Tug McGraw’s Leap: Baseball and the Literary Arts
(or, "How Long Until Pitchers and Catchers Report?")
by Kevin O'Rourke
Timing is everything. Just when I couldn’t have been more distraught over the end of the 2007 baseball season, and moreover the manner in which it concluded (another sweep?!), my mother gave me a book. Namely Michael Chabon’s highly entertaining and evocative Summerland (Miramax, 2002). His tale of children & baseball & a fantasy world which exists in tandem with our own certainly did its very best to raise my spirits. So what if the book is supposed to be for kids? So was a certain other series about a boy wizard and his adventures. I enjoyed that one too, even if it meant removing the books’ dust jackets whenever reading them on the subway.
But I digress. Full disclosure: I am a huge baseball fan, I participate in a fantasy baseball league, and my idea of a good time tends to involve watching a game and jawing about, say, Rickey Henderson’s lifetime stats. I mean, the man stole 1,406 bases! Number two on the all-time list, Lou Brock, stole 938. Look at it this way: Henderson had 10,961 at-bats during his career, and his OBP (on-base percentage) was .401. That means he got on base about 4,395 times. Which means he stole a base approximately 32% of the time he was on base. This is completely ridiculous.
Again with the digressions. Suffice it to say that I’m a huge baseball fan. But I’m also a writer. And am therefore—now just hold on—something of an anomaly among other artists and writers. On the flipside, I am an unabashed sports fan who reads John Ashbery for fun. So you might say I stick out. I fully realize that I’m not the only exception to the rule, but for the most part the supposed division between bookish types and sportish types seems to be a very real thing. Nor am I sure why, but it’s not the purpose of this essay to examine that split, really; I suspect it has something to do with wedgies. That being said, why more writers don’t absolutely adore a sport currently played by the likes of Milton Bradley, Coco Crisp, Larry Broadway, and Jhonny Peralta (he and Dwyane Wade should talk) is beyond me. Not to mention the gobs of wonderful baseball stories from years past—the aforementioned Henderson’s tendency to refer to himself in the third person, Dock Ellis throwing a no-hitter while on acid, and of course Ruth’s “called shot.”
A quick Google search for “baseball poetry” yields 23,000 results, and that doesn’t even take into account works of fiction like Summerland. Donald Hall wrote extensively about Our National Pastime. Baseball-Almanac.com maintains a page covering poetry and songs about the sport. There is a Wikipedia entry solely devoted to English language idioms derived from baseball. Let’s not even get into the fuzzy territory where baseball jargon and truly "poetic" poetry meet. Nor should we touch on the blogosphere much, save for the requisite Deadspin shoutout. And then there’s Elysian Fields…the list could go on and on.
So I suppose my point is this: literary fiction and poetry about and inspired by sports, and baseball in particular, not only has a lively history but is also still being written. Moreover, everyone should read Summerland because it’s really, really great (hell, it taught my mother what a slider is). Moreover, what American childhood would be complete without “Casey at the Bat”?
Oh, somewhere in this favored land the sun is shining bright;
The band is playing somewhere, and somewhere hearts are light,
And somewhere men are laughing, and somewhere children shout;
But there is no joy in Mudville—mighty Casey has struck out.
Comments
Great post!
I, too, love baseball, and was truly disappointed to see the most recent World Series taken by the Red Sox. (The planets must be unaligned.)
What I've always found interesting is that writers - poets in particular - love baseball, but why? Is it the game's glorious history? Or is it that baseball, much like life itself, is a game of contradictions, filled as it is with examples of graceful motion *and* brute force?
Posted by: danny rivera | November 25, 2007 01:28 AM