Shea's afternoon with Silvera is gold

A few weeks ago I interviewed Justin Christian who just finished up the season with the San Francisco Giants. He’s not a very widely know player being that he has played minor league baseball most of his career. So it makes sense that he would be interviewed by a minor league reporter such as myself.

Anyway my article on Justin Christian finally went in the Skyline View this week and I’m pretty pleased with the profile. Justin gave me a lot of great stuff to work with as well as Skyline coaches John Quintell and Dino Nomicos.

I’m still relatively new at putting together newspaper articles, so I just did the best I could do and, as I said before, was pretty pleased with the result. That is, until I read another sports profile today in SF Chronicle’s sporting green.

John Shea is a sports writer for the SF Chronicle and he put out a doozy in today’s paper. Interestingly enough, his profile was on a minor celebrity as well.

There probably aren’t very many people who remember the Major League Baseball career of Charlie Silvera (I’d never even heard of the guy). He is not very well known for his personal achievements in baseball, but more for the fact that he played backup for Yogi Berra on the New York Yankees and alongside players like Joe Dimaggio and Mickey Mantle.

Old people are full of great stories, and their homes are littered with great old artifacts. Old people who played on a Yankee team with Dimaggio and Mantle should probably be donated to the Baseball Hall of Fame.

Already, Charlie Silvera’s life is ripe with material for a great profile, and that’s where much of the interest is. But the reporter John Shea uses a great technique to gain deeper insight into Charlie Silvera’s life, and most importantly in this article, his personality. Shea spends an entire afternoon with Silvera, watching the ball game on TV. And the result is that the reader feels as if he were spending an afternoon with Charlie Silvera. As I was reading the profile I did almost feel like I met the man and that his stories were being told to only me.

This is the result of great writing and reporting by John Shea who really knows how to spin a yarn into whatever shape he wishes. The player I interviewed for The Skyline View (Justin Christian) didn't play alongside Dimaggio or Mantle, but if I had the article to write over again, I might have liked to write it in the fashion of John Shea's article in the Chronicle today.