"That crisp crack of the bat"
"That crisp crack of the bat"
The best baseball novels aren't really about the game on the field.
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I’m currently reading The Good Lord Bird by James McBride. (I wanted to read the book before I watch the Showtime series with Ethan Hawke and Daveed Diggs.)
If you’re new here, last week’s edition was about the travel writing of William T. Vollmann. The week before that was about The Sport of Kings.
And now: Issue 3.
The 2020 World Series will start next week, but you’d be excused for having missed this baseball season entirely.
October is the usual time of year when the World Series happens, but nothing else is usual about sports this fall. Due to the pandemic, the NBA, WNBA, NHL, NFL, college football, golf Majors, and tennis Majors and NASCAR have all been playing their seasons at the same time. While that may sound like a sports fan’s dream scenario, the television ratings suggest otherwise: viewership for almost all live sports is down big from one year ago, whether due to the crowded plate of sports to choose from, or the mental toll of the pandemic, or the distraction of the election, or all of it. (That’s a topic for an article somewhere else: this one.)
The baseball season has arguably been the weirdest of all. While every other big sports league was establishing a detailed plan to return to play amid the pandemic, MLB team owners and players were squabbling over salary splits. The league looked in danger of having no 2020 season at all. It ended up returning on July 23, after nearly nine months off the field, for a 60-game mini-season. (Each team normally plays 162 games.) You may also recall the revelations last year that the Houston Astros used a cheating system with cameras to steal opposing pitcher signs and relay them to Astros batters by banging a trash can with a massage gun.
All of this could understandably have turned you off from following the 2020 baseball season. But whether or not you’ve been watching, and whether or not you even identify as a baseball fan, you can still turn to baseball fiction for escape, and should.
Let me tell you about four great baseball novels (one brand new, three very old) that aren’t really about what happens on the field. Like all the best sports fiction, our fascination is with the characters around the sport.
Published in February, timed to the start of spring training (no one knew the baseball season would be shut down one month later), The Cactus League, by Paris Review editor Emily Nemens, is set entirely around MLB spring training in Arizona, known as the Cactus League. (The other 15 teams do their spring training in Florida, the Grapefruit League.) It’s a unique setting for a baseball novel, one I don’t think has been done before, and the author’s love for the tradition is clear. (Nemens took childhood trips to Arizona spring training with her father.)
Ironically, at one point during the pandemic MLB considered bringing all 30 teams to Arizona to play the entire season there; CBS even reported in April that the “Arizona Plan” was “the likeliest path to 2020 season.” In the end, they let all teams play at their home ballparks, with cardboard cutouts in the stands instead of human fans.
The Cactus League is real, but the Los Angeles Lions are fictional. Nemens’s novel is ostensibly about Jason Goodyear, the beloved, highly-paid star outfielder of the Lions. But it actually orbits deftly around him, depicting him as others see him. The book is charmingly structured as nine stories (or innings), each one from a different character’s perspective; we don’t hear from Goodyear until the final story. Each story begins with a brief narration by our unnamed sportswriter guide.
The characters are not who you’d expect to hear from: only two are players, while the others include the stadium organist; an ancient agent in a wheelchair; the black, gay part-owner of the Lions; a jersey chaser who hangs around spring training to hook up with players; and a local boy whose mother works concessions at the stadium. All of them come into contact with Goodyear, but the novel isn’t really about him.
Thus The Cactus League is more a collection of linked stories than a novel in the usual connotation. Linked story collections were very in vogue in the Aughts: Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge (2008), Daniyal Mueenuddin’s In Other Rooms, Other Wonders (2009), Jennifer Egan’s Visit From the Goon Squad (20210), Tom Rachman’s The Imperfectionists (2010), and Joan Wickersham’s The News From Spain (2012) are all excellent examples. David Mitchell’s incredible Cloud Atlas (2004) also belongs. Going back further, Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried (1990) and Denis Johnson’s Jesus’ Son (1992) are famous examples of the form.
These kinds of books require tight plot-mapping, and in The Cactus League, spotting characters from previous chapters becomes its own pleasure. The perpetrators of a break-in during the first story are revealed in the seventh story; a character arrested in the second story is picked up from jail by a character in the third story.
The genius of the novel is that these are stories that rarely get told. Her characters are fictional, but they are stand-ins for real types that exist within every organization. And their misfortunes are both universal and specific to their station.
Take Michael Taylor, the Lions’ batting coach. His backstory: He toiled away in the minor leagues for “humbling” checks, and when he finally got a major league contract, “His bat cooled off, as bats inevitably do, and he was sent back down. He ran through his option years, and when he was released on waivers, he was like the homely girl at the middle school dance: no takers. He switched to coaching then; for a decade he strung together three seasons a year—Triple-A, the Arizona Fall League, and then winter ball in the D.R. He missed just about every milestone in his kids’ lives.” That’s sobering, and real. Pro baseball is full of Michael Taylors.
Or take Tami, whose survey of the types of people hanging around outside the ballpark hoping to meet a player is the book’s finest story opening: “Done-up divorcées, new-to-Scottsdale cocktail waitresses, ladies in from Single-A affiliate sorts of towns… bored-looking fathers hang back in the shade, thumbing phones and tugging on their belts… too-pushy teen and preteen boys, pudgy middle schoolers and undersize underclassmen who bike over from the local schools just as soon as the final bell rings… The only group that can overcome the bad vibes of loitering at the players’ exit are the sorority girls from ASU… If the air could go out of a sky the way it goes out of a room when a busty Kappa Alpha walks in the door, that’d be happening in this Arizona parking lot… Tami won’t deny that she’s waited for a player to emerge from the locker room; of course she has.”
If Jason Goodyear is the kind of shining star that young fans think represents pro baseball, fringe people like Taylor and Tami are the unglamorous reality of the sport.
And I mean very unglamorous. The concession worker mother in the penultimate story leaves her child waiting in a hot car while she snorts coke with a friend. The team part-owner trades a player over his jealousy about one witnessed flirtation.
Goodyear, the golden boy, has a vicious gambling problem, an open secret among the team. His vice leads to an astonishing and moving final collision with one of the other characters.
And now, let’s get a little weird.
Philip Roth is one of my very favorite writers, and I’ve read almost all of his books. The Great American Novel (1973) is certainly not among his best or his most popular, but if you already know and love his (mostly very serious) writing, it’s like a zany treat, a book-length Jewish dad joke.
The novel (narrated by 87-year-old sportswriter Word Smith, eye-roll) follows the 1943 season of the Port Ruppert Mundys of New Jersey, who play in the doomed Patriot League. (Roth grew up in Newark, where the real-life minor league Newark Bears played in Ruppert Stadium from 1926 to 1949, and the team’s mascot was named Ruppert. Sadly, the team folded in 2014.)
The Mundys have had their ballpark requisitioned by the U.S. War Office to use for soldier training, so the team has to play an entire season with no home games. Many of their players are “replacements” while the real athletes are away at war. Thus the team becomes a symbol of America during WWII and all the ways the war disrupted daily American life. (Word Smith ends the novel with a letter to Mao Zedong begging him to publish his story of the Patriot League in China.)
But the war is just a thematic backdrop; really this screwball comedy is about the awful Mundys and the antics of their inane players. The character names are corny candy for pun lovers. Players in the Patriot League include: slugger John Baal, son of the pitcher Spit Baal; Mexican relief pitcher Chico Mecoatl; one-legged catcher Hothead Ptah; one-armed outfielder Bud Parusha; one-eyed pitcher Sy Clops (get it?); vengeful pitcher Gil Gamesh; and 14-year-old second baseman Nickname Damur. (“At fourteen he was the youngest player in the majors, as well as the skinniest.”)
In a 1981 piece for the Times selecting an all-star team of fictional ballplayers, Daniel Okrent, the creator of rotisserie baseball, put Hot Ptah at catcher, and called Roth’s novel “a self-indulgent fireworks display, an extended send-up of sport-as-seen-by-sportswriters.”
Roth lets Word Smith run completely wild, with long, hilarious tangents. (Smith claims to have been a friend of Hemingway’s and paints an unflattering picture of a day spent fishing with “Hem.”) In one aside, Smith says his library copy of The Canterbury Tales has doodles in it from kids, including a drawing of a fart: “Pretty good one too. Kids love farts, don’t they? Even today, with all the drugs and sex and violence you hear about on TV, they still get a kick, such as we used to, out of a fart. Maybe the world hasn’t changed so much after all.”
The book is full of geeky American literature allusions, to Hawthorne, Hemingway, and of course, Melville. (The first line of the book is, “Call me Smitty,” and the epilogue at the end begins, “The drama’s done. Why then here does one step forth?—Because one did survive the wreck of the Patriot League.”)
Depending on your sense of humor, you will spend the whole read either rolling your eyes or laughing out loud. For me, it was both.
Now, let’s get even weirder.
The Natural is universally famous, but more nowadays for the 1984 movie adaptation than Bernard Malamud’s 1952 novel. The book has rusted somewhat; I don’t get the feeling many new readers are picking up this nearly 70-year-old baseball novel. If anything, the most lasting legacy of the book and the movie may be only an abstract construct, a syrupy Disney ideal: the god-like, homegrown American slugger, smiling wide as he graciously signs a ball for a kid. (Daniel Okrent, in the Times piece I referenced earlier, wrote that Roth’s baseball novel “managed to outdo the entire Malamud-inspired genre of baseball-as-American-myth.”)
But the book, which I read early in the pandemic, floored me.
It was not at all what I expected. It carries you along, like a dream, as bizarro events happen that are treated almost nonchalantly.
The book opens with Roy Hobbs, the wunderkind pitcher, on a train to Chicago for a tryout. His manager Sam Simpson, an alcoholic but a sweetheart, accompanies him. There’s a lot of backstory never told: you don’t know how Sam found Roy or got him the tryout, where Roy is from, or anything about his family background. It’s fine.
Roy is protective of the bassoon case he totes with him. (There’s no bassoon in there; it holds his magical bat, Wonderboy, carved from the wood of a tree split by lightning.) On the train, he meets a mysterious woman, Harriet Bird, who also carries a precious piece of luggage: a black hat box. She’s your standard femme fatale. Roy, who does not have much depth to him, blushes and bumbles over her, like a cartoon rodent with his heart beating out of his chest to an “ahooga” sound effect.
On the train, some shit goes down. Roy and Sam encounter Walter “The Whammer” Wambold, a beefy slugger with shades of Babe Ruth, and the snobby sportswriter Max Mercy who is traveling with Whammer and is rude to Roy and Sam. (All four of the books I’m highlighting today have sportswriter characters, a must.) When the train lets everyone off for a break at a county fair, Whammer challenges Roy: “Pitch it here, busher, and I will knock it into the moon.” (The dialogue is pure 1950s.) The crowd gathers round. Roy strikes him out, in a scene far more restrained in the book than in the movie (slow-motion windup; uplifting music). Sam, who plays catcher for Roy at the fair and takes one of Roy’s pitches hard to his belly, dies on the train before they reach Chicago. Sam’s death is beautiful in its brutal simplicity: “The trainmen came in with a stretcher and they lifted the catcher and handed him down the steps, and overhead the stars were bright but he knew he was dead.”
There are other surreal deaths or near-deaths. When Roy gets shot in a hotel room (not a huge spoiler: it happens on page 34), he “sought with his bare hands to catch” the bullet, “but it eluded him and, to his horror, bounced into his gut.”
I gasped out loud when I read it. I was sure Roy died, and I thought we had a Sixth Sense situation until the shooting is finally referenced again 100 pages later.
Later, another absurd death conveyed with a shrug. Pop Fisher, the worn-out manager of the (fictional) New York Knights, where Roy ends up playing (at age 34), is reluctant to start Roy. But then the team’s star outfielder, Bump Bailey, dies by running through a wall to lay out for a catch. (You just kind of roll with it.) Roy gets Bump’s starting spot and goes after Bump’s grieving girlfriend Memo, who is Pop’s niece.
The scenes between Roy and Memo are the weirdest in the book, which is saying a lot. They read like a fever dream. Two in particular were unforgettable for me.
Memo hangs out with Gus Sands, a bookie with one fake eye. One night, Roy goes out to dinner with Memo, Max Mercy (who has zero recollection of meeting Roy on the train years earlier), and Gus Sands. After a lighthearted argument between Roy and Gus about gambling, Roy “grabbed the bookie’s nose and yanked. A stream of silver dollars clattered into his plate… Roy rippled the green cloth in front of Max’s face and dragged out of his astonished mouth a dead herring… From Memo’s bosom, he plucked a duck egg… From the glum Mercy’s pocket he extracted a long salami… A whirl of the cloth and a white bunny hopped out of Memo’s purse.” The chapter ends with Gus and Max baffled and Memo laughing. I had no idea what to think: either at some point in life Roy learned some extremely convincing magic tricks (and had all those items within reach at the restaurant?), or it was Malamud magic. (The author is known for magical realism, but it’s more overt in his more famous books like The Magic Barrel.)
On another occasion, Memo is driving them home from a date, and Roy thinks she hits a kid with the car. It’s confusing: “He looked up and saw in the moonlight a boy coming out of the woods, followed by his dog. Squinting through the windshield, he was unable to tell if the kid was an illusion thrown forth by the trees or someone really alive.” Roy yells to Memo to slow down but she just keeps driving; the incident is barely mentioned again.
Roy is no inspirational hero. He’s pretty flat. His dreams are limited to baseball; he wants to be “the best there ever was in the game.” He’s deeply flawed: unable to identify bad influences, unable to resist temptations. It makes for an undisciplined ballplayer. (Like Roth, Malamud is a Jewish author, and Roy, who spends most of the book suffering, is surely the most Jewish ballplayer in fiction who is not overtly described as Jewish.)
But Roy is just a vessel for the larger journey. This description of Roy when he shows up at New York Knights practice sets the tone for the whole book: “He was traveling (on the train that never stopped). His self, his mind, raced on and he felt he hadn’t stopped going wherever he was going because he hadn’t yet arrived. Where hadn’t he arrived? Here.” Huh? Yeah.
(The movie, by the way, does a surprisingly decent job, in its first half, of mirroring the weirdness of the book; the train trip, hotel room scene, and magic-trick dinner scene all felt to me like they did in the book. But the movie goes unforgivably awry when it slaps on a happy sappy Disney ending, completely rewriting the book’s dark, dismal ending and betraying Malamud’s unflinching cynicism.)
Now, let’s get extremely fucking weird.
Robert Coover’s best known novel is The Public Burning (1977), narrated by a fictional Richard Nixon, about Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, the American Jews convicted of spying for the Soviet Union and executed in 1953.
Coover is best known for postmodernism and metafiction. And it doesn’t get any more meta than The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop. It’s dark, brainy, and amid the rise of fantasy sports, topical again.
I discovered the 1968 novel when it was reissued in 2011. The book starts in the middle of the 56th season of the Universal Baseball Association (UBA), and there’s more on-the-field action here than in any of the other novels I’ve discussed today—but none of it is real. The UBA is the fantasy of Henry Waugh, and he plays through the season alone, hunched over a table in his kitchen with dice and a pencil.
It’s fantasy baseball, before that was a mainstream term. (The word “fantasy” never appears in the book.) Strat-O-Matic, the tabletop game created in 1961 with a card representing each real-life pro player, must have been an influence on Coover. (We played it in 1997 at my summer camp in Maine.) And even though the entire UBA is happening in Henry’s head, that doesn’t make the action any less exciting.
The book opens like a scream: “Bottom half of the seventh, Brock’s boy had made it through another inning unscratched, one! two! three! Twenty-one down and just six outs to go! and Henry’s heart was racing, he was sweating with relief and tension all at once, unable to sit, unable to think, in there, with them! Oh yes, boys, it was on! He was sure of it! More than just another ball game now: history!” (Roth, too, used a lot of exclamation points in The Great American Novel; baseball demands them.)
Henry acts out every UBA game in his head, and even the social lives of the UBA players off the field. He’s consumed by it. And Coover, the postmodernist, flips back and forth between UBA action and Henry’s real life without warning or sign posts, sometimes in the same sentence, which can be jarring—and that’s the point.
After Rutherford completes the no-hitter, Henry imagines the players going out to celebrate at Jake’s, their favorite bar. He pictures them shouting, “Let’s go to Jake’s!” Henry doesn’t realize he says that out loud, and the reader soon realizes that Henry is sitting at a bar (not called Jake’s) in his real life. A hooker named Hettie overhears him and asks, “Where?” Henry reflects: “She was pretty far along. So was he. Didn’t realize he had been talking out loud.” He invites her home with him. On the way to his place, she asks what he does for a living. He’s an accountant, and says so, but then he also says, “I’m an auditor for a baseball association.”
He’s not just the auditor. He’s every player, every ump, and every fan in the stands. As she unbuckles his pants, Henry tells her: “Call me Damon.”
That’s pretty chilling (though also funny), and it only gets darker from there.
Henry’s game comes with sheets and sheets of rules, and Henry follows them religiously. It throws his life completely off-kilter when one of his own rules (from the “Extraordinary Occurrences Chart,” which was “the only chart Henry still hadn’t memorized” because it came into play so rarely) results in the death of his favorite UBA player, the rookie pitcher Damon Rutherford: three consecutive rolls of triple snake eyes (that is: nine 1s) means the batter dies from a pitch to the head.
Henry loses sight of his real-life job, obsessed with playing out the season after Damon’s death. (At one point he invites over his coworker Lou to play, and it does not go well; the UBA is a solo affair.)
Amid Henry’s descent into madness, there’s still room for some humor (and a lot of sex). Coover, like Roth, has fun with ballplayer names: Swanee Law, Rag Rooney, Bingham Hill, Maggie Everts, Tuck Wilson, Barney Bancroft, Hatrack Hines, Hamilton Craft, and Witness York are all players or managers in the UBA.
Their names, and their backstories, are vital to Henry. The players are more real to him than the people in his real life. While Henry orders a sandwich at his local deli from Benny Diskin, the son of the deli owner, Henry reflects, “He’d considered using the name Ben Diskin, solid name for an outfielder, there was a certain power in it, but Benny spoiled it. A good boy, but nothing there.”
There’s a quote I love from the Season 4 finale of the underrated FX show “Rescue Me” that I think applies to reading fiction about baseball. Sitting at a Yankees game, Lou (played by the great John Scurti) opines: “Baseball and life are one and the same. Everybody says that life is too short. Bullshit. Life, unless you get cancer, hit by a bus, or set on fire, takes forever. Just like baseball. It’s a series of long, mind-bogglingly boring stretches of time where absolutely nothing happens. So you take a nap. Then, after a little while, that crisp crack of the bat hitting the ball, so crisp you can almost smell the wood burning, jolts you awake, and you open your eyes to see something so exciting and intricate and possibly very, very meaningful has just happened—but you missed it, because you were so goddamn bored in the first place.”
Notes/addenda: I wrote longer things about The Universal Baseball Association at The Paris Review Daily in 2017, and about The Natural at Kirkus in July.
Honorable mention: I would have written about Chad Harbach’s The Art of Fielding, but my aim with this newsletter is to introduce you to books you have likely never heard about. Everyone read The Art of Fielding, deservedly so. It hit the rare nexus of critical acclaim and commercial success. (Read the Vanity Fair piece about the bidding war for the book, which ended at $665,000.) If you didn’t read it, you should. Like the other baseball novels I highlighted here, it’s more about what happens off the field. The book is set at fictional Westish College, with a Roy Hobbs-like wonderboy (Henry Skrimshander) and plenty of Melville references (just like Roth). It’s a joy, and to my mind, more of a college campus novel than a baseball novel, as I wrote at The Rumpus in 2011.
Real baseball: If nonfiction is more your thing, there are of course many great nonfiction baseball books (probably more than there are baseball novels). Everyone loves Roger Kahn’s The Boys of Summer, about the Brooklyn Dodgers, but my pick is The Bad Guys Won!, Jeff Pearlman’s very fun account of the 1986 Mets—including a raunchy opening scene on the team plane.
Happy reading. See you out on the (fictional) field.
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Coming up next time: Gonzo politics.