Most of us have dreamed of sitting in the dugout with our favorite baseball team, and at sixteen Matt McGough was no different. A few months after sending a blind application letter to George Steinbrenner, on Opening Day 1992 Matt found himself walking into the legendary Yankee clubhouse. There, amid the chaos and excitement, he was greeted by none other than his idol Don Mattingly — who promptly played a prank on him.Thus began two years of adventures and misadventures, from being set up on a date by the bullpen to playing blackjack on the team plane to studying for an exam at 3 am in Yankee Stadium. Through these often hilarious experiences, and especially through his friendships with the ballplayers, Matt learned priceless lessons about honor, responsibility, and the importance of believing in oneself. A magical tale of what happens to a young man when his fondest dream comes true, Bat Boy wonderfully evokes that twilight time just before adulthood, ripe with possibility, foolishness, and hard-won knowledge.
Matthew McGough is an author, journalist, and screenwriter. His non-fiction writing has been published in The Atlantic, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Boston Globe, and Slate. As a teenager, Matt was a bat boy for two seasons with the New York Yankees. He attended Williams College and Fordham Law School, then served as a law clerk to a federal district court judge in New York City.
In 2004, Doubleday published his memoir Bat Boy: Coming of Age with the New York Yankees. Matt's spoken word performance about his first day with the Yankees was selected to lead off the pilot episode of The Moth Radio Hour. His book Bat Boy became the basis of CLUBHOUSE, a primetime TV series on CBS. Matt was then hired as a legal consultant and writer for NBC's LAW & ORDER.
Matt's true crime account "The Lazarus File," published in the June 2011 issue of The Atlantic magazine, was named by Longform.org to its list of the Best Crime Writing of 2011. His latest piece of journalism, a history of the LAPD's Cold Case Homicide Unit, was in the Nov.-Dec. 2011 issue of Miller-McCune magazine. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife and their two children.
