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SBD: what the reader thinks she knows
One point that Lauren Willig made during her workshop at RWA really stuck with me: authors need to think about whether their historical accuracy is going to pull readers out of the story, and determine how important that detail is to the overarching story. Because if a detail (accurate) strikes the reader as inaccurate for the period, it will jar them out of the reading experience. The example she used was the appearance of a camera in a historical novel. Reality: the technology for early cameras existed at the time, at least in a rudimentary way. Reading experience: readers were jolted out of the story by the hero of a historical novel using a camera at a time when they believed cameras had not yet been invented.
I'm reading a contemporary right now, one of the many books I obtained at RWA. And on the first two pages, details yanked me out of the story. A four man pitching rotation? No team in MLB uses a four man rotation; they began dying in the 70s and kicked the bucket in the early 80s. Periodically teams use 4 starters when there are breaks coming up in the schedule or one of their starters is on the DL, but there are no true four man rotations in the MLB right now. Or so I thought. But it turns out that there is talk about a few teams using them in the second half of the season.
The second thing that pulled me out of the story was the fact that the hero, a starting pitcher, "routinely" won twenty games per season. Uh, okay. The vast majority of pitchers never have a twenty win season. The idea of it being routine was supposed to make the reader understand how very good this guy was at his job, how talented he was. But it just made me roll my eyes. Except there are a bunch of pitchers who did win 20 games per season more than once, so maybe routinely wasn't such a bad word to use.
Here's the thing: this is a pretty good book. I like the characters, even the secondary ones. It's well paced and very readable. But those two things that I knew (or thought I knew) made me put the book down and go hunt up baseball statistics, which is probably not the author's goal.
Now that I think about it, most of the players on that list of multiple 20W seasons played in the era of the four man rotation, so maybe it isn't such an odd thing, to have the two things (rotation and 20W) together in the book, even if it distracted me.
I'm reading a contemporary right now, one of the many books I obtained at RWA. And on the first two pages, details yanked me out of the story. A four man pitching rotation? No team in MLB uses a four man rotation; they began dying in the 70s and kicked the bucket in the early 80s. Periodically teams use 4 starters when there are breaks coming up in the schedule or one of their starters is on the DL, but there are no true four man rotations in the MLB right now. Or so I thought. But it turns out that there is talk about a few teams using them in the second half of the season.
The second thing that pulled me out of the story was the fact that the hero, a starting pitcher, "routinely" won twenty games per season. Uh, okay. The vast majority of pitchers never have a twenty win season. The idea of it being routine was supposed to make the reader understand how very good this guy was at his job, how talented he was. But it just made me roll my eyes. Except there are a bunch of pitchers who did win 20 games per season more than once, so maybe routinely wasn't such a bad word to use. Here's the thing: this is a pretty good book. I like the characters, even the secondary ones. It's well paced and very readable. But those two things that I knew (or thought I knew) made me put the book down and go hunt up baseball statistics, which is probably not the author's goal.
Now that I think about it, most of the players on that list of multiple 20W seasons played in the era of the four man rotation, so maybe it isn't such an odd thing, to have the two things (rotation and 20W) together in the book, even if it distracted me.
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As for the 20-game winner issue, Curt Schilling did have 3 out of 4 seasons with 20 wins in this century (if he hadn't missed a month after having his appendix removed in 2003, he may have made it then too.) I am assuming the character in this book is the sort of l33t pitcher that Schilling and Tom Glavine were. But, no, pitchers don't routinely win 20 games. That's for the "is this guy a Hall of Famer or not" category of pitcher.
There's always talk about one team or another going back to the four-man rotation, and it really doesn't work out as such. On the other hand, I'm currently reading Summer of '49, and one of the Yankees talks about having a pitching staff of "8 starters and 2 relievers"--there would certainly be a basic rotation of A, B, C, D but occasionally E, F, G, and H would spot start.
If I don't stop now, I'll start ranting about pitch count, the no-decision, and the fact that starting pitchers really shouldn't be judged by the W-L record, as it's largely dependent on run support and the performance of the bullpen. (I think romance writers have more important things to worry about than modern advances in sabermetrics, but it would be nice not to have to nitpick so much.)
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