“We ain’t doin’ none of this Tuesdays with Morrie shit,” baseball great Dave Parker once told his collaborator Dave Jordan, as they worked together on the soon-to-be-Hall-of-Famer’s memoir. “We goin’ out poetic and wild.”
As Told To podcast guest Dave Jordan is a writer and filmmaker and founder of Instream Sports, a pioneering athlete-author writing platform. He is the co-author of the acclaimed memoir Cobra: A Life of Baseball and Brotherhood, with the late Dave Parker, who was inducted into Major League Baseball’s Hall of Fame just weeks after his death in June 2025, following a decade-long struggle with Parkinson’s Disease.
Upon publication, Cobra was hailed by Tyler Kepner of The New York Times as “one of the most gripping and revealing baseball memoirs I’ve ever read.” The book was nominated for a prestigious Casey Award, as one of the best books of the year, and stands as one of the wildest, most poetic memoirs on the baseball bookshelf.
Prior to his work with Parker, Dave Jordan was a regular contributor to the Sporting News, SB Nation, and the Hardball Times, and the co-author of Fastball John, written with former San Francisco Giants pitcher John D’Acquisto.
Dave Jordan’s short film, “The Paper Mache Chase,” starring Jim Gaffigan, Cynthia Nixon, and Spalding Gray, was featured at South by Southwest, the Brooklyn Film Festival, and several major film festivals. The film focuses on the crazy, stressful, and wildly competitive admissions process facing parents of New York City pre-schoolers.
At the time of Parker’s death, author and subject were completing work on a follow-up collaboration to Cobra—King’s Island, a look back at the Hall of Famer’s rookie season with the Pittsburgh Pirates, and the racial and political climate that surrounded the game in the summer of 1974.
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