Brittle Innings

Editor’s Note

Danny Boles, a long-time scout for the Philadelphia Phillies who began working for the Atlanta Braves in 1978, died on opening day of the 1991 baseball season. He was 66. In the early 1980s, he had his vocal cords removed to halt the advance of a throat cancer whose recurrence in 1989 led to his death.

Always a famous raconteur. Boles learned to talk with the aid of a microphone-like amplifier that he held to his throat. The amplifier gave him a mechanical-sounding “robot” voice that he was still able to infuse with personality. To obtain the material assembled in his memoir Brittle Innings, I conducted nearly forty interviews with Mr Boles. They ranged in length from twenty minutes to nearly three hours. He also gave me access to his longhand transcriptions of the journals of “Henry Clerval.” From these sources, I distilled the remarkable text now in your hands.

Look next year for my sports biography The Good Scout, in which I chronicle Mr Boles’s career as one of the most able major league scouts in post-war America. It will not stretch your credulity quite so far as Brittle Innings has likely done, and I immodestly regard it as the best book on this topic since Mark Winegardner’s Prophet of the Sandlots.

– GABRIEL STEWART

Columbus, Georgia

August 21, 1992