[legendsport]

Maplewood, New Jersey: August 27, 2019:

Paul Crowe rubbed his eyes. Maybe he needed glasses. Staring at the laptop screen all day long sure was tough on the old peepers. He grabbed his phone off the desk and pressed the home button, reflecting as he did so that not too long ago he would have had a watch (a "classic" watch - not a smartwatch), or just a clock, to check the time. Now, as he seemingly did with just about everything else, he looked at his phone. "Steve Jobs was a freakin' genius," he said aloud.

"What was that?" his wife said from the doorway.

Paul grinned. Cheryl was standing there giving him the look. Her look of "you're talking to yourself again, you big doofus."

"Oh, I was just thinking about how smartphones have taken over the world, and wanted to give credit to the late, great Steve Jobs. Or maybe it should be blame... I don't know," Paul explained.

"Hmmph," Cheryl said. She nodded towards the laptop. "I thought you were working on 'the book'" she said, and he could tell by the way she said it that she had verbally placed quotation marks around 'the book.'

'The Book' was what Crowe himself - with quotations and capital letters - had dubbed it, so he couldn't very well blame his wife for picking up on it. He was a veteran sportswriter (an endangered species in this age of talking heads and bloggers) but this was his first book. And it - with all the research and writing - had consumed much of his free time. And that too, had been noticed by his wife.

Back on point: he needed to head over to the ballpark soon - the Gothams had a seven o'clock start with LA and when those two got together... well, as a sportswriter, rivalries like that were his bread and butter. But Rufus and his enormous brood of Barrells... they had taken over his life, to put not too fine a point on it.

"I still think the title's stupid," Cheryl said.

Paul sighed. They'd had this discussion before. Paul thought that "The Ballad of the Brothers Barrell" was clever - it had alliteration for cryin' out loud! But Cheryl pointed out - in her usual clinical manner - that the story was neither a ballad (which was a type of song, as everyone knows) nor was it only about the Brothers Barrell. It was about the entire family. "And you're doing a disservice to the women in the story, too," she pointed out.

"Duly noted... again," Paul said and smiled in what he hoped was a disarming manner.

"Don't you need to be getting over to the ballpark? Traffic on the bridge will be terrible."

"It always is," he sighed. "But I'm a little stuck."

Cheryl gave a mock gasp. "Award-winning writer P.S. Crowe has writer's block? Oh, the humanity!"

He glared in response. "Very funny."

"So what's the sticking point now?" Cheryl asked.

"Well, I've reached the point in our epic tale where the OSA has been founded and Rufus is about to head off to get it running."

"And?"

"The OSA's been around for over a hundred years - everyone knows about it," he paused, and noting Cheryl's look of disbelief, then amended, "OK, all baseball fans know about it. But the first years of its history were... well, they were kind of boring. So now I have to decide if I want to bog this down in the minutiae of running a scouting bureau, or skim it and concentrate on Joe, Rollie and Jack's burgeoning careers."

"And what about Jimmy?" she asked.

"Well, his story's poignant and important, but he's still a kid at this point." Jimmy Barrell was a personal favorite of Cheryl's.

"You're the writer - you figure it out," she said.

"That's not particularly helpful."

She put her hands on her hips. "So you don't like my ideas about the title of the book, but you do want me to tell you what parts of the story you can skip?"

He smirked, saying, "Something like that. I'm just looking for a bit of advice."

"What did Brinker do?" she asked, pointing at a thick book sitting on the blotter.

John Brinker had written 'the book' on Rufus Barrell almost seventy years earlier. Published in 1951, "Rufus Barrell: His Life and Times" was still considered the best work on the Barrell patriarch. But Paul found it mind-numbingly dull. Brinker had concentrated solely on Rufus himself, giving short shrift not only to his children, but also to his wife. And his prose was about as entertaining as an accounting textbook. There were other books on some of the other Barrells and Paul had read them all. Some of them were contemporary 1920s and '30s "hero-building" pieces intended for children. Paul had read them anyway. He had even found (and purchased) a copy of a late 1920s cookbook attributed to Roland "Possum" Daniels titled "Ol' Possum's Southron Delicacies!" (Paul very much doubted that the colorful ex-catcher had actually penned it).

"Stinker," (Paul liked his childish pun of the long-deceased writer's name), "goes on at dreary length about the early days of the OSA. He even has full-text copies of correspondence between Potentas and the FABL league offices. Total snooze-fest. He even makes Rufus scouting Max Morris dull - and that story is really hard to make boring."

She shook her head and shrugged. "Really, I'm not the right person to ask. Sports fans know the Barrell family, or at least know the broad strokes. So yes, the real fans will know about the OSA's early days. Maybe you should concentrate on Joe, or Rollie. Heck, even Jack - and you know I hate hockey."

He picked up a pencil and began absently chewing the eraser.

"Stop that!" she exclaimed. "What are you, two years old? Oral fixation much?"

He rolled his eyes.

With a sigh, he dropped the pencil, closed the laptop and stood up. "I need to get on the road. Watanabe's pitching for LA and the Japanese media are voracious - I need to get in there reasonably early so I don't get literally squeezed out."

Grabbing his bag (which had his work laptop in it - he wrote his book on his own computer since the paper knew nothing about it), he cast a glance at the now dormant machine on his desk. "Rufus and his clan will still be there when I get home tonight."

Cheryl stuck her tongue out at him. "And if you're lucky, I might still be here too."