Episode 3: Steve Kettmann As Told To

Sportswriter, collaborator, editor, publisher…Steve Kettmann has just about covered the publishing waterfront. Perhaps his biggest success on the ghostwriting front was his 2005 collaboration with outsized baseball slugger Jose Canseco, Juiced, which made headlines immediately upon publication for its revelations on the widespread use of anabolic steroids in our national pastime and became a #1 New York Times best-seller.
After nearly a decade as a sportswriter for the San Francisco Chronicle, highlighted by several years as a beat writer covering the Oakland A’s, it seems only natural that many of Kettmann’s books have centered in and around baseball—including an uncredited collaboration with another of the game’s most controversial figures, Pete Rose (Play Hungry), as well as his own One Day at Fenway, chronicling a single game between the Boston Red Sox and the New York Yankees, and Baseball Maverick, an examination of the life and career of the noted front-office visionary Sandy Alderson.
Kettmann has also written extensively about politics, including collaborations with former Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe (What A Party!) and the late Robert Byrd, long-time U.S. Senator from West Virginia (Letter to a New President), among others.
In recent years, Kettmann has turned his talents to editing, compiling a headline-making collection of essays on the aftermath of the Trump presidency (Now What?: The Voters Have Spoken – Essays on Life After Trump); and, a heart-breaking and heart-lifting compilation of reminiscences inspired by the sudden death of his great friend Pedro Gomez, the ESPN reporter and one of the game’s greatest ambassadors (Remember Who You Are: What Pedro Gomez Showed Us About Baseball and Life). Both books were published by Wellstone Books, the small, independent publishing arm of the Wellstone Center in the Redwoods, a writer’s retreat in northern California founded by Kettmann and Sarah Ringler in 2012.  
Over the course of his long and varied career, Kettmann has reported from twenty countries on five continents, for publications including the New York Times, New York Newsday, the Los Angeles Times, The New Republic, the Washington Monthly, GQ, and Wired.com.
“I have a lot of passion for telling stories through collaborative writing,” Kettmann says—and in this episode of “As Told To” that passion comes through loud and clear, as he joins us to discuss what it means to capture the juice and essence of a celebrated subject and a life purposefully (and, in some cases, scandalously) lived.   
Steve Kettmann: Twitter | Instagram
This episode is sponsored by Libro.fm and Writer's Bone.