TOW #10

Pitch Simply: An interview with Major League Baseball player Daniel Norris

Adam Fetcher

The Cleanest Line (Blog by Patagonia)

            Before reading this article I had already read a little about Daniel Norris. For those who have not heard of him he is a Major League pitcher for the Detroit Tigers. Upon receiving his 2 million dollar signing bonus he purchased a 1978 Volkswagen van and has been living out of it traveling to various surf spots during the off season. He is a baseball player, surfer, photographer, adventurer, and cancer survivor.  Fetcher wants go beyond these surface attributes so his questions focus on the philosophies that led him to make this abrupt lifestyle change. He also wants to learn how Norris balances the different aspects of his life, so he asks him “You described a philosophy around simplicity through the experience of living in the van. I’m just wondering, how do you incorporate that philosophy into your training and bring it on the field?”(Fetcher 16). Fetcher is trying to emphasize the complexities that make Daniel Norris such a unique individual. The interesting element of an interview is that the reader gets to hear directly from the individual about what they have to say to question asked. So that means there are no authors to manipulate what the individual has to say. But the interviewer still has the job of facilitating the delivery of the information in the fullest sense. A big part of Daniel’s life is photography so Fetcher incorporates many of Daniel’s pictures so that again the reader is able to see an unobstructed view into who this person is.

Daniel Norris’s life is obviously intriguing to read about, but Adam Fetcher is also someone who has unique experiences of his own. Before he became the Director of Global PR & Communications for Patagonia he “was deputy national press secretary for President Obama’s re-election campaign and served in the Obama administration.”  And just to connect himself back to the article and seem more human he throws in that he is a Minnesota Twins fan.