An Interview with Sports Writer Molly Knight

Near the beginning of the 2015 baseball season, sports writer and New York Times bestselling author Molly Knight had an online conversation with Dodgers pitcher Brandon McCarthy.  A sports writer chatting with an athlete about sports is pretty standard stuff, but this particular exchange was special, because it was the athlete asking the questions. And it piqued the interest of a mob of fascinated Twitter onlookers.

It started with this Tweet from Brandon McCarthy (@BMcCarthy32), which he addressed to Molly Knight (@Molly_Knight).

@BMcCarthy: “When do you know when to talk to a player?”

@Molly_Knight: “Wait until they have pants on.” And then, as an aside: “First baseball player I ever interviewed only wanted to know what hotel I was staying at.”

And thus began the type of back-and-forth that you rarely see in any public online forum: a measured discussion between two people who function in a framework where they are typically antagonists. Knight and McCarthy spoke about the dynamic between player and writer—that high-wire act of getting to the fundamental truth about an interview subject without simultaneously revealing too much and screwing them over. McCarthy got into gender politics. He asked Knight questions about her experience as a female reporter in a field that is not only dominated by male reporters, but in and around actual professional baseball fields that are cluttered with some of the world’s most dominant types of men. Knight and McCarthy answered each other candidly and with compassion over the course of 90 minutes.

I happened to be on Twitter that night, reading about baseball. (Some people do yoga to relax. I read rumors about the competition for the fifth spot in the rotation.) It was the first time I’d ever heard of Molly Knight and her book, The Best Team Money Can Buy: The Los Angeles Dodgers’ Wild Struggle to Build a Baseball Powerhouse.

Knight has been a Dodgers fan since she was a kid, and she’s been writing about sports for ESPN magazine for nearly a decade. But a couple years ago, she realized there was something special about the story of the Dodgers.  The franchise—embattled by its almost cartoonishly evil former owner, Frank McCourt—began to emerge as one of the best resurrection stories in sports. The team went from bankruptcy to being sold in the most expensive deal in sports history. Its payroll ballooned to nearly 300 million, heads and shoulders above every other team in the league. They had Clayton Kershaw, one of the best pitchers on the planet. Former NBA star Magic Johnson is partial owner. And Knight tracks the whole operatic tale in her meticulously reported portrait of the...