Pearl District, Portland (Or.) – You don’t meet many people who wrote for McGyver and co-wrote a book about life, the universe, and everything, with Stephen Hawking. Actually, you can probably meet just one people like that: Leonard Mlodinow, in the neighborhood recently for a capacity crowd at Powell’s City of Books.
Mlodinow, decked out in comfortable jeans, snug black t-shirt and navy-blue blazer – yes, the standard uniform for men of certain talents and years – was talking about his new book, The Upright Thinkers: The Human Journey from Living in Trees to Understanding the Cosmos. But I first started reading two books ago. The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives (2008) is probably the best book ever written on the subject, and introduced many of us to the mind-bending Monty Hall Problem (go ahead and bend your own mind … but only if you’ve got some time). I didn’t know about McGyver (or any of Mlodinow’s other TV work, including a decidedly non-scientific episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, in which Wesley Crusher has a serious crush on an allasomorph). But I did recall that Mlodinow referenced baseball a couple of times in Drunkard’s Walk. So after Mlodinow’s talk about his latest work, I sat down with him while he signed dozens and dozens of books, and later at the local Peruvean tapas joint (where he asked our waiter for the most traditional fare on the menu).
Mlodinow grew up in Evanston, Illinois, the son of Holocaust survivors. He loved baseball and the Cubs, and was a Little League all-star. In Drunkard’s Walk, Mlodinow suggests that while Roger Maris was of course unlikely to break Babe Ruth’s record, it wasn’t so unlikely that someone like Maris would do it. Mlodinoff was a small boy at the time, but had his favorite. “They all rooted for Mantle,” he wrote. “I liked Maris.
“I just liked people other people didn’t like,” he says now. “I felt a kinship for outsiders. I grew up in Evanston, Illinois, the son of Holocaust survivors, and I was not well-assimilated. In the seventh grade, I went to a friend’s house and his mother asked if we wanted grilled-cheese sandwiches. I didn’t know what that was, which was rather embarrassing. I was the only kid who carried a briefcase to school every day.”
In the third grade, he was writing stories about dinosaurs and showing them to the school librarian, who encouraged him to keep writing. Still, young Leonard was hardly a prototypical nerd. “I played baseball every day, every summer. I played at Brandeis, too, as a freshman, but was kicked off the team when we had some off-days and I went to visit my girlfriend rather than practice every day. I had trouble with curveballs, anyway, so probably my career was self-limiting.”
Mlodinow trained as a theoretical physicist – his Ph.D. thesis at Cal-Berkeley was titled “The Large N Expansion in Quantum Mechanics” – but never really stopped writing stories about dinosaurs. He started with spec scripts and ultimately wrote, with a longtime partner, for many television series, but doesn’t miss the work much: “They treat you like shit. They lie. They cheat. They steal.” After bowing out of episodic television with a 1990 episode of The New Adam-12, Mlodinow worked in the video-games industry for a spell before returning to academia. And a couple of years ago, he turned to writing books full-time, while still publishing the occasional physics paper “as a hobby.”
Turns out Mlodinow doesn’t follow baseball much any more. “Part of it is the teams shuffling around so much, and part is me moving from city to city.” He did deliver a talk at MLB’s General Managers Meetings a few years ago, and demonstrated the unlikelihood of clutch hitting as a repeatable skill. “Billy Beane liked Drunkard’s Walk. He came up to me afterward and told me he loved the talk, and I should shut up because he doesn’t want everyone else to know it.”
And still there’s a place in Mlodinow’s heart for the Cubs.
“I’ve got a friend who works for Major League Baseball” – a well placed friend, too: Dan Halem, MLB’s top lawyer – “and he says he’ll get me tickets if the Cubs ever get to the World Series.
“I remember saying to my father, who wasn’t much of a baseball fan, ‘Well, maybe the Cubs will win the World Series in your lifetime.” He was around 60. Now I’m 60 and they haven’t won one in my lifetime, either. So there you go. Two generations of Mlodinows.”
