Jim Caple always had a quirky, at times outlandish, approach to sportswriting. From his early days as a beat writer covering the Minnesota Twins for the St. Paul Pioneer Press to his long run as a columnist for ESPN.com, Jim’s ceaseless curiosity had a way of taking his readers down winding, out-of-the-way roads, such as that time he wrote a piece on figure skater Johnny Weir. Not content with simply ladling out the questions and then writing down the answers, Jimmy joined Johnny for side-by-side pedicures, which became the jumping-off point to a hugely entertaining and informative column:
NEW YORK — While pedicurists soak, buff, trim and polish our toenails, Johnny Weir describes the costume he plans to wear in this weekend’s U.S. Figure Skating Championships.
That’s classic Jim right there. Completely comfortable in his own shoes, he proceeded to jump merrily into Johnny Weir’s shoes, right down to the toenails.
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And so when our mutual friend Jerry Crasnick called Monday morning with the not-unexpected news that Jim had passed away at age 61, having succumbed to a long illness, my first thought was that it’s too easy to say we’ve lost a great storyteller. Oh, he told great stories, no doubt about that. But it was the manner in which he collected the raw material on which those stories were based that separated him from the rest of us. A pedicure? Really?
Some writers turn the box a little in search of a better angle, but Jim would methodically disassemble the box and then put it back together again, having found a way to write a story nobody else could have imagined. During his Pioneer Press days, he dutifully traveled to Toronto and spent a couple of days with St. Paul native Paul Molitor after Molitor played on a World Series winner with the Blue Jays. But the relationship reached a new level in 1996 when Molitor came home to play for the Twins. Everyone trumpeted the obligatory local-boy-does-good angle, Jim included. But he had an idea.
“This is when I learned Jim had a different way of doing things,” Molitor said. “He said he wanted to get in a car with me and drive around to all the parks I played at as a youngster and in high school. And it was in the middle of winter. We went to the Oxford playground, where I played baseball, and to the field at Cretin High School. We were sitting there in five feet of snow, talking about my youth baseball days.
“And the story came out, and that’s when I understood what he was looking for,” Molitor said. “I guess he wasn’t afraid to do something a little different to try and grab a little piece of history. We had a pretty darned good relationship after that.”
Jim was equally comfortable writing about the not-so-famous, such as the piece he wrote in 2006 on a Wesleyan University baseball player named Jeffrey Maier. Ten years earlier, Maier, a lifelong Yankees fan, had received his 15 minutes of fame when he reached out of the Yankee Stadium grandstand to intercept a fly ball hit by Derek Jeter. It was ruled a home run. It was the playoffs. It was a national story.
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Ten years later, Maier, having emerged as the all-time hits leader at Wesleyan, was invited to a Cambridge, Mass.-based charity event called the Oldtime Baseball Game. (Disclosure: I help organize the game.)
Jim Caple (left) interviewed Jeffrey Maier and joined him in playing in the Oldtime Baseball Game in Cambridge, Mass. Christopher Kontoes shot this photo for an ESPN.com story in 2006. (Courtesy of ESPN.com)Maier played in the game wearing a vintage 1951 Mickey Mantle Yankees uniform. Jim flew from Seattle to Boston not just to write a 10-years-later retrospective on Maier, but to do the interview while playing in the game with him. Jim wore the uniform of the 1969 Seattle Pilots, the one-and-done expansion team he rooted for as a child in Longview, Wash., and then broke his heart when it moved to Milwaukee and became the Brewers.
“It was a unique interview,” said Maier, now 40 years old and living in Amherst, N.H., with his wife and three sons. “It started out as an interview and soon it became a conversation. Rather than just talk about that game at Yankee Stadium, he asked me a lot of questions about what it was I enjoyed about baseball growing up and what drew me to it in the first place.
“We also talked about the Seattle Pilots,” Maier said. “He introduced me to a team I really knew nothing about.”
Sportswriting is not a 9-to-5 business, and it’s not for homebodies. You go where the work is, and for Jim, the work took him all over the world, from Wrigley to Wimbledon, from the French Quarter to the French Open, from the Running of the Bulls in Pamplona to the Pillsbury Bake-Off in Orlando. How, then, to keep the home fires burning? Easy: Jim’s wife, Vicki Schuman, was as much of an adventurer as he was. Her position in the airline industry allowed them to go just about everywhere, and they went, well, just about everywhere. And ESPN certainly indulged Jim his wanderlust, such as when the network sent him to Sonkajarvi, Finland, so that he and Vicki could compete in the World Wife Carrying Championship.
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The effort inspired another never-to-be-forgotten lede: “The hardest part of the World Wife Carrying Championship is telling your spouse she needs to drop another 10 pounds.”
I met Jim in 1987. I was the new guy covering the Seattle Mariners for the Tacoma News Tribune, he was just out of the University of Washington and covering Mariners home games for the Bellevue Journal American. That he was going places was quickly made apparent when he wrote an exhaustive retrospective on those doomed 1969 Pilots, the baseball team that hooked Jim for life.
It’s funny the things you remember: I once showed Jim a box score from a 1960 Red Sox spring training game in which Ted Williams and Carl Yastrzemski both played. Given that Teddy Ballgame and Yaz never played in a regular-season game together, Jim studied the box score as though it was the Rosetta Stone. For that alone, I knew we were going to get along fine.
Jim was a forward-looking sportswriter, adapting to many of the newfangled things that were happening in baseball and in media. But he hated pitch counts and “openers,” and he felt that older players, coaches, managers and scouts were being pushed out of the game.
Jim was young and curious and old and eccentric all at once. As comfortable as he was writing about getting a pedicure with Johnny Weir, he was just as adept at writing about the World War II exploits of his father, Verle Caple, who flew B-24s.
Crasnick and I visited with Jim for three days last year. We talked a lot about his favorite baseball player (Willie Mays), his favorite basketball player (Sue Bird) and his favorite movies (“Singin’ in the Rain” and “Say Anything” are right up there). I made a return visit this past April. Jerry, Jayson Stark and Jim’s longtime buddy Scott Miller from the St. Paul days visited with him in July.
Heartbroken over the passing of one of my favorite people in the world, Jim Caple
Jim & I shared a special love of the offbeat side of baseball. And it led us to so many laughs, unforgettable stories and “award-winning” ESPN videos.
Jim was a brilliant, beautiful soul. RIP, pal pic.twitter.com/bZu6qGdqY5
— Jayson Stark (@jaysonst) October 2, 2023
Just last night I was talking with Crasnick and posed this question: How would Jim have written this story? It makes me cry, but it also makes me laugh: Jim Caple would have come up with a unique angle, and the lede would have been hilarious.
(Top photo, from left, of Jerry Crasnick, Jim Caple and Steve Buckley visiting in Seattle last year: Courtesy of Steve Buckley / The Athletic)
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