Glanville enjoying post-career renaissance
Baseball, writing a perfect combination for outfielder
Doug Glanville has always been blessed with the sort of random curiosity and restless intellect that suggested he would make the transition to life after baseball with the same easy grace with which he ran down fly balls in the gap.
That turned out to be a pretty good scouting report. Since playing his last big league game in 2004, Glanville has pursued a wide range of interests, including authoring "From Where I Stand," which offered insights into life and baseball and earned critical acclaim.
Glanville is in his third year of working for ESPN in a variety of capacities and has already started his second book.
"I'm trying to map it out, but I have a pretty good outline," he said. "I'm chipping away at content. I've just found that I love writing. This one's going to have a lot more interview-based conversations with players. Getting into transitioning out of the game. So there will be some really cool elements of life beyond."
Glanville has also written columns for The New York Times and Time.com.
"I just want to shed light on the human side of the game. What players deal with. Talk about the issues you don't necessarily see and that players don't always talk about," he said. "It's been a great combination to sort of marry what I love to do, which is baseball, to the form of expression that I love the most, which is writing. It really came together well. And there's so much to write about baseball. Day to day, all the stories, you play 162 games. It's a great resource to talk about anything, really."
Glanville does columns for ESPN.com as well, but that only begins to explain his role with the worldwide leader.
"You get to wear a lot of hats at ESPN," he said. "You gain skills in so many different areas, so you feel prepared to do pretty much anything. They're very cutting edge. They have great research and resources, so I feel like I've learned more about the game than even when I played, which is really cool."
One of Glanville's more innovative duties involves a sponsorship with Sony PlayStation's "MLB: The Show," which he describes as both fun and unique.
"We teach the game through virtual demos. I actually look like I'm standing on the field and I talk about, say, [Tigers ace Justin] Verlander's curveball," he explained. "There's a lot of pitcher-based stuff. Last year, I did it, and by the end, I was writing scripts and everything. So this year, we're going to really ramp it up. I get to do about 30 of these demos. But that's one of the things I just kind of took ownership of, and it's gone really well."
Glanville was a dugout reporter during Spring Training and does studio work for "Baseball Tonight" as well.
Glanville played nine big league seasons, finishing with a .277 lifetime average. Six of those came with the Phillies (1998-2002, '04), including the best year of his career. In 1999, he batted .325, and his 204 hits were second most in the National League.
In 2005, Glanville signed a one-day Minor League contract so he could formally retire as a Phillie. That was appropriate since he rooted for the Phillies while growing up in Teaneck, N.J. -- he particularly liked the powder blue road uniforms -- and graduated from the University of Pennsylvania.
After he retired, Glanville started a real estate development company in Chicago with a childhood friend.
"I call that moderately disastrous," he said with a laugh. "I'm sort of recovering from that, but I still have my partner. We have some projects together on a lesser scale. When the market tanked, we just tried to sell everything. We sort of crashed and burned. We're still coming through that, but we're alive as a business."
Now 41, Glanville is more focused these days on his media enterprises as well as his family. He and his wife, Tiffany, recently welcomed their third child and moved to Raleigh, N.C.
"With the family growing, it was one of those things where you say, 'Where is our family, our mom, our parents?'" Glanville said. "So North Carolina made sense, because everybody's within four hours and my brother has lived in Raleigh for 20 years. It was sort of a family decision."
Paul Hagen is a reporter for MLB.com. This story was not subject to the approval of Major League Baseball or its clubs.
Article provided courtesy of MLB.com. Read the complete article at philadelphia.phillies.mlb.com.
