Recounting the Life of Outfielder Dave Parker

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It’s a short chapter in a long baseball story, but it’s fair to cite 19-year MLB outfielder Dave Parker’s stint as a 1990 Brewer as a turning point in franchise history. Parker was already a six-time All Star, the 1978 National League MVP, a participant on four postseason teams and the owner of two World Series rings when he added another accomplishment in December of 1989: The Brewers’ decision to add him as a free agent reportedly helped convince Robin Yount to reject more money elsewhere and finish his career in Milwaukee. Without Parker, Yount’s 3000th hit might have happened somewhere else.

This spring Parker and co-author Dave Jordan are releasing his memoir, Cobra: A Life of Baseball and Brotherhood. We recently talked to Jordan about the book and his experience writing it.

Starting from the beginning, what was it about Dave Parker that drew you to go do a book with him?

About a year after the release of Fastball John, the John D’Acquisto autobiography that I co-authored, we had just gotten home from an event in Cooperstown celebrating the book when I had a chat with a friend of mine who was close to Parker. He told me that Dave was trying to get his autobiography off the ground.

Baseball fans of a certain age, when you hear his name it’s like, “Ooh, the Cobra,” right? That must have been a wild ride. So that book should be, in the right hands, a tremendous reading experience. I told my buddy that I’d be happy to talk Parker through the process, I enjoy helping other writers. The whole book publishing world can be sort of a byzantine adventure at times, and it’s not always user friendly. So my friend was like, “just give Parker a call. I’d love to see what Cobra’s story would look like in your hands.”

It kind of made sense logistically. D’Acquisto and Parker were born in the same year, graduated from high school at the same time, were both selected in the 1970 draft, both decided not to go college and played baseball instead of attending school, and both made their Major League debuts in 1973. It was territory that I was extremely familiar with.

So we had a friendly initial chat, and we kept in touch here and there, and then late in 2017 the project stalled. So I said to him, “I’m going to send you a copy of Fastball John. If you really want a book done, we can get it done.” And he called me back a few days later, on a Sunday morning in December, and we talked football for 30 minutes. At the end of it he was like, “call me back next week.”

 I hit him up the following Sunday for another half hour chatting exclusively about the NFL, the Bengals, the Browns, everything. And again, “call me back next week.” Same thing, but a little more about our families, where we were in life, each other. This goes on for two months. And they were enjoyable Sunday conversations. I mean, it was “Breakfast with The Cobra,” every Sunday for the better part of a quarter year.

So football season ends, we’re past the Super Bowl, it’s February of 2018 and Parker was like, “all right, let’s do an article together. Let’s see how this goes.” And he asked me, “What do you want to write about?”

Now, I loved this book by Bruce Markusen, The Team That Changed Baseball, about the 1971 Pirates. That book made me wonder, what would have become of the 1973 Pirates had (Roberto) Clemente not passed away tragically in the New Year’s Eve plane crash? What happens that spring training? Forget about Parker for a moment. What do they do with Richie Zisk, Pittsburgh’s other prized prospect, who was ready to hit Major League pitching and was out of options? Bob Robertson, the Pirates’ hero of the ’71 World Series, does he lose his job? Probably not. Willie Stargell had played some first base in ’72 but Willie loved left field and people tend to forget, he was one of the most underrated left fielders around the game at this time, and the numbers prove that out. Al Oliver, their center fielder, did not want to play first base even though his nickname was “Scoop” because he was very good at first base. And Gene Clines, who gets a little forgotten at this point, batted .334 in ’72 in 334 plate appearances. He came in 20th in the MVP voting that year and there was still no place to put him.

The team had a true problem on their hands, and that’s in the very best of circumstances. Now Clemente is gone, and the entire organization is an emotional mess. The politics of right field for the 1973 Pirates in spring training was a real thing. And Parker was like, “I know all about that.” So we did a piece on that time in his life, The Sporting News ran it, Parker received accolades from friends inside and outside the game, and then he said, “all right, let’s do a book.”

One of the things that stands out in the book is the volume of details Parker remembers, down to the brands of cigarettes various teammates smoked and the sequence of teams he played high school football against. Were you surprised by how much he still remembers, 50 years after the fact?

Yeah. These are important moments in his life, and a lot of it was backed up with my research. He would ask me to look things up. We’re both co-authors, both of our names are on the cover, so it was a lot of his great memories and my deep research reinforcing what he remembered.

One of the cool things about the book is the variety of folks that Parker interacts with, whether it’s legends like Roberto Clemente, Willie Stargell and Dock Ellis or stories about guys like “Charlie Boo” (longtime Pirates minor leaguer Charles Howard), who he meets in the minors. How was it for you to be able to tell that variety of stories with him?

Well, Dave basically had said to me, “I want to spread some sunshine on the fellas.” And by that he meant a lot of the guys he played with. Some of his dearest friends remain guys who never got to the majors, guys he was roommates with in the early 1970s. He still maintains these deep relationships with players that he came up through the system with.

And in addition to what I mentioned earlier, Dave made sure that I spoke with the Pirates and they basically opened their Rolodex to me. And I had spoken with about 50-75 players, coaches, executives, managers, high school teammates. It was a very well-researched effort, and we got a lot of perspectives in addition to things that Dave told me about. So we were able to at least verify so much.

You sometimes find memoirs where they misremember a statistic, or an occurrence, or an at bat, or an inning or whatever. We made sure to check things over two or three times before we included them.

Parker has this long and storied baseball career, and obviously you spent a lot of time with him in the ‘70s with the Pirates, but one of the things you mention later in the book is that you could do a whole second book about his time with the A’s. How hard is it to fit all this stuff of this kind of lifelong baseball adventure of Parker into one book?

Well, let me put it this way. Nebraska Press really wanted the Parker book. They had gone back and forth with Parker years earlier with another writer, the project had stalled. So in Parker’s mind, once the deal was definitive and we were “go,” he basically said, “they want my book, let’s give them an incredible book.” We submitted a manuscript that was 229,000 words.

I really enjoyed working with my editor, Rob Taylor at Nebraska, we have a really nice rapport. He basically started laughing once I submitted the draft. He was like, “we can’t publish a 700-page book!” And we had a good laugh about that, but to his credit he gave us the freedom to police ourselves and get the word count down to something that’s a more reasonable number. So of course that led to some decisions.

Before we began writing the book I conducted an anecdotal survey of 200 die-hard baseball book readers. I went to a couple of newsgroups and whatnot. And I said, “Dave Parker’s writing a book. What do you want to know?” Overwhelmingly, as you might guess: those prime Pirates years, the 1985 drug trial and, surprisingly, his minor league teams. People really wanted to know about that.

What does the drug trials mean? It means complete coverage of his time in Cincinnati. What else does that mean? It means exploring his relationship with Pete Rose. Now The Cobra and Charlie Hustle were really tight, like “seeing each other around Christmas and exchanging gifts” tight. Like “buzzing down I-75 in Pete’s Porsche to Queen City black tie events during the offseason” tight, you know?

Nobody really asked too much about his one-year layover in Milwaukee, and just a single person asked about the 1989 season, specifically the earthquake World Series. I spent a dozen hours on the phone with Dave Stewart, Carney Lansford and (Jose) Canseco just to fact-check Parker’s stories and his recollections of the Oakland years.

So we have close to 18,000 words on the two Oakland seasons, and in addition to that we have 7,000 words on that 1990 Brewers season. They may be released in some form around the time the book is published, in magazine or blog form. We talked about the impact of Parker and Yount, who Parker nicknamed “General Custer.”

Anything else you want to tell us about the book?

It’s due out April 1, you can pre-order it on Amazon, you can get it through Nebraska Press, for the next couple of weeks they’re running a book sale, like 40% off baseball books, so you can get Cobra at a decent price for the next couple of weeks.

But yeah, we’re really excited to get this going and Dave’s been waiting a long time to tell his story and now he’s finally getting an opportunity to do that, and he’s terribly excited.

Press Box Publicity provided a pre-published draft of this book to assist in this story.