What’s in a Famous Name
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Michael S. Schmidt topics.nytimes.com index.html
Bats
When I began reporting about baseball for The New York Times in the fall of 2005, I was a clerk who fetched coffee and photocopies, and had few contacts. My editor would tell me which people I should try to call for information, but I feared they would never call me back. Why would they? These people didn’t know me. Without any returned calls, I worried, I wouldn’t have a story. I thought my only hope was to take advantage of my name.

My entire life, I had been ambivalent about sharing my name with the Hall of Fame slugging third baseman who played for the Philadelphia Phillies. I played baseball, but the name didn’t help me hit home runs, and at times it attracted annoying questions. (Did your parents know what they were doing when they named you? Yes. Did your parents name you after him? No.) But the need to get people on the phone presented me with a new and different challenge, and for the first time I tried to leverage the words Mike Schmidt.

I figured if I called someone and simply left a message that Mike Schmidt was looking to talk, they might mistake me for the other Mike Schmidt and call me back.

Early on, my greatest successes came when I called the players union. The friendly receptionists there would promptly pass me through to a high-ranking official, and I’d have the access I needed. At the time, I didn’t realize that I was benefiting from an unofficial union rule. If a former or active player calls the union, officials often stop what they are doing to talk. I learned this first hand during a visit to the union offices in 2007, when I was sent into the hallway because Ray Knight was on hold.

My success at the union lasted only so long. The folks there caught on to me, and after a few calls from Mike Schmidt — and my unwanted questions about performance-enhancing drugs — the receptionists began taking messages. I would usually not get a call back for hours, often uncomfortably close to deadline.

Over time, I met enough people and wrote enough articles that I no longer thought about using my name as a way in the door. But to this day, when I introduce myself as Mike Schmidt, it raises the eyebrows of many players, particularly the older ones. After I introduced myself to Mike Mussina last month, he stared at me for a few seconds before blurting, “Mike Schmidt, no way, that’s not your name.” It served as a good icebreaker.

Mike Schmidt had already played in eight All-Star Games and won a World Series before I was born on Sept. 23, 1983. My parents weren’t Phillies fans, but they wanted to name me after my father’s mother, Margaret, who died many years earlier and loved the name Michael.

My parents weren’t oblivious to my baseball connection, and shortly after I was born they wrote Schmidt a letter asking him to sign a copy of my birth announcement. Several weeks later he sent the announcement back.

My family moved in 1990, and somehow the birth announcement got lost. My father then began a 16-year project to track down Schmidt to sign another birth announcement. The Phillies lost one announcement, and another that was sent to Schmidt’s house was not returned. Finally in 2006, my father tracked down his publicist, who said Schmidt would sign the announcement.

At this point, my father had only one announcement left, and it had a stain on the only blank spot. So my father had the announcement mounted with a space below it to sign.

Schmidt signed it and my parents gave it to me, framed as an unexpected gift that now hangs in my room.

While talking to my father for this piece, he revealed that if he could do it again, he would have chosen a different name for me.

“In hindsight, I realize there is too much out of your control if you connect your name to a famous person,” he said. “Shortly after you were born, a lot of baseball players began getting into trouble with drugs, and you could have been forever connected to something bad even though you didn’t do anything. In the end, we were lucky because he didn’t get into trouble.”

That’s true, although as Mike Schmidt the reporter, I’ve written my share about stories about players who have gotten into trouble.