Fantasy Made Real
This article was written by Elizabeth McGrail
This article was published in The SABR Review of Books
This article was originally published in The SABR Review of Books, Volume V (1990).
Two of the most whimsical, delightful baseball novels of the 1980s, The Curious Case of Sidd J. Finch and Shoeless Joe share enchanting as well as technically interesting qualities. Each book recounts a magical fantasy, a story that the reader knows could not actually happen, in a fashion that allows the reader to believe that the events are happening for the duration of the book. Both also enhance the credibility of the narration by the use of real people as characters. In Sidd Finch, George Plimpton embellishes his 1985 April Fool’s Day Sports Illustrated “scoop” about the Mets’ pitching discovery. Finch is a young Englishman with a 763 mile-per-hour fast ball and pinpoint control who learned to chant mantras in a Tibetan monastery. Plimpton chronicles Sidd Finch’s brief major league career (2-0, 17 2/3 IP, 0 H, 0 ER, 0 BB, 53 K) as observed by Robert Temple. Temple is a writer who finds out about Sidd by accident, rents him a room, and eventually becomes his friend.
In Shoeless Joe, W.P. Kinsella recounts the story of Ray Kinsella, who builds a baseball field on his farm in Iowa so that first Shoeless Joe Jackson and later the rest of the Chicago Black Sox can come back and play ball again. Kinsella’s adventures include a drive to New England where he kidnaps writer J.D. Salinger to take him to a Red Sox game. Salinger becomes enchanted with Kinsella’s dream, and goes to Iowa with him to participate in the peopling of the field.
The quality that shapes both stories is a time-honored narrative technique, the recounting of otherwise unbelievable events through the eyes of a neutral, believable character with whom the reader can identify. In Sidd Finch Robert Temple is our everyman. He is a baseball fan, like us, and also like most of us, a fan with no special inside connections in the sport except for having written “a few stories for Sports Illustrated.” He finds out about Sidd Finch because he is a friend of the pilot who takes up the Goodyear Blimp so that Nelson Doubleday and Frank Cashen can drop baseballs from a height of 1000 feet to catcher Ronn Reynolds to find out whether he will be able to catch Finch’s fastball. On the heels of this believable coincidence, the Mets discover that Temple is a writer, and let him in on the secret so that he will not reveal it. Ironically, Temple has writers’ block, and can write nothing.
Plimpton shamelessly exploits the real world in shaping his story. He writes an introduction, ostensibly at the request of Temple:
“Robert Temple has picked up the cudgel [of telling Finch’s story]. His book provides many of the answers we would like to know. By all accounts Sidd Finch is a terribly shy bird. Temple got to know him. So that was fortuitous.”
This separates Plimpton the author from Temple the narrator, who can then write an acknowledgement thanking Plimpton. Throughout the story, Sidd Finch is closely interwoven with the “real” Mets and the real world. Ronn Reynolds is his catcher, Davey Johnson is his manager, Mel Stottlemyre is his pitching coach. The Sports Illustrated article is published. The leadoff hitter Sidd faces in his first major-league start is Vince Coleman. Plimpton-Temple wisely do not give us a date, so we cannot go back in baseball’s carefully documented history to find out who actually did pitch for the Mets that day, or even whether they played the Cardinals.
As the story unfolds, the combination of Temple the believable narrator and the presence of the real 1985 Mets forces the reader to stay in the game. We know these people; even though we don’t know them personally we know that Davey Johnson, Coleman, and Stottlemyre are real people. We can watch them on television. If we care to go to the expense and effort we can see them live albeit from the upper deck. We can’t know Robert Temple personally (because he doesn’t exist) but it is clear that he is a part of this extraordinary story purely by chance. He has no axe to grind. He refers to the real people in such a way that the reader has no reason to distrust him. He is somewhat awed by meeting them, as we would be. We have to believe in Sidd Finch, even though we know he never happened.
The combination of fact and fantasy is emblematic of every fan’s dilemma: How much of a good thing could the game stand? Baseball has been described mockingly as a sport in which the definition of a perfect game is one in which nothing happens. But to see a perfect game is every fan’s dream. Which of us doesn’t start to get a little tense when the pitcher gets to the fifth or sixth inning without having allowed a baserunner? One of the most enjoyable parts of Sidd Finch is the description of Sidd’s first start, in which he does pitch a perfect game. Every fan of a team wishes for the perfect season — the season when your team wins 162 games, your favorite slugger hits a home run every time it matters, your favorite pitcher is 36-0. The fan knows that this can’t happen, but there is solace in this knowledge because if it did happen it wouldn’t be any fun.
Plimpton’s story forces the reader to confront the fragility of this balance in baseball. Sidd comes within one out of repeating perfection in his second start, calmly puts down his glove and walks off the mound and out of the park. We know that it is the right thing to do. Even one totally unhittable pitcher would destroy the competitive (not to mention the economic) balance of the game.
A grand slam in the bottom of the ninth with the home team behind by three is wonderful precisely because it happens so seldom. The magic of a perfect game, a no-hitter, or even a shutout, builds pitch-by-pitch because it could disappear each time the ball is thrown. The thrill is in the rarity and suspense. If Sidd Finch were real, the Commissioner would have to do something about him. Having made him real, Plimpton avoids the unthinkable by having him hang them up before he ruins the game.
In Shoeless Joe, Kinsella takes a more daring unconventional approach to the narrative technique. The story is told in the first person, from Ray Kinsella’s point of view, a remarkable tale of the reincarnation of the Black Sox on his private field in Iowa. When Kinsella first begins to build his ball park, only he and his family can see Shoeless Joe; his in-laws and neighbors cannot. Under most circumstances Kinsella would not be believable. This guy has built not even a whole ball park but just a left field, on his lawn. He claims he watches Shoeless Joe Jackson play there. The first bold step Kinsella takes is to involve his wife and daughter. Perhaps Annie, his wife, is just playing along, but not Karin, the five-year old. Children of this age are remarkably honest, at least about what they see or don’t see. His skeptical brother-in-law (deliberately skeptical because he wants to buy the farm) is disconcerted when he realizes that Karin also sees the baseball players.
Even so, the reader is not totally convinced. The masterstroke is the enlistment of J.D. Salinger. While they are at the Red Sox game, Kinsella sees a message on the scoreboard at Fenway that no one else sees; no one, that is, except J.D. Salinger. It is one thing to reject the vision of Ray Kinsella, but much harder to conclude that J.D. Salinger is seeing the same things that aren’t there. As with Robert Temple and Davey Johnson, we don’t know J.D. personally but we’ve read The Catcher in the Rye. For a whole generation who grew up with Holden Caulfield Salinger represents the literature of our adolescence. J.D. may be a flake, but he has no reson to be anything but candid. Kinsella sees Shoeless Joe, Salinger sees Shoeless Joe, therefore Shoeless Joe and by extension, the rest of the Black Sox, really are playing baseball on Kinsella’s field.
Shoeless Joe cannot have as many threads connecting it to reality as Sidd Finch. It is not set in the same kind of context of cold reality as a story about the 1985 Mets, but it is not entirely lacking in subtle connections. People claim to have eaten in the Greek restaurant that Kinsella takes J.D. to on the way to Fenway. On the way back to Iowa from Boston, Kinsella and J.D. visit the Hall of Fame Library in Cooperstown to verify and amplify the career of a very obscure player, Archibald “Moonlight” Graham. Graham played one inning of defense for the Giants in 1905. (You could look it up. It’s on page 1008 of The Baseball Encyclopedia.) The librarian who helps them is Cliff Kachline who really was the librarian. [And SABR s first executive director. Ed.] Ironically, in Sidd Finch the “baseball historian” who is interviewed about the possible impact of a pitcher like Finch, is Bill Deane, who is currently librarian at the Hall. [And a SABR author, too. Ed.]
Kinsella’s narrative is a sentimental celebration of the way that baseball in America has the ability to connect the generations, in fantasy or in reality. The ball players he resurrects are the players his father told him about. Kinsella reminds us that as long as someone is alive who knew someone who knew someone who watched a ball player play, that player, all the players he played with, and all the people who watched him, are real and alive. In Shoeless Joe Kinsella makes us believe in this timelessness through a sophisticated narrative technique. He uses what would ordinarily be considered an “unreliable” narrator but bolsters that narrator’s believability by having him chaperoned by a totally credible person, in fact, not a fictional character at all but a real person. It is a stunning demonstration of the way that baseball lives.
Both books share the technique of merging the fantastic with the “known to be real” in such a way that the reader is obliged, though not unwillingly, to believe. The two books also have in common a defiance of the usually accurate pronouncement that most baseball fiction is unsatisfactory because what can happen in a real game is more surprising than anything you could make up. In Shoeless Joe and The Curious Case of Sidd Finch the action is finally more unrealistic than Game 5 of the 1986 World Series. The two books share a narrative method that causes the unbelievable to be believable.