A Cobra Conversation

Cobra: A Life of Baseball and Brotherhood is available now and I sat down with co-author Dave Jordan to discuss the book.

Well, about a year after the release of “Fastball John,” the Johnny D’Acquisto autobiography, we had just gotten home from an event in Cooperstown celebrating the book when I had a chat with a friend of mine who is close with Dave Parker. He told me that Dave was trying to get an autobiography off the ground. When baseball fans of a certain age hear his name, it’s like “Oooooh, The Cobra, right? That must’ve been a wild ride.” That book, should be, in the right hands, a tremendous reading experience. I told my buddy that I’d be happy to talk Parker through the process, I enjoy helping other writers, the whole book publishing world can be sort of a byzantine adventure at times and not always user-friendly. My friend was like, “Nah, just call him. I’d love to see what Cobra’s story would look like in your hands.” Which kind of made sense logistically – D’Acquisto & Parker were born in the same year, graduated high school at the same time, were both selected in the 1970 Major League Draft, both made their big-league debuts in 1973. It was territory that I was extremely familiar with.

So, we had a friendly initial chat, kept in touch here and there and then late 2017, Parker was like, “The project stalled.” So I was like, “I’m going to send you “Fastball John.” If you really want to get a book done, we can get it done.” He called me back a few days later. It’s a Sunday morning in December. We talked football for 30 minutes. “Call me back next week.” I hit him up the following Sunday, another half-hour chat about the NFL. “Call me back next week.” Same thing, but a little more about our families, where we were in life, each other, you know. This goes on for two months. They were enjoyable Sunday conversations, I mean, breakfast with The Cobra, right? So football season ends, we’re talking, Parker’s like, “All right, let’s do an article together. See how this goes. What do you want to write about?” Now, I loved this book by Bruce Markusen “The Team That Changed Baseball,” about the 1971 Pittsburgh Pirates, and that book made me wonder. “What would’ve become of the 1973 Pirates had Clemente not passed away tragically in the New Year’s Eve plane crash? What happens that spring training? Forget about Parker for a moment, what do they do with Richie Zisk? Pittsburgh’s other prized prospect, was ready to hit Major League pitching and was out of options. Bob Robertson, the Pirates hero of the 1971 World Series, does he lose his job? Probably not. Stargell had played some first base in ‘72, but Willie loved left field and was one of the most underrated left fielders in the game and the numbers prove that out. Al Oliver didn’t want to play first base. Gene clines batted .334 in ’72, came in 20th in the NL MVP that year and no place to put him. The team had a true problem on their hands, and that’s in the very best of circumstances. Now, Clemente’s gone, the whole team, the entire organization is an emotional mess. The politics of right field for the 1973 Pittsburgh Pirates at spring training is a real thing. Parker’s like, “I know all about that.” So we did a piece on that time in his life. Sporting News ran it, Parker received accolades from many friends inside as well as outside the game, so then he said, “All right let’s do the book.”

That was definitely by design. When you have great storytellers at your disposal – Dave Parker’s a fun storyteller, John D’Acquisto is an epic storyteller – why get in the way of that? It’s like Vin Scully’s home run call or the very best play-by-play announcers letting the crowd noise tell the story during a home run trot rather than speak. Why interfere with that? But really, Parker wanted to create this literary experience where the reader felt like he was hanging out with The Cobra on a Sunday afternoon with some chilled beverages just shootin’ the stuff. And that worked fine for me because that’s exactly what Johnny D’Acquisto and I did with “Fastball John.”

Nebraska Press really wanted the Parker book. They had gone back and forth with Parker years earlier with another writer but the project stalled. So, in Parker’s mind, “They want my book? Well, let’s give ‘em my book.” The submitted manuscript was 229,000 words. I really enjoyed working with my editor there, Rob Taylor, we had a nice rapport. He basically started laughing once we spoke after submitting the draft. He’s like, “We can’t publish a 750-page book.” To his credit, he gave us the freedom to police ourselves and get the word count down to a slightly more reasonable number. Of course, that led to some decisions.

Just as we began writing the book, I conducted an anecdotal survey of 200 diehard baseball book readers. “Dave Parker is writing a book, what do you want to know?” Overwhelmingly, as you might guess, those prime Pirates years, the 1985 Drug Trials and surprisingly, his minor league seasons. What does “The Drug Trials” mean? It means complete coverage of his time in Cincinnati. What else does that mean? It means exploring his relationship with Pete Rose. Now The Cobra & Charlie Hustle were tight, like seeing each other around Christmas and exchanging gifts tight, like buzzing down I-75 in Pete’s Porsche to Queen City black-tie events during the offseason tight. Nobody asked about Parker’s one-year layover in Milwaukee. Just a single person asked about the 1989 season, specifically the World Series. I spent a dozen hours on the phone with guys like Dave Stewart, Carney Lansford, Canseco just to fact-check Parker’s stories about his Oakland years. We have close to 18,000 words on the two Oakland seasons, and 7000 words on 1990 with the Brewers, which will be released in some form around the time that the book is published. It was extremely important to Dave that the minor league stories remain intact because so much of this effort was about spreading some sunshine on the fellas he played with so the world will know what great athletes, and more important, what great human beings they were.

Such a great story, right? Has all the elements – humanity, recognition, affection, love, with just a touch of “Whatttt?” There were some good ones, especially when Parker’s elder, recently-graduated high school Baseball teammate Adolph Carter came back to Cincinnati in late fall 1969 warning Parker about another huge “brother” on his Houston Astros Rookie League team who went by the name “James Rodney.” I would have to say, though, that of all the deleted scenes, the one that affects me the most is his Winter Ball 1976 story of the Venezuelan woman at the Stadium who gives Parker a solid gold Star of David medallion, the origin story for his necklace. Again, another wonderful moment in his life, and some additional remembrances of Mitch Page, that we just didn’t have room for in the book.

One of the aspects of Cobra that we’re pretty proud of is our exploration of the final days of players rooming together on the road. I think that also lent something to the closeness of teams and especially a club like the Pirates. I do believe that once that dynamic was removed from the baseball player experience, I guess that platonic intimacy, something got lost there and you’ll never get that back in the game. Also, the decline of Willie Stargell, who gradually became the spiritual glue of the roster, most especially in the wake of Clemente’s passing, definitely affected the organization.

In many ways, Cobra is a true glimpse through the lens of Black Baseball’s peak, which fell during the 1970s and early ‘80s. Much like Brad Balukjian’s super 2020 book release “The Wax Pack,” Dave Parker and I went deep into his narrative to humanize the faces on all those rectangular pieces of cardboard that we’ve been staring at for decades now, and most specifically select Black players that have, for lack of a better term, been sort of lost to history. You’re gonna carry John “Hammer” Milner off the field after he hits a game-winning grand slam, and then you’ll slam some frosty drinks and eat some wings with him at a downtown Pittsburgh bar. You’re gonna watch Larry Demery toss 3 straight complete-game victories, then strut down 7^th avenue at midnight through a crime-ridden NYC, because you’re with your fellas now, and you’re all so young and so bleepin’ invincible.

Although ‘Cobra’ tells the tale of a million-dollar athlete just before Baseball became a billion-dollar game, the book, at its core, is a story about the relationships we make, the relationships we break, and how these inter-personal “transactions” form us as we move forward in life.