There are many areas of literature in which American authors have made an indelible mark. Be it jazz, rock, or any other facet of modern music, Americans can take pride in place of first, if not place of best. Another area in which such commentary and greatness do overlap is in our National Pastime: baseball. A symphonic movement of a game, baseball rose with radio, television, and now (through MLB Advance Media Ventures) the digital age. And with its modern turn, a crop of citizen-journalists has risen – a class of commentators outside of the prestigious club of baseball writers, who mix excitement and fandom with hard-nosed journalism.
AD’s hometown team, the Los Angeles Dodgers, made the biggest splash of the baseball offseason, inking Shohei Ohtani – for whom the term “generational talent” feels like an understatement – to the largest contract in sports history. Already a great team, the Dodgers made this splash in the hope of securing not just a championship this year, but a sustained culture of winning. But baseball is fickle, and signing the best does not make you the best. Championships are earned – the Dodgers may have increased their odds with the signing of Ohtani, but they still must prove themselves and sustain success across a long season.
Into this moment steps Richard Parks III and his new podcast, Dodger Blue Dream. Parks has already established himself as a podcaster, with credentials helming masterful seasons of Richards Famous Food Podcast and as executive producer of Seth Rogan’s Storytime. Those shows, like his new venture, are a sonic buffet, intertwining brilliant storytelling with audio pizazz and intricate yet measured musical accompaniment. A student of the game – both of baseball and the podcast/narrative craft – Parks has chosen the new baseball season and the excitement around the Los Angeles Dodgers as his new focus. The initial episodes of Dodger Blue Dream feel like being the fly on the wall of a baseball fever dream. Perfectly inside-the-outside, Dodger Blue Dream is the type of document that may serve to either introduce an unsuspecting audience to baseball and/or a receptive audience to his style of podcasting.
We recently met up with Parks at a noisy Silver Lake coffee shop to discuss Dodger Blue Dream, the journey that led him to it, and how hope springs eternal, even if that hope is tied to the nail-biting drama writ large across 162 games. | kramer
Aquarium Drunkard: The Major League Baseball season is looong – 162 games. You can never know how it will go. If things go well, it’s even longer – indeed, the fewest games a championship club could play is 173 games. You’ve signed yourself up for this project – to chart the course of the Dodgers season through your particular lens. Why is that? Why take on something having so uncertain a journey and outcome?
Richard Parks: I just wanted to bottle that feeling of being a fan, following the season, and not knowing what’s going to happen. And, in doing so, I’ve injected it into my workflow in a possibly dangerous way for making plans – and making good on plans.
This is a challenge for me – and this project should imbue the whole thing with the proper emotional narrative. As a baseball fan, we know what it feels like to follow a season the whole way through. That’s the joy – if you follow the season, if you invest early enough and enough, and you see yourself through the dog days. . . when that big moment comes at the end of the season and that guy is standing in the batter’s box and the pitcher is staring him down, and the camera is zooming in – you know everything about that person and why that moment is so important. So, to get all that narrative importance – the only way to do that is to start early and invest.
But I’m stressed I’ve spent too much time working on this thing, and it’s been taking away, for the past week or so, my following the season in the way I maybe would otherwise.
My plan is to try and track the season. The idea was weekly. I thought I was going to be talking about, like, what are the stakes of Mookie Betts moving to shortstop. I literally thought I’d be working on that piece, but instead, there was this bombshell news story that landed in my lap the day that I was putting the first episode, which was Opening Day in Korea, so my plans have already been foiled in a way that’s exactly what I had hoped for – I think that that is the excitement of baseball, you don’t know what is going to happen.
AD: Betts and Ohtani are good examples. There could be stories that you want to tell – perhaps early in the spring to frame season, or just stories you feel should be told, no matter when – but there will be events or moments that will come up, such as what occurred in your first episode with this scandal. Are you nervous or anxious that there are stories you may not get to tell?
Richard Parks: Oh, I’m going to miss things. I have to figure out how to do this. For example, I’m working on a big Ippei [Mizuhara, Ohtani’s now-fired interpreter] episode now – it follows very naturally from the story in the first episode. I mean, of course you would focus on Shohei from the beginning, it seems kind of natural that you would, but none of this news had come out to that point. Ippei was a character in that [first] episode, and then the day that I planned to release it, this thing [the gambling scandal] happened. And I waited for a day, not knowing what to do about that – eventually, I made a few updates, and then I put it out. Now I’m trying to follow it.
But I’m missing out on stories already, on things that I would have done. And also . . . I’m making the first two episodes of my baseball show not about baseball! Maybe about the culture and business of baseball, which is part of it, but I’m missing out on talking about Will Smith’s contract extension [10 years/$140 million], and Gavin Lux’s throwing arm [a possible case of the Yips], and Teoscar Hernandez [another new Dodgers signing] striking out too much. But in terms of what this thing is for – it expands who it is for and what it’s about. I don’t think I can’t get back to “baseball,” but I’m going to miss a lot because it’s documentary in nature. The cadence of baseball, especially in 2024, is not weekly it’s hourly.
What I’m doing is different, but it’s a fun, creative challenge. It’s like having a gun to your head and saying, “you have to make Backstage Dodgers [the local Dodgers cable provider’s “insider” show] by yourself every week, from your perspective, and see what happens.”
I’m going to miss a lot, but what I hope it will still have is the narrative of a season. The season starts: pink jasmine is in bloom [Parks actually grabs a pink jasmine hanging over our table], there are snowcaps on the San Gabriel Mountains, the L.A. River is gushing full, and the days are getting longer. And all of that Ken Burns “Baseball” stuff – I have to backtrack. It’s all ersatz George Will or Doris Kearns Goodwin.
AD: Well, that’s a good point to ask about your relationship to baseball journalism, which has many facets. From Bart Giamatti’s [the 7th Commissioner of the MLB and, yes, a certain actor’s father] “Green Fields of the Mind” and other beautiful poetry like John Updike’s “Baseball,” to beat reports and un-bylined work, and everything in-between. Will, Goodwin, Peter Gammons, Roger Angell, and so forth. And now, present day, there’s more writing about the culture than ever. Historically and currently, what are your interests in how you follow the game, and how do you think they might influence Dodger Blue Dream? Are you bummed not to have a press pass and get in the locker room?
Richard Parks: Well, I guess, fortunately, that option is not available to me.
AD: Yet.
Richard Parks: [laughing] Yes, maybe one day I may join the Baseball Writers Association of America [the association of writers who, amongst other things, votes on which players achieve the Hall of Fame]. I would love to, I would be honored.
But it all starts with Vin Scully [the voice of the Dodgers for 67 years, first on radio and in Brooklyn, and then in Los Angeles once the team moved], who I grew up with as a Dodger fan, and who is absolutely – I would identify him as, even before this project, and before I was really making audio-narrative journalism – my literary hero. He would say things like, “he’s like the little girl with the curl.” I heard that when I was 9, and I found out later that that’s an old nursery rhyme, or it’s Longfellow, or it’s Shakespeare, “’tis a humble thing, but thine own” is something he’d say about a little infield single off the end of the bat. Or just “deuces wild.” He would say these things stick in your brain, these little earworms of language. He was a play-by-play announcer who did it by himself. Of course, there’s no one like him, there never will be, and that job is not available anyway.
It’s a funny thing, even with the break-neck pace of the internet and media and the 24-hour news cycle – I guess you could go live on Instagram or something – but paradoxically, live things that were once broadcast events that were consumed by most of the culture are now more ephemeral formats. You know, if I were to go live to my 1,300 followers, no one would ever see it. So, I’m not trying to do what he did, but he’s always in my mind. He has that Irish storyteller in him. I think that what I’m trying to do in this show — it’s emerged as I’ve been piloting stuff and working on it, because I’ve wanted to do this for years and had half-attempts at it. But then the episode that finally came out, “this is the thing” – and the next one I’m working on, it’s more like I’m a Gammons, except, you know, I’m not Gammons! The jacket doesn’t fit that well. It’s more like, I’m Huell Howser, and somehow, I’ve self-assigned, and they gave me a cameraman, said “we have three edit points, go!” It’s like a character of a host who is trying to be a national columnist, perhaps, to pull out these stories.
I listen almost exclusively to baseball podcasts. That’s something that started happening over the last couple of years, as I sort of retreated more into baseball as my main source of media-food. Because everything’s there and you don’t really need anything else. And I don’t want to become a fascist in my middle age, but I’ll become a fan instead. So I’ve sort of retreated into baseball in my middle-age. But the thing that I’m doing, that I don’t hear other stories doing, are things that I naturally do and is my job, or the things that I do in my previous work. It’s just storytelling – just edited, written, storytelling. That’s the differentiator – I think that pairs nicely with the idea of what a columnist does. Whether it’s a voicy, op-ed kind of opinion piece, or just a trend story, or looking at a side of a player’s personality that we may not know about, picking out these single narratives, and write them as these tight little columns – I think that’s what I’m trying to do, in audio format.
The experience of being a baseball fan is super overwhelming. If you’re a Dodger fan, and you have Spectrum SportsNet – it’s a station that’s basically owned by the Dodgers, which has a lot to do with the business side of baseball. We’re watching reality shows about these guys, about their homes. There’s this cacophony of voices and soft-journalism, where everyone who asks the questions works for the team. I wanted to somehow, without commenting on that, include it in the show, because it’s a part of how we receive the story of the season.
The other thing about Vin Scully is, he is, I think, arguably the person who popularized telling backstories about players within the game. He had this brilliance, “if I can get people to care about the person, they’ll care about the game more.” And it fits nicely with the cadence of play. I think that we know that we get these portraits of people, and they’re distanced somewhat. So that’s something I want to add in, with the column approach. Hear more voices than my own, not be omniscient, not pretend to be the expert of anything like that. It’s a nicer listening experience to say, here’s this broad portrait of someone with a detailed landscape behind them.
AD: We’ve touched on it, but I’m wondering your thoughts on access. Baseball journalism is guarded by a hierarchy based on access. That access has expanded – there are podcasters who get press passes now. Is that something you want? Worry about not having? Would you want to talk to players for this project, beyond just the cool factor of it?
Richard Parks: Being in a room like the press room, for me, as an observational writer and documentarian, even if I’m not recording – that would be gold. Asking a question and getting an answer – that interaction may be valuable, but I don’t imagine I would ever have that opportunity. Though, I’ve been in a room with Dave Roberts [Dodgers manager], actually. My friend, who I wrote a cookbook with, Wesley Avila, whose a great L.A. chef. Angry Egret Dinette [a sadly shuttered Chinatown restaurant opened by Avila] got this grant from the Dodgers and MasterCard, so he’s done a bunch of stuff with them and made a bunch of videos. I went to Dodger Stadium for an event this off-season, and so I helped out prepping food. Dave Roberts was on stage for this luncheon and goes, “Where’s Wes?” Wes was back in the kitchen, he said to me, “you can go see this, I’ve seen this kinda stuff.” So I yelled out, “he’s back in the kitchen!” “Oh, he’s in the kitchen?” and Roberts looked at me, so I said, “Yeah!” So that was cool, I had my thing with Dave Roberts.
But I would love to have access. To speak to Mookie, in particular – have you heard Mookie’s podcast? I really like it. It’s just baseball players talking. It’s performative in a way, but he’s such a different person than the guy in the post-game interviews or the press I’ve seen. And he wanted to do it for whatever reason, it’s part of his whole expanding-everything-he-does, his brand, into ultimate greatness. But he’s fun, he’s very good at it, he’s good at being on a stage, asking questions. They put lights up [on his podcast] and he’s wearing sunglasses inside, just talking to [Clayton] Kershaw, like, “Kersh, you know the confidence you have to have to wear Sketchers?” He’s very funny, and really different than when he’s being interviewed by the baseball press.
I’m not banking on access. Coming back to the perspective of being a fan is something that is homebase for me, because all of my enjoyment of baseball comes from that, it’s just so connected to enjoyment of consuming stories. It’s this story format I want to share with all of my friends who aren’t baseball fans. I want you to enjoy this at-bat as much as I do, so here’s this thing that might help you do that. I’ll bait you in with normal storytelling, with surprises and changes, and it’s packaged in a way you might like.
AD: Is that something you have faced in your storytelling before? Where you know you are, in part, seeking an audience who may be averse to the foundational topic you’re discussing? Or perhaps, you know you want to broaden the audience beyond those already predisposed to baseball coverage beyond the game?
Richard Parks: I’m struggling with that now. I think about who it’s for all of the time. I don’t always know – and I certainly don’t know yet who it’s for. But all the same basic rules apply: if it’s going to be for anyone, as my dad [musician Van Dyke Parks] always says, “never leave them wanting less.” Trying not to waste anyone’s time, trying to be generous – you are your only proxy for who might listen to this. Trying to to remember the things that keep you interested and curious, and present them in a linear order that felt the most surprising and delightful to you; and real, and authentic, and honest to the story and whatever else you know about it . . . and, you know, put a lot of fun bijous, ear-candy stuff. It’s twenty, forty minutes of that – it’s not an hour of some guys chatting. It’s the best I could do.
AD: With Richards Famous Food Podcast, with this project, you put yourself forward. Maybe not front-and-center, “look at me,” but you and your voice are at the heart of this. How did you find that trust in yourself? Do you question yourself – from your worthiness to simply how you sound?
Richard Parks: That’s something I struggle with a lot. I’ve done it a fair amount . . . it’s all writing. Everything is creating a character. When you portraitize someone, your voice is there as a host, your actual voice, or your voice is there as an editor, writer, producer, documentarian. You’re always making decisions. Like a sculpture – you’re there, and someone else is there, and you’re always presenting a viewpoint, and I think that the more intentional you are about that, it just clarifies what the thing is. So if you’re going to be narrating – you just have to do it. And if you’re going to be editing and writing, you’re probably going to be narrating, and then you’re going to be a host character, and then you have to decide who that person is, overall and then within any piece or section. There’s always different needs.
It’s something I’d been through working with Storytime with Seth Rogan [a podcast conceived and hosted by the actor and produced/edited by Parks], obviously, he’s very famous, and he has a lot of personality and has a very recognizable voice. But it was the same job, you know? Like, Richards Famous and Storytime led to this project in a way, because I’d been through a long experience of working with Seth and writing these things. I tracked them, and then he came in and put his voice on them, punched things up, or said, “I wouldn’t say it that way, but I’ll say it this way,” or he just said it the way he would. It was also more of a straight storytelling show. With Dodger Blue Dream, as I was making it, I thought, “this is sort of like a rough draft of Storytime.” Before the host comes in.
AD: That’s a good point to discuss your own journey as an audio-focused journalist and storyteller. Richards Famous, while it had many voices, was heavily on your shoulders. Then, with Storytime, perhaps you had a lot of creative control, but you didn’t decide what story you were working on that week. Now, you’re back to something you fully control. How has that journey helped you evolve as a journalist, storyteller, podcaster? Did your time working on Storytime teach you about what you could do in a collaborative setting, or perhaps just one with a dynamic such as it had? Did you want to recapture being in complete control?
Richard Parks: Ahhhhh – no! I mean. I’m always looking for collaborators. I loved working on Storytime, I learned a lot from Seth and doing that together. It was like another thing my dad always says, “great show. Now all we need is a frontman.” Seth was the ideal front man. You would think, as a person who likes to make things for yourself or likes hosting, that it would be a difficult guy to have around. But it was immediately, symbiotically, really naturally a fit for me, to be as voicy as I possibly wanted to be, and then have him step in – the spotlight comes on and he walks in, and everybody is looking at him. That’s a blessing. And that’s kind of what I was looking for the whole time with Richards Famous: get this guy out of the way. It was so great to have Seth as a frontman.
Every once in a while, you have to have a big thing like this in your life. It’s something where I have so many of them that are almost happening, and this format, podcasting, is a really great place for me to say, “Okay, I’m ready, I don’t want to wait for any of that stuff anymore – I’m just going to do this.” And then you look around and, “I guess, well, no one else is going to host it.” It wasn’t that I wanted to get back to hosting something necessarily. And yet, this is a show that I think perhaps only I could host. There are only so many people, maybe, who have these overlapping skill sets and interests.
I love collaborating. My life is like a long search for collaborators. I don’t read it as often as I should, but [Ralph Waldo] Emerson’s Self Reliance – if you have that itch to get things done, to move on, to provide, and you don’t want all of these things to lie dormant for something that feels like a lifetime or a permanent period, then you must do. I want to contribute somehow if I can. It’s not that I think I deserve all the attention, it’s that – this is where the time goes. This is what I have to offer.
AD: One might consider what you do – between these projects, writing, the music you play or participate in – to make you something of a polymath. Why is it that this – audio-storytelling, the podcast form – has been something you’ve been able to stick with, return to?
Richard Parks: Even when it’s collaborative, it’s still very small. Generally, I sit there, and I do it myself. It’s very similar to the process of doing print poetry or print journalism. I used to work at newspapers, and I also came through documentary film and different filmmaking stuff. And to some extent I’ve been involved in making music. Podcasting fuses all of those things in a way that – the distance between the idea and the execution is just short enough – I feel the invest of my time to get there is always worth it. It’s very similar to writing in that way. And also, it’s a place that is naturally populated by both thoughts and feelings the way music is. In a way every piece of tape, whether it’s me doing voice-over or me grabbing a clip of Kirsten [Watson, Dodgers “sideline” reporter] interviewing Mookie in the locker room, or a broadcast, or music that I make or music that I hear, has some type of emotional meaning and emotional value. And the process of writing is deciding how much of those things go in what order, from A-to-Z, to create an experience that feels whole. That’s what storytelling is. And I believe that that is what songwriting is. It’s natural for audio. There’s some aspect to what I do that’s musique concrete, with sound design and stuff, and so it opens up things – I have more tools to work with. And yet, it doesn’t require lights, or rentals, or teams. I want teams, but I have that itch to do something. And not everyone is giving me the budgets I need! That’s why it ends up happening. It’s all stuff I learned from my father, in observing him, and the people that I have known through him. So many musicians are writers and storytellers. My dad played one of his songs on Rufus Wainwright’s album that came out last year [2023’s Folkocracy], a song he wrote [“Black Gold” off the elder Parks’ 2012 LP Songs Cycled]. Going through that experience and playing with him, and having him come out at some of the events, it reminded me how much he is a storyteller. He’s always been a storyteller in his music, but also just in general, and that presence that he has: he is that bard. And it’s that Irish storyteller thing again! In a way, I’m trying to be a bard making these podcasts, I guess, but hopefully, it’s fun to watch someone fail at being a bard, and I feel that’s more the category I fall into.
AD: It’s part of the joy of Scully, or why one can just put a baseball game on as background noise. There are a million moments that are nothing, but because there are so many moments, it all washes out. You remember what was memorable, fun, funny, insightful. It’s nice to have that not be so – perfect. That attracted me to the podcast: it’s one thing to say, I have a project, here are the 16 episodes, released one at a time. It’s another to actually track something one has no control over, like the 162 games of a baseball season, to see how it goes.
Richard Parks: No, it’s not immaculate. It’s wabi-sabi.
AD: Can you describe your set-up when you’re actually producing an episode? Is that banjo right there, the keyboard over there, the computer and mic in front of you? Or are you more measured in your approach?
Richard Parks: The first episode, I wasn’t necessarily planning to do any music at all, but I knew that I wanted to own it outright or pay whoever contributed to it. In writing it, and again, coming from Storytime where I was using library music . . . music is so useful in so many ways for me. I’ve tried to assembly line my process many times and it never works, especially if I’m working basically on my own. I’ve started to embrace that and be okay with it, and almost start with music to get into a character or writing idea that I might not otherwise find. And so, when I was putting together the first episode . . . I play mandolin, and I’ve been playing a lot of mandolin with my father, with his album, and I’m reacquainting myself with that instrument a lot. When it’s paired with baseball, I always think of Ken Burns “Baseball.” To hear a solo mandolin, to borrow that form, is a very germane thing in the process for me, like in Richards Famous, to grab forms from other places and try something that’s maybe slightly off, or satirical, or self-conscious, or whatever it is to get ideas out. I knew that I wanted to include “Take Me Out To The Ballgame” so I just started doing that. And in doing that, I thought, in order to tell this story that I’m working on, I really want some music cues that are basically some ostinatos, just some repeated musical phrases that maybe build a little bit and provide a container that’s one-to-two minutes, so I can get a scene across or a narrative idea. I just kept playing my mandolin and adding reverb.
So, literally, some cases of instruments next to me in my extra bedroom, a mandolin and a banjo, it’s all acoustic instruments. I work in Adobe Premiere Pro. I haven’t learned . . . I use Final Cut 7 hotkeys. I have a nice microphone, but I don’t even have a MIDI keyboard, which is insane. I really should have one, and a looper pedal and an octave pedal, and I should get Logic and just . . . do it. It could make all these things happen just a little bit easier, but instead I do it my own little messed up way. And the piano is all the way in the other room. So, I just start making stuff. The music in the first episode is me and my mandolin and I don’t even play to a click. I’m just playing at tempo twice and then I just pan left-and-right and I just add a delay and say, “okay, good enough.” It’s a sketch, it’s like temp-music. But it’s back to that wabi-sabi thing, “it’s good enough.” Because it provides the vibe, and then the host character is there. So, I started making music in order to write. That’s another way that I feel music and writing are connected in a different way, like, an 8-bar musical thing can be really useful to me in writing narrative journalism, for whatever reason, or getting into the right character.
It’s a fluid process. I made the first episode of Richards Famous in an office building that had a live-room, and there were a bunch of music makers in there with me, and we recorded live drums and stuff like that. It was . . . fun! I don’t always have access to that, but I don’t let it stop me. And as I continued, I realized I needed more music, and I kept using my mandolin. The whole thing [first episode] is just my mandolin and native effects in Premiere Pro, like reverb and delay. That’s it. And then I went to my dad’s house, he got out his accordion, and we played “Take Me Out To The Ballgame” for the end.
AD: Off of that – what is your relationship to the sounds of baseball? I’m talking about both the crack of the bat and the term, “crack of the bat.” Organ music. Crowd prompts and cheers.
Richard Parks: That’s where it starts. When I was growing up, with Vin Scully – he came from radio, before television. We didn’t have cable, I wasn’t allowed to watch much television, and there weren’t many games on television. Maybe on Fox 11 once or twice a week. So I listened to a lot of the games on the radio. Audio and baseball – a lot of people agree, they’re just naturally paired. It’s like a palette. There’s a color-scheme to those sounds, and I love those sounds — the roar, the murmur of the crowd, the organ in the distance. The way there is both distance and intimacy in a baseball broadcast, and the way that encapsulates the shared experience and the personal experience is just so beautiful. It didn’t end up in the first episode as much as I would have liked, but in concepts for the show, in years past, the sounds of baseball is where it started. The crack of the bat and the pop of the glove. I was there last year at Dodger Stadium when Ronald Acuna hit that home run last year – I’ve never heard a sound like that. You don’t need anything else, you don’t need amplification, it’s just the best.
There’s a vernacular. With literary forms, with audio forms, musical and otherwise, radio, storytelling, This American Life, Vin Scully, music . . . there’s a vernacular you can decide to engage with in ways that just open up opportunities and also has a limiting thing that’s very useful creatively, because you know you’re engaging in that tradition. So how you decide to position yourself in relationship to that says a lot about you, and can communicate a lot, not all of it verbally, to an audience. Sound is great!
AD: What would be your walk-up song? Or would you craft your own?
Richard Parks: When I was a kid, I fell in love with baseball. My father saw this happen while he was making an album called Tokyo Rose. Which is about, generally speaking, Japan and America. Japan had already taken on baseball and become obsessed with it. And my dad wrote a song called “One Home Run,” and he put it last on the album. And it starts with the crack of the bat, and a little piano riff. So, I grabbed it and put it in the first episode. I guess I would have to go with the song my father wrote for me!
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