Spitball: Baseball’s Literary Journal

This article was originally published in The SABR Review of Books, Volume III (1988).

 

Exactly a hundred years ago, on June 3, 1888, Ernest Lawrence Thayer’s “Casey at the Bat” appeared in the San Francisco Examiner. Baseball and the written word have been on good terms ever since. It was not until 1981, however, that the game acquired a literary journal all its own.

Spitball, a small, unpretentious quarterly founded by Mike Shannon, who now directs it, and the late W.J. (Jim) Harrison of Covington, Kentucky. The magazine entered the literary field with the avowed purpose of publishing baseball poetry. In the eight years since then, for 26 issues to date, it has successfully done that, and much more.

To begin with what filmmakers call an establishing shot, Spitball is a 5 1/2 by 8 1/2 inch paperback magazine, saddlestitched (i.e., stapled) issues four times a year — March, June, September, December — and featuring, in addition to poetry, a lively mix of short fiction, articles, interviews, book reviews, line drawing, and, albeit rarely, photographs. The text appears in typewriter type just as SABR’s Baseball Research Journal did in its formative years. The first issue of Spitball consisted of 20 pages; recent ones contain 52 pages.

From the outset, the magazine has sponsored two annual literary contests: one for baseball poetry, the other for baseball fiction. The prizes, as with most small literary magazines, are basically just free copies of the magazine. Its biggest one-time competitive event to date, the centennial “Casey at the Bat” Poetry Contest, gained some publicity around the country and brought forth the varied efforts that dominate issues #26, June 1988.

Beginning with a tribute to Johnny Bench in issue #8 (all issues will hereafter be referred to by number), Spitball has occasionally focused on an individual player or on a particular aspect of baseball. Issue #15, for example, features Pete Rose; #21, ballparks; and #24, blacks in baseball.

Spitball sponsors one big annual affair, the Casey Awards Banquet, held in January at the Carnegie Arts Center in Covington, Kentucky, across the river from Cincinnati, where the magazine is published. The Casey is a bronze plaque (“very beautiful and expensive to make”) given to both the author and the publisher of the year’s best baseball book, as chosen by a panel of three judges: Eric Rolfe Greenberg’s novel The Celebrant won the first Casey in 1983. Subsequent winners: Peter Golenbock’s Bums (1984); Roger Kahn’s Good Enough to Dream (1985); Bill James’s The Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract (1986); and Diamonds Are Forever, edited by Peter H. Gordon, Sydney Waller, and Paul Weinman (1987)

This January a crowd converged on the Carnegie Arts Center for Spitball’s 1988 Casey conclave, including, as always, a few nominated authors, among them David Voigt and Paul Weinman. The banquet, like the magazine itself, has been growing and improving year by year. It has become literary baseball’s equivalent of SABRs annual convention.

The man behind this shoestring-to-bootstrap venture, Spitball’s publisher and editor, Mike Shannon (no relation to “Moonman,” the one-time journeyman St. Louis Cardinal), notes that the magazine “is definitely in the tradition of the small poetry/literary magazine (those that are labors of love).”

With virtually no advertising budget Shannon has found it hard to reach the larger audience he believes must exist. Now and then, however, free publicity comes his way. On February 4, 1987, The Wall Street Journal carried a front-page article by Jolie Solomon, “Baseball Is a Game Of Hits, Runs, Errors And Lyric Poetry,” that describes Spitball at length and, on the whole, very favorably. The magazine, Solomon writes, is “dedicated to those whose passion for the game of inches is equaled only by their passion for the well-chosen word.”

This spring Pocket Books brought out a handsome paperback book, The Best of Spitball, edited by — who else? — Mike Shannon. The Best of Spitball is a 173-page anthology and an ideal introduction to the magazine. Readers who like the anthology selections will like Spitball.

Literary magazines are chancy propositions at best, and few who saw the premiere issue of Spitball (Spring 1981) would have predicted a bright future for the Shannon-Harrison enterprise. Among the best of its 13 poems is Arthur Mann Kaye’s “One Thinks of Willie Mays” but, alas for newness, it had already appeared in Roger Angell’s The Summer Game. The most noteworthy original poem is editor Mike Shannon’s own “The Mantle-Mays Controversy Solved.” No short stories appear in the premiere issue. One curious inclusion is Terry Smith’s nonfiction piece, “1946: Bill Kennedy’s Fabulous Year,” which prompts a question that arises insistently later on: Does even the most sweeping definition of literature include such workaday prose as this excerpt from Smith’s privately published book about baseball in Rocky Mount, North Carolina?

Mike Shannon’s choice for the best issue to date is #22, published in June 1987. And no wonder. From Darryl Lankford’s classy cover drawing of a caricatured W.P. Kinsella in a cornfield to the book reviews at the end of the magazine, issue #22 is a delight. Fine baseball fiction by Jim Brosnan, Eugene C. Flinn, and cover-subject Kinsella, along with a revealing Spitball interview with Kinsella (author of the novel Shoeless Joe) make up most of the issue. Brosnan’s “Hardball, Aunt Steve, and the White Sox,” which leads off, is a charming tale of youthful fandom. Flinn’s “Never Mind ‘Who’s on First?’ Who’s in the Outfield?” is a fantasy about an aficionado’s wife, the redoubtable Patti, who sets Whitey Herzog’s fading Cardinals straight with “good molecules.” Kinsella’s “Diehard” uses the old ashes-scattered-on-the-ball-field theme in a light-hearted but touching way. 

Concerning issue #22, Shannon remarks that “we usually have a better mix of poetry and fiction…in a typical general issue we have a little more poetry (in terms of numbers of pages) than fiction, but we always like to have at least one short story (usually about 10 pages in length).” In that sense, then, #22 isn’t a model issue — but in most other senses it is. A sizable portion of issue #22 made its way into The Best of Spitball.

Although #22 with its short stories is the best single issue, the truth is that Spitball’s greatest strength is, as originally envisioned, its poetry. Except for parodies, the poems are nearly all written in free verse, a somewhat limiting form, paradoxically, since it lends a stylistic similarity to much of the poetry. Among the best of the poems are Mike Shannon’s “The Last Days of Forbes Field: A Nightmare” (#4), Tom Sheehan’s “In Cold Fields” (#6), James Perkins’ “Pop Foul/Crosley Field, 1949” (#14), Robert J. Harrison’s “The Answer from Alex Weissman at the Asylum for the Insane, Rockland County, New York” (#21), and Tim Peeler’s “Niekro Summoning Piage” (#24).

Nancy Breen’s “Devotion” (#8) is appealing except for a single image — “her hands two snoozing/doves” — that doesn’t connect. Jim Palana’s “Baker Bowl — Philadelphia” (#21) is marvelous all the way to the last line: “… baseball when the grass was real.” Shades of Joe Biden. It’s a good line all right, but it’s not a Palana original.

Gene Fehler has published more poems in Spitball than any other contributor. His poems include a number of parodies, the best of which is “Baseball Manager: Five Variations on William Carlos Williams’ ‘This Is Just to Say’” (#7). The problem with most of his and others’ parodies in issues #7 and #10 is that they aren’t very funny. Some show evidence of being purposely serious — an odd aim for a parody.

Nonetheless, poetry is the forte of Spitball, and, like the magazine itself, the poems, on the whole, are getting better with each issue.

So is the short fiction, which rose to Brosnan-Flinn-Kinsella heights in issue #22. What has been done once can presumably be done again. Prior to #22, however, the short stories fall well short of the poetry. Fantasy seems to be the preferred mode, with golden-age superstars whimsically and sometimes irritatingly rewriting what SABRites have always supposed to be baseball history. An exception is Bill Howard’s “The Charlie Pepper Letters” (#16), which is anything but a fantasy. Indeed, it is a rather grisly tale that might have been, and perhaps was, constructed from newspaper accounts of Cincinnati catcher Willard Hershberger’s suicide in 1940. It’s engrossing, but no more so than James Barbour’s factual “The Death of Willard Hershberger” in The National Pastime (Winter 1987). 

Three of the best Spitball stories besides those in #22 are an early Kinsella effort, “How I Got My Nickname” (#8); Daniel McAfee’s “Batting 1.000” (#20); and Dallas Wiebe’s “The Measure Thereof Shall Be After the Homer” (#23). In general, though, Spitball’s short fiction has some catching up to do in comparison with its poetry.

Nonfiction raises a fundamental issue that was evident in issue #1. There aren’t a whole lot of essays (that is to say, articles) in Spitball, and the ones that do appear can hardly be called belletristic. On literary merit alone, nothing published so far in “The Literary Baseball Magazine” could not more logically have appeared in SABRs Baseball Research Journal.

Admirable short baseball nonfiction does exist, as witness the Einstein Fireside books, the Thorn Armchair books, and The National Pastime (all of which contain a sampling of fiction and poetry as well), but superior nonfiction has yet to make its way, at least in the form of original submissions, to Mike Shannon’s office. Should Spitball include nonfiction? Why not, if the quality of the writing warrants it? Shannon would be delighted, no doubt, to offer a prose piece on the order of John Updike’s “Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu,” an unforgettable sketch of Ted Williams’s last game that first appeared in The New Yorker. The difficulty lies in finding one or more undiscovered John Updikes.

This is not to say that there is no worthwhile nonfiction in Spitball. Dick Miller’s essay “Old Crosley” (#21), a nostalgic look at the Cincinnati Reds’ former ballpark, is a solid effort. And Mike Shannon’s “Suspicions, Surprises, and Speeches: Induction Weekend ’87” (#23) is an engaging personal look at the Baseball Hall of Fame ceremonies in which Ray Dandridge, Catfish Hunter, and Billy Williams were inducted. Shannon spent that Saturday on a Cooperstown street corner passing out free Catfish Hunter commemorative poem cards that he had had printed — an attractive souvenir as well as a not-so-subtle advertisement for Spitball.

The reaction of the passing throng did not always warm the heart of the poet-publisher. “It seemed that the only thing more foreign to them than the idea of a poem,” he reported, “was the idea of a poem about a baseball player.” Still, he gave out more than 800 cards, and some people even said, “Thanks.

The first Spitball interview appeared in issue #5, a conversation with Gene Fehler, who in the early days of the magazine was a regular contributor of both poems and fiction. Subsequent interviews with National Baseball Hall of Fame librarian Tom Heitz (#10), player-author Jim Brosnan (#14), biographer Charles C. Alexander (#15), and others have established the interview as a valuable feature, one that has surely earned a place in the future of the magazine. Although Spitball is hardly a how-to publication, the fact is that interviews with established writers can be fascinating and highly valuable to other writers – and it’s a safe bet that most of Spitball subscribers have a few manuscripts tucked away in their desk drawers

Book reviews surfaced in Spitball just one issue ahead of interviews (in issue #4). Unlike the interviews, the book reviews have occasionally gotten out of hand – in issue #17, for example, which devotes 22 of its 40 pages to them. That proportion might be all right if all or most of the books reviewed had at least a vague claim (other than having been set in type) to being called baseball literature. They don’t. Why, for instance, would anyone expect to, or want to, read about Gary Matthews’s They Call Me Sarge in a literary magazine?

One has to wonder from this issue what the criteria are for a book to be reviewed in Spitball. While W.P. Kinsella’s The Thrill of the Grass, a baseball short-story collection, surely deserves a long and thoughtful review (which it gets from the versatile Mike Shannon), it’s not clear that Harvey Frommer’s Baseball’s Greatest Managers qualifies for half a page of attention in the magazine. It isn’t literature, nor does it pretend to be. Better a half-page “retrospective review” of a book, however old, of at least passing literary interest, such as Zane Grey’s The Red Headed Outfielder and Other Baseball Stories (1920), or Douglas Wallop’s The Year the Yankees Lost the Pennant (1954), or Paul Hemphill’s Long Gone (1979).

Even poor current baseball fiction would seem to merit review space in Spitball, while all but the best nonfiction — Roger Kahn’s Good Enough to Dream, perhaps, although my own assessment of Kahn’s book is less fulsome than Spitball’s — has a more tenuous claim on the magazine’s limited space.

No adverse criticism of the actual reviews is intended. There are some good ones. Among Spitball’s able reviewers are Kevin Grace, not surprisingly since he’s the magazine’s Book Review Editor, and Bill Vernon, whose review of Daniel Okrent’s Nine Innings (#15) is a model of the genre, although Vernon’s ultimate judgment on the book differs from that of Jeffrey Neuman in the Premiere Issue of The SABR Review of Books. (Vernon likes the book, Nueman doesn’t.)

Spitball is still a relatively new magazine. It’s in the process of defining or perhaps refining, itself. As Luke Salisbury wonders in The SABR Review of Books, Volume II, “Why Is It So Hard to Write a Good Baseball Novel?” Mike Shannon must often have wondered what elements make up an ideal literary baseball magazine. He comes closer to a cogent answer with his later issues than with the earlier ones, but some difficulties persist. 

The overriding difficulty is one of definition. What, exactly, is baseball literature? It’s true that many of the heavy hitters in America’s recent literary lineup have penned something about baseball. William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, and Donald Hall have written baseball poems. Carl Sandburg’s “Notes for a Preface” in his Complete Poems begins with two baseball anecdotes, one about Babe Ruth, and the other about Ty Cobb. Yet the world’s best-known baseball poem, Ernest Lawrence Thayer’s “Casey at the Bat,” is, in all tones (and much as we may love it), essentially comic verse. [Note: Glenn Stout feels otherwise.] The same is true of Franklin P. Adams’ “Baseball’s Sad Lexicon,” which assured Tinker, Evers, and Chance of quotable immortality, but didn’t elevate poet-columnist FPA to Westminster Abbey Poets’ Corner.

Spitball’s only direct involvement with the baseball novel is as a reviewer, not a publisher. What Mike Shannon needs for his magazine is an influx of good baseball short stories. Unfortunately, good baseball short stories are hard to come by, because their writers face the same dilemmas as baseball novelists. Realistic short fiction is an all but pointless exercise — baseball has plenty of drama without the aid of play-by-play contrivance. Fantasy, like poetry, appeals to romantics, but it can drive literal-minded fans to the real-life excitement of TV’s Sports Channel.

Stories in which one or more of the main characters are famous major league ballplayers, manipulated like puppets in the author’s febrile brain, can make knowledgeable fans wish that E.L. Doctorow had lost his Ragtime manuscript on the way to the publisher. Ring Lardner’s “Alibi Ike” and James Thurber’s “You Could Look It Up” are perhaps the most widely known baseball short stories, at least by title, and, like “Casey at the Bat,” they’re humorous. Maybe there’s a moral here. Could it be that, since baseball is a game, humor is the perfect imaginative medium for it? Certainly, the most impressive short stories in Spitball up to now have had a humorous slant. So, too, have a few of the best poems.

Seriousness in itself is not a fault, of course, but the hagiography in Spitball sometimes is. Men and women who are inspired to produce baseball poetry or fiction have their revered heroes, as we all do, and occasionally these writers have an irresistible impulse to pen tributes to their paladins. Judging by a few (though decidedly not all) of the odes in Spitball, writers should resist, or at least question, the urge. Ernie Banks is not Ulysses; Babe Ruth is not Zeus.

Most of the best serious poetry in the magazine deals with baseball not canonically or mythologically, but abstractly or peripherally. The best poetry, like the best fiction, is devoid of both play-by-play realism and hero-worshipping sentimentality. Tom Sheehan’s “In Cold Fields,” to take a single example, could almost be classified as a war poem rather than a baseball poem. Its ballplayers are kids, not professionals, and the real game they’re learning concerns life, as young “Billy Centerfield” can testify, having left “his arm/in Kwajalein debris.” It’s a far cry from apotheosizing yet another superstar.

A few general thoughts about Spitball: The idea of honoring the best baseball book of the year is a good one, but it’s doubtful that any panel of judges can make a rational choice between a surrealistic novel, let’s say, and a book like The Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract. Or between Mike Shannon’s tiny chapbook, Pete Rose Agonistes (if that were to be nominated), and David L. Porter’s monumental Biographical Dictionary of American Sports: Baseball (ditto).

The Casey Award, to be meaningful, should compare apples with apples, oranges with oranges. If there’s to be only one Casey each year the competition should probably be restricted to fiction. Granted, such a change would impose severe limitations – in some years there might be no winner – but it would also add meaning to the award.

Better yet, if two broad categories were to be established, fiction and nonfiction, there would always be at least one annual award, the one in the nonfiction category.

A Spitball reader has to know his or her baseball much better than the average bleacher creature. Up to a point that’s fine. No one but a dedicated baseball fan is going to read the magazine anyway. But even a dedicated fan may sometimes be confused by the lack of explanatory headnotes or accompanying text. For example, Jim Palana’s series of monologues in “The Wall” (#14), intriguing as it is, demands a knowledge of Boston Red Sox history that may be too much to expect of even the most tuned-in Spitball reader.

In issue #17, Sue Bogyo’s cover art draws a “Wow! Pretty good, wouldn’t you say!” Well, yes, but who are those three players pictured? (It turns out that they’re the 1987 Hall of Fame inductees, Ray Dandridge, Catfish Hunter, and Billy Williams.)

So much for complaints. Spitball, on balance, is a clear success. Eight years after its founding, the magazine seems much less a “quixotic venture,” in Jim Brosnan’s words, than it did at the beginning. A growing body of fine baseball poems and short stories attests to the fact that not all of the best baseball writing is factual.

In late 1980, over a few beers and across the Ohio River from Riverfront Stadium, Cincinnati, Mike Shannon and Jim Harrison had a vision — a vision for a baseball literary magazine, an “unlikely marriage,” they thought at the time, but one that was consummated as fully as the mysterious prophesy, “If you build it, he will come,” in W.P. Kinsella’s Shoeless Joe. Shannon and Harrison built Spitball, the literary edifice, and an increasing number of talented writers and appreciative readers have been streaming through the gates ever since. 

Baseball is inherently artistic. Not every ballplayer down through the years has viewed it that way, of course, but it is. Mike Shannon, his staff, and the contributors to Spitball look upon the game as one of America’s finer arts, and the literature of baseball has benefited from their perception. Daniel Okrent, author of The Ultimate Baseball Book, comments on his blurb for The Best of Spitball, “Whenever I need to be reminded of the music of baseball, I read Spitball — its best pieces are as true as a shot to the wall.”

True enough.

And as lively as a Burleigh Grimes spitter.