E-mail this pageTommy Szarka, Class of '98
Author
Plattsburgh State helped to broaden my horizons and gave me the freedom to grow
"Since graduating from Plattsburgh in 1998, I have worked for the Watertown Daily Times as a sportswriter and also as the Assistant Sports Information Director at Clarkson University.
"Over the last year, before returning to Clarkson for a second tenure in the sports information office, I lived in Boston where I was able to use that city's many educational resource centers, including the Boston Public Library and Boston College's library. I spent many, many hours in the libraries conducting research for new projects while I searched for a literary agent and publisher for my first book, McGuire the Pitcher, which was completed in March 2001. Fortunately, both of those searches were fairly short.
"I must say that the history department at Plattsburgh State was an integral part of my development as a writer. I feel that all of the professors aided me quite significantly. Despite his hopes that I would broaden my horizons, Dr. Skopp allowed me to research and write papers on baseball frequently and I appreciate his patience and leniency in this matter. Dr. Voss acted in an advisory role during my senior project and helped provide me with a focal point in the endeavor.
"The entire department's allowance for writing freedom in non-traditional subject matter certainly made my time at Plattsburgh much more enjoyable and made all of the projects and homework a labor of love rather than just being arduous and toilsome. The freedom provided by the Plattsburgh State History department helped me nurture my creative side and has certainly contributed to my early success as a writer."
PublishAmerica Presents Abner's Curse by Tommy Szarka (Press Release)
Frederick, MD April 12, 2007 -- PublishAmerica is proud to present Abner's Curse: A Diary of Essays from a Baseball Itinerant by Tommy Szarka of Potsdam, New York.
"People ask me what I do in winter when there's no baseball. I'll tell you what I do. I stare out the window and wait for spring." Rogers Hornsby
In the days before travel was simple, before directions were more than a mouse-click away, and depression ran rampant, Hornsby spoke for every baseball fan with this famous quote. Fortunately, the world has changed.
After hundreds of hours of preparation prior to each baseball season, the author travels across the country on various jaunts, and during the 2006 season he decided to share the majesty of the game and its players along with its accompanying sights, sounds, fans, ballparks, promotions and the surrounding world. Infusing baseball with incidents from the author's past, pop culture, humor and social commentary, Abner's Curse allows readers to live vicariously through a nomadic baseball fan and his sojourns to ballparks from Portland, Maine, to Phoenix, Arizona.
Excerpt from jacket of Tommy Szarka's book, McGwire the Pitcher: Baseball's Alternate History (PublishAmerica, 2002):
"Back in the spring of 1981, a then 17-year-old high school senior had to make one of the biggest decisions of his life. No, it wasn't about whom he was going to take to the prom or whether or not to try beer. Mark McGwire was given the weighty decision of whether he would start a professional baseball career as a pitcher with the Montreal Expos, or accept a baseball scholarship at the University of Southern California. He chose the latter and the rest, as they say, is history. Or is it? Every chapter in McGwire the Pitcher: Baseball's Alternate History examines some of the biggest decisions in baseball history, some tragic and some trivial, to see what might have happened, if, at a critical moment, the choice was altered. The casual wonders of baseball fans are answered in the historical fiction vignettes of McGwire the Pitcher."