and add even more color, add even more feeling and emotion, and I think that's sort of was the approach I took for most of it. >> Robert Casper: Angela writes that one of her favorite parts of Buzz Saw was a chapter on how advanced scouting helped the Nats parch the Cardinals here in the NLCS, and I totally agree, and she wondered: Were there other behind-the-scenes details, like the development of that strategy that you really wanted to include but just couldn't fit it, even with the capaciousness of a book format? >> Jesse Dougherty: No, I would say I certainly fit in everything I wanted to, and again, that was sort of the benefit of having such a wide swath of, you know, space to write, and like I said, around 95,000 words, and so all the sort of strategy details on the World Series, I mean, the one thing I wish I could have gotten to more was the sign-stealing scandal, you know, so to speak, with the Astros. The news on that sort of broke after the book was finished, a lot of it, and I think people got way more open to talking about it once a lot of great reporters in other outlets sort of brought a lot of those things about the Astros to light, and when I was asking questions about the potential sign stealing in the World Series in the first round of reporting around November and December, the Nationals were sort of like, "Yeah, we had an inkling this thing was going to be going on," but they kind of wanted to stay away from it, and then when these things kind of -- when one person reports it, kind of the dam breaks and everyone gets way more willing to speak. So I'd say if there was one thing I wanted to get in there more that maybe isn't represented in the book, it certainly is the machinations of how the Nationals combatted potential sign stealing and also just their general feelings on the Astros potentially cheating. So those things sort of came to the forefront in the aftermath of writing the book, which was a bummer for me, but by and large, most of the strategical points and all the sort of, you know, ruminations of what goes into the World Series are represented in the book right now. >> Robert Casper: Patricia asks if, with more perspective and time, would you want to write a follow-up or a second edition or something that might re-examine, re-contextualize this historic season? >> Jesse Dougherty: I think that's a great question. I hadn't thought about that at all, but I do think that one thing I've already talked about, on the book, about how 2020 sort of makes something like 2019 so much more special. I think it's -- that's not necessarily just in the sense of winning versus losing, because right now, as we speak, the Nationals are going through a really tough season, but it's also in the sense of community, in the sense of how maybe we take for granted the ability to go to the ballpark and sit with our friends, to just buy a ticket and hop on the metro because of all the ways our lives have changed in 2020 and the perspective that lands on all of our social institutions, not just the sport of baseball. So I think that potentially exploring that in some add-ons to a paperback edition is in play, but that's not necessarily a full new examination of the season as you're suggesting, but I think that 2020 in a lot of ways has lent a really interesting perspective on what a season like 2019 means to not just the team or players but also the community around it and the city around it, so that's certainly something I've thought a lot about which would represent my work at the Washington Post but also potentially again in a new afterward-type thing, so yeah, something to look out for in the coming months. >> Robert Casper: And Beth asks specifically if it was really difficult to not be able to celebrate the World Series with the fans, to not have that raising the flag and distribution of rings and chance to cheer the players and what effect that that might have had versus other World Series winning teams. >> Jesse Dougherty: Yeah, I mean, I think it was really disappointing for everyone involved because if you think about it, you know, a century of World Series champions, century-plus of World Series champions got to celebrate in a certain way. The Nationals, of course, had a parade in Washington, but in terms of the next season, getting that sort of hero's welcome on opening day, the ring ceremony, the banner raising, these are all things that they did not get to experience with their fan base or with their community, so in a sense, you know, we knew they were unique champions because they came back from such a bad record and they went on this crazy run and they won all four of their games in the World Series on the road and these were all things that were very unprecedented, but now they're a unique champion in the sense that their celebration was cut short and you could even go back to the fact in spring training, they show a spring training accomplished with the Astros, so, so much of the conversation around that time was dominant on sign stealing and everyone was saying, "Well, what about the World Series we just won?" So probably from the beginning these Nationals have been robbed, in a sense of that usual sort of, you know, post-World Series glow. It's sort of been obstructed in a lot of different ways, because of the pandemic, first and foremost, but also in some of the other storylines around baseball that became more dominant. So I think the Nationals certainly feel that, their fans certainly feel that in a lot of ways. That's what I was hinting at with the perspective this year as author, that it's changed a lot of things of maybe how we think about the year before. >> Robert Casper: I'm just going to ask a question and then I'm going to change it a little bit because I imagine the answer is yes. He asks: Were you surprised when the Nationals won the World Series? And my question -- my revision to that is: When were you not surprised that the Nationals won the World Series? >> Jesse Dougherty: Yeah -- >> Robert Casper: [inaudible] the World Series. >> Jesse Dougherty: Yeah, it's funny, like I think maybe -- I don't want to say we're trained to be cynical because that's maybe a bleak look at our profession, but I do think we're trained to be critical and in that way maybe we've veered toward expecting the wrong results, so I would say up until the Nationals' win that night, I was -- I thought they were going to be the losing team. I will admit that my copy for the Washington Post was veering more toward the loss story. I was writing two stories at the same time. You know, they go down three-two, leading Washington, and they trail in Game 6 and come back, and they trail in Game 7, and maybe at that point you think you're trained to say, "Well, they do this every time. They're going to win." But for me, it was: This is the one time it's not going to work out. The comeback's not going to be completed. They're going to actually have shot themselves in the foot by going down early in a game and putting themselves behind the eight ball, but I was wrong again, and I thought, you know, when Howie Kendrick hits that home run in Houston, it's the foul ball, you're kind of, for a second, you watch and you try and gather details and you try and see the celebration and you hear the pin-drop silence and you try and describe all those things on the fly, then to quickly turn and say I'll need to write, I'll need to start -- for newspaper purposes, start writing this story on deadline, so you don't have a lot of time to feel the things like shock or surprise in the moment. I think reflecting maybe a couple of weeks later, even while writing the book, I kind of went right into, you know, chronicling the season from start to finish shortly after. I never really had time to reflect on, you know, what this -- how improbable it was, but I think now with the benefit of hindsight it was incredibly unlikely and that just makes [inaudible]. >> Robert Casper: As you were putting together this book, there's a relevant question David asks: If there's anything that Simon and Schuster or the Nationals said was not -- was off the table, anything that you couldn't talk about? And he gives examples: Player relationships with management or ownership. >> Jesse Dougherty: No, absolutely not, and I think, you know, you have inklings on things and sometimes you don't report them fully. I mean, I think the rule of thumb is like I wouldn't put something in a book that I wouldn't report in the Washington Post, like the bar was the same, for reporting bar. It wasn't like, well, I have one source, maybe I'll miss sort of weird story I heard once, but maybe my Post editors would want me to have three, but I can now just chuck it in this book because it's just "this is my book." It never was that. I held myself to the same reporting standards and the same ethical standards that I would have as a journalist and author. There was a complete Venn diagram intersection there. So it's not that anything that was off limits, it's just that, you know, the standards didn't change for the book, so I wouldn't have sort of put anything in there that I wouldn't as a beat writer on my day-to-day work. So I'd say that was -- again, that's not an off-limits thing, but it's certainly just to make a point that the standards never changed. >> Robert Casper: David asks a question: What player gave you the most access or had great insight? And I'm also curious that maybe even a team member. >> Jesse Dougherty: Sure, so in the book process, Max Scherzer gave a lot of time to speak about the World Series win and his, you know, back story and everything. We spoke for about three hours in the winter, which is a lot of time for these interviews. Sean Doyle [phonetic] both throughout the season as a beat writer and then during the book process gave a lot of time to speak. Mike Rizzo, we spoke for about 50 minutes in his hotel room in San Diego, which is the opening and closing scenes of the book, him sitting up there sort of reflecting on his own life and career and ability to finally get to the top. And then from there, they were almost pretty standard in offering, you know, 30 to 45 minutes of their time, most of the players, a lot of the coaches, some members of the front office, some staff members. You know, you mentioned advanced scouting earlier, there being a full chapter. Jim Cuthbert, National's advanced scout, was really generous with his time in walking me through the process he went through in scouting the Cardinals and other opponents. So I have everyone to thank for that in terms of their making time for me after the season was over and they're trying to kind of shut down for the winter, that they were able to sort of reflect with me and give me a lot of access into their lives and their stories and that was really cool. >> Robert Casper: Patricia wants to know about your background. Have you always been a baseball fan and a Nationals fan, and how do your personal history -- how does your personal history, how do your preferences reflect on being a beat sports reporter? >> Jesse Dougherty: Yeah, so I grew up in Philadelphia. I can hear the Nationals fans booing on the other end of this call, but I -- so I grew up rooting for the Phillies. I will say, in terms of allegiance when you become a sports writer and a beat writer, they kind of go out the window in a sense. You start to cover it sort of objectively and you don't hold on to those allegiances, and it sounds silly to say, but they really do kind of go out the window. And them from there, my own history, you know, I grew up really following baseball, very average high school baseball player. You know, my dad was a little league coach with me and we used to always watch the Phillies growing up, so I would say -- I would say one thing that was really influenced by my own background in baseball and being a baseball fan is the section that I wrote, in the World Series and Game 7 was about all these fans around the world and how they experienced the Game 7 win, whether it was family, you know, with friends, you know, in bars, in living rooms and all these places, and some people were in airplanes watching on their iPhones, and I thought that was something that was informed by my own experience in the sense that I always remember what I was doing when the Phillies won the World Series in 2008 or when the Eagles won the Super Bowl, and those sort of community moments are so important and you remember that forever. You remember that a lot more than the pitch someone threw in the sixth inning. You always remember where you were, who you were with, what you were doing, and I would say sort of growing up a sports fan and growing up in a family that sort of shared sports and with friends that shared sports together drove my approach to writing that last scene, that I wanted to make it a sort of cinematic look at how Nationals fans around the world were interacting with baseball [inaudible] sports fan and I thought, you know, that was -- if I think about it now, that's a great question, that it definitely was sort of influenced by how I interacted with sports growing up. >> Robert Casper: As a follow-up, Mark asks: Who were you influences as a baseball writer, and even meaner, sports writer influences for you? >> Jesse Dougherty: Oh, that's a great question. I would first say that I'm really lucky at the Washington Post to work with so many great baseball writers, writers in general on the news side and sports side of baseball, so I think the tradition is so great, so working with Thomas Boswell, who's a long-time columnist, has been at the Washington Post for 50 years, you know, Barry Svrluga, a columnist as well, he used to be a beat writer. There's Adam Kilgore, Chelsea Janes, who was my beat partner for a minute before going to the politics side, and then Dave Sheinin, who's one of my favorite writers in the world, is our national baseball writer. I know it might sound silly or lame to just point to your colleagues, but I truly am amazed all the time that I get to work with them and my name appears beside them in the paper, especially during the World Series run last year. Seeing sort of my byline next to Barry, Dave, and Tom was sort of like a pinch-me moment for sure, so I would say the influence me all the time. I never miss a word they write. I'm proud to be their teammate and it's really cool to get to work alongside sort of titans of baseball writing in that way and hope to sort of, you know, hope to make them proud. I'd say that's definitely a part of that driving force in my beat work. >> Robert Casper: Well, Adam asks about the other sports beat writers at the Washington Post and whether or not you talked to them about 2019 and 2020 and where we are now. >> Jesse Dougherty: Absolutely. I'd say we're always sort of comparing notes about how we cover our beats, what access looks like, how to sort of balance covering sports as sports but then sports as sports during a pandemic, which are one in the same, but I think in terms of maybe reader preferences or story preferences, they can feel different and how to sort of, you know, genuinely meld the two, how to responsibly meld the two is something we're working toward all the time, and I think our editors have done a great job giving us the leeway to cover sports as something that's happening in society, not just in a vacuum, and I think talking with fellow beat writers, Ava Wallace on the Wizards or Sam Fortier on the Washington football team, you know, Samantha Pell on the Capitals, all extremely talented reporters who have their own unique perspective and their own sort of unique sports cover. It's really great to hear sort of how they're approaching their beat helps me inform how I'm going to approach mine, and I'd say that's a conversation we're having all the time. >> Robert Casper: Yeah. Well, one last question. Let's get to this moment now for the Washington Nationals, and the question that is a lead-in is on morale and what the loss of Parra [inaudible] from around the clubhouse, but really, how do you think the Nationals are doing right now morale-wise and in coping with this terrible situation in terms of not having fans and negotiating playing sports during this pandemic? >> Jesse Dougherty: Yeah, I think it's a good question, and not to punt on it at all, but I will say one thing is that a really tough part of the season for me as a beat writer is I can't be in the clubhouse, so gauging sort of the camaraderie, gauging the morale is tough when we're just -- we're talking to people through Zoom calls, just like we're sort of doing right now, and our access of being in the clubhouse pre-game, being in the clubhouse post-game, observing how people are interacting with each other and the effect of players, like you mentioned Gerardo Parra who was such an influential figure on the team's chemistry last season. So I'd say overall, I mean, they're disappointed with the results of the season. They obviously would have wanted it to go better. I think there is a general consensus that this year is sort of a throwaway year that's so odd. There is -- you know, it's so tough to sort of put too much on team performance, personal performance, it's just that I think everyone's ready to kind of just push it aside, rest this winter, hopefully get healthy and hopefully everything in 2021 is back to normal, and I think that's obviously going to take an effort from everyone. It's not something that just baseball can control. That's a societal effort and hopefully, you know, we can all care about one another and do the things necessary to, you know, curb this pandemic once and for all and get back to sort of living our lives like we would like to. >> Robert Casper: Well, let me sneak in one last question from Erica. So here now you have Buzz Saw. You're a beat reporter who's written a book. Do you hope to write another book when the right topic comes along and what might that topic be? >> Jesse Dougherty: Oh, man, I wish I knew the topic. I'd start right now. I loved writing the book. It was one of the most fun things I've done in my short career so far, so certainly I hope to write another one in the future, so when the topic presents itself, whether it's another World Series or something entirely different, sports or non-sports, I would love to dive in and try it again, and since that is the last question, I'd like to just sort of wrap up and say thank you to everyone for listening, for anyone who bought the book. I really appreciate it. I know money's tight. I know everything is a little weird during the pandemic and it's not like you can just go buying things like crazy, but it's just -- it really warms my heart that people were so receptive to the book back in March and have kept doing so. All the notes and emails, and even letters in some cases, were sort of my highlights of this six wacky months and I'm really looking forward to interacting with everyone moving forward. >> Robert Casper: Well, thanks for joining us, Jesse. Sorry about the trouble early on, but I got you on the screen, and thanks for all the questions, everyone. I've been speaking with Jesse Dougherty whose book is Buzz Saw: The Improbable Story of How the Washington Nationals Won the World Series. You can find his presentation on the Family, Food, and Field Stage of the National Book Festival at nationalbookfestival.com. [ Music ]