From Frank Merriwell to Henry Wiggen: A Modest History of Baseball Fiction

This article was originally published in The SABR Review of Books, Volume V (1990).

 

On October 15, 1988, with a runner on first, Kirk Gibson of the Los Angeles Dodgers jerked a slider from the Oakland A’s Dennis Eckersley into the stands for a 5-4 victory.

Newspaper reports noted that it was the first time a World Series game had been turned to victory from defeat by a final-at-bat home run.

Actually, it wasn’t. It had happened tens, dozens, maybe a hundred times before. It had happened in books, books which were implanted in the imagination of every American youngster.

Standing in the back yard, or down at the neighborhood park, it was always the bottom of the ninth. His team was always behind. It was his home run that would save it all.

A boy might never have seen that situation in real life but he had read about it. Frank Merriwell or Fred Fearnot or Joe Matson or Roy Tucker or Chip Hilton or one of the Blue Sox had banged out that desperation hit and he could do it, too.

He knew he could because he could recognize in those same stories many things which had happened before. Jackie Robinson had rattled many pitchers into balks before Roy Tucker did it. Sal Maglie had been released on Old Timers day before Speedy Mason. Don Drysdale had come along as a hot-tempered but talented rookie before Schoolboy Johnson. And those characters are from just one book. There are other fictional characters who echo Mike “King” Kelly or Frank Chance, Ralph Branca or Joe DiMaggio.

Baseball’s history has been so diverse, and has been recorded so well, that few heroics needed to be imagined. They were there, waiting to be polished.

What was polished changed as the game evolved. Early fictional characters played on town teams, told the pitcher where to throw the ball and thought the hit and run was the height of skill. With time, they played in domed stadiums, were taught to hit by computers and waited for the three-run homer.

The first novel which was almost completely about baseball was published in 1884. Noah Brooks Our Baseball Team and How It Won The Championship was a reflection of professional baseball in its formative decades.

Our Baseball Team was an Illinois town team formed from the swells and the mechanics by the city bigshots, formed to reflect well on the town and perhaps increase real estate values. Its best players were paid decent salaries by the standards of the time and its lesser players were paid nothing or next to it. The team traveled, played other teams around the state and reflected in many ways the career of the Midwestern boy to whom the book was dedicated, Albert Spalding.

By the first decade of the new century boys’ baseball books were filled with the “inside baseball” of John McGraw and the Giants. Team captains such as Frank Merriwell ran their charges like puppets, with elaborate signs. Professional managers tended to have Irish names mirroring McGraw, Connie Mack (Cornelius McGillicuddy), Jimmy Collins and the other famous managers of the era.

In the early 1920s one of baseball fiction’s most popular characters, Baseball Joe Matson, suddenly switched positions. In the teens, Joe had been a pitcher, the dominant position in the dead ball era. Suddenly, in 1922, just after Babe Ruth had shattered earlier records with consecutive 54-homer and 59-homer seasons, he became Baseball Joe, Home Run King.

In the ’50s, black players began to pop up in books, both about neighborhood games (Florence Hayes’ Skid) and the big leagues (Murrell Edmunds’ Behold, Thy Brother.) Little League and its equivalents also became the setting for many a book.

In recent decades, the reliever emerged. No longer merely a way to give a fading starter one last chance for glory, relief pitching produced prominent characters. Television gave authors another possibility, putting the hero in the booth to prolong his connection with the game.

Just as they drew their baseball from the game they watched, writers drew their characters from the players they watched. Sometimes, the debt was acknowledged, as it was to Frank Chance in Hugh Fullerton’s Jimmy Kirkland series. Sometimes, as in Johnny Madigan (Eddie Stanky) of Duane Decker’s Good Field, No Hit, it wasn’t. Spalding was merely the first of the characters borrowed from life.

George Brett, Charlie Finley, Reggie Jackson, Don Larsen, Connie Mack, Christy Mathewson, Babe Ruth, and Eddie Waitkus have all shown up in some form.

If a writer didn’t want to borrow a player wholesale he could give him a bit part using his real name. Babe Ruth has a walk-on in Spitballs and Holy Water. Gene Autry has a ride-on in Johnny Got His Gun. Shoeless Joe Jackson got a book and a movie from the same bit of imagination.

Some authors took the idea of blending fiction and baseball history to a greater degree of exactness. Season’s Past by the pseudonymous Damon Rice uses several generations of a family to trace the history of New York City (mostly Brooklyn Dodger) baseball from Bob “Death to Flying Things” Ferguson to Jackie Robinson and Walter O’Malley. Two others, Donald Honig and Frank O’Rourke, built books around transparently disguised versions of the 1941-42 Dodgers and the 1949 Phillies. W.P. Kinsella imported the 1908 Chicago Cubs for The Iowa Baseball Confederacy.

It wasn’t only in the writing that baseball fiction reflected the game’s history. The illustrators which accompanied the stories are an alternative to photographs. Brooks’ book contains drawings of players without gloves and with benches that were exactly that, no roof to shade players from sun or fans.

Since Gilbert Patten’s Frank and Dick Merriwell books were reprinted several times from the 1890s to the 1930s, their cover art is a vital history of the period. The pitcher’s stage changes from a field-level slab with a path shaved directly to home plate to a raised mound with only a circle of dirt around it. Uniforms, caps, gloves, bats and stadiums evolved.

From the beginnings to 1910

But everything didn’t come together at once.

Although forms of baseball were played dating back to Colonial times, and some fragments tantalize us, there was nothing recognizable as baseball fiction until after the Civil War made baseball the national game.

In many ways, this was a reflection of the economics of book publishing in the United States. Fewer than 1,000 books were published in the country annually before 1890. Many of these were reprints of popular British authors, whose work American publishers could “borrow” freely because of the lack of a copyright treaty.

Most books were sold for about $2, a substantial sum when $1 a day was a laborer’s wage. They were the province of the wealthier classes, a group heavily influenced by English tastes.

In fact, the first substantial appearance of baseball came in a book that was an attempt to capitalize on the popularity of Tom Brown’s Schrool Days. Thomas Hughes’ schoolboy classic had been published in London in 1857. The book had been printed in America as well, and Boston’s Lee and Shepard Co. was looking for a way to tap the same market. They snapped up Charles’ Everetts’ Changing Base, a book of schoolboy adventures with a little more than two chapters devoted to the description of a baseball game. It appeared in 1868.

Between then and the turn of the century fewer than 10 original novels were published which contained any significant amount of baseball.

Yet, publishers were interested in baseball. In 1887, for example, teams from five publishers had formed a league which played regularly around New York City. The league included teams from Scribner’s (which had published Brooks’ Fairport Nine) and The Century Co. (which would publish its first full baseball novel, Leslie Quirk’s Freshman Dorn, Pitcher, in 1911.) Publisher’s Weekly, the bible of the industry since the 1870s, printed box scores of games between publishing house teams.

They also knew there was a market for baseball fiction. For outside the book market, a sizable number of baseball stories were being published.

They were appearing in what today we call story papers and dime novels. Story papers were generally the size of a newspaper and contained several serialized tales. Dime novels were about the size of a comic book and usually contained one or two stories, the main one about the length of a substantial short story. The dime novel story was generally complete in that issue (no heroes were left hanging with the bases loaded) but the characters and general plot lines continued from issue to weekly issue.

The series dime novel had been invented by the brothers Beadle, originally of Cooperstown, New York, in 1860. After the Civil War, the Beadles and their imitators began to publish large amounts of such fiction.

In contrast to the Anglocentric fiction of the rich, dime novels were overtly patriotic. The staples were the American West and heroic moments from American history.In the 1880s however, faced with a flagging market, dime novel publishers began to cast around for other topics. The major new genre was detective stories. The Beadles tried their share of these, but they also had other ideas.

Since its inception in 1860, the Beadles had published the annual Beadle’s Dime Base-Ball Player by Henry Chadwick, the inventor of the box score and one of the early codifiers and popularizers of baseball. For example, John McGraw recounted how he established his early baseball reputation in Truxton, New York by purchasing the new edition every year and being the first around to absorb the rule changes and think about their implications.

With this background it seemed natural for the Beadle to introduce some baseball tales into their dime novels, often in conjunction with detective stories. Their first baseball dime novel, in 1885, was Edward Wheeler’s High Hat Harry, the Baseball Detective. A couple of years later, they introduced the aptly named Dan Manly as Double Curve Dan, the Pitcher Detective, who made it clear baseball was merely a way to solve crimes and not a career for anyone serious, was the first baseball character to return in multiple dime novels.

At the same time, dime novel publishers were eyeing a younger audience. Dime novels (which usually cost a nickel) were one of the few forms of packaged entertainment a child could afford in the days before movies.

Baseball stories were a natural for this market. They were such a natural that publishers were inclined to fudge a bit in their advertising. Baseball covers became a favorite, even when there was little or no baseball action inside. Book publishers imported the Jack Harkaway boys adventure series from England and put a picture of Jack on the spine with a baseball bat, even though the Britisher played nothing of the kind. A.L. Burt, one of the large publishers of the day, put out a book called The Bordentown Story Teller in 1899. On the cover is a young man sliding into the plate while the catcher reaches for the throw. A crowd watches from a grandstand and the trees behind the outfield fence. Inside is a series of stories about Joseph Bonaparte, the brother of Napoleon, after he settled in the United States in the 1820s. Not a word of baseball.

Dime novel publishers also learned to jump on current events quickly. In 1890, John Montgomery Ward tried to break the owners’ economic stranglehold by creating the Players’ League, also known as the Brotherhood League. By late April, Street & Smith,which was replacing the Beadles at the top of the dime novel heap, was producing The Brotherhood Detective, or, Short-Stop Sam. In May, they had Brotherhood Buck, or, The Players League in the South.

The publishing world’s knowledge of baseball’s popularity received its greatest confirmation beginning April 18, 1896. On that date appeared Frank Merriwell’s School Days, the first issue of a new dime novel series, Tip Top Weekly, from Street & Smith. Frank’s creator was Gilbert Patten, a successful dime novel writer from Maine who’d played a lot of baseball as a boy and run a town team as a young man.

From the beginning Frank played baseball. Oh, he’d stray to football in the fall and a host of lesser sports during the dull winter months (which were often broken by a game of indoor baseball or a trip to some southern clime for a few winter innings.) But Frank’s acknowledged favorite was baseball. Baseball tales began with late winter practice, slid into the school team’s year and then stretched into some kind of summer league or barnstorming team. Frank’s foreign trips almost always took place during the winter. In all, some 712 of the eventual 245 Merriwell books (Frank spawned a brother, Dick, and later a son, Frank Jr.) contained baseball, far more than all other sports combined.

Frank was a publishing phenomenon, such a phenom that within a year, Street & Smith began to turn the Tip Top Weekly episodes into books. They would take three or four of the dime novels, do a little editing for continuity and put them out with paper covers. A couple of years later, they began putting out hardbound versions.

While no other venture was as successful as Patten’s Merriwell, there was no lack of imitators. Fred Fearnot was created by a Street & Smith rival in 1898. He survived into the 1920s and spent many of his summer months playing baseball. Others — Jack Lightfoot, Frank Manley, the Three Chums, Dick Daresome — popped up for a year or so and played baseball.

From 1910 to 1940

But the dime novel was actually on its last legs.

The first blow had hit in the 1890s with increased postal rates, for most dime novel sale were to subscribers. The publishers were also thrashing around for new genres, new plots and new characters.

The plots had long ago reached the point where even a 12-year-old boy could recognize a tinge of unreality. 13-year-olds regularly out-thought, out-played and out-fought adults. This came despite these adults trying every known poison, trap, deceit or disguise imaginable.

And then came the movies. Movies in the early 1910s were much like dime novels. They ran for fifteen action-packed minutes. Any they just happened to cost a nickel, too. They were such a natural that Gilbert Patten dug up his old dime novels and sold some to movie makers. (Eventually, in the 1930s, some Merriwell stories would be made into a movie serial).

Even the perennials like the Merriwell stories began to fade. The last original Merriwell dime novel appeared in 1915, and Patten had bailed out several years before that.

While the dime novel was fading, things were looking up for books. The first impetus was production methods. Cheaper paper and bindings, as well as new, highly-automated binding methods, had the potential to cut publishers’ costs.

Edward Stratemeyer was one of the first to perceive the potential of lower prices. Stratemeyer was a successful dime novel author and a friend and admirer of Horatio Alger, whose unfinished works he’d completed after Alger’s death.

Stratemeyer came up with two successful ideas.

The first, not entirely his own, was to price books at a dollar, or even at 25 cents. The increased volume would more than make up for the lower profit margin, he reasoned. He turned his pen to producing more of the historical adventure novels he was known for under a variety of pseudonyms. They sold well.

They sold so well they inspired Stratemeyer’s second idea, to turn writing into a highly organized, highly profitable enterprise — what a later writer was to call a fiction factory. Stratemeyer would think of a character and a basic plot outline. This would be turned over to a writer who would produce the book to Stratemeyer’s specifications. Stratemeyer would then find a company to publish the book.

In effect, the Stratemeyer Syndicate, as it was known, was a publisher. And thus he put great emphasis on two of a publisher’s standard practices of the time — series books and pseudonyms.

The series book was an extension of the most popular publishing ventures in the United States, the mass circulation magazine and the dime novel. Like both of these, the series book sought to interest a broad range of readers rather than a small, upper-class audience. And like the successful dime novels, it centered on a character with whom the public could identify. The identity and continuity bred sales.

However, it wasn’t a good business practice to attach these potential profits too closely to an author. What if he died, or won the lottery or decided to write the new The Scarlet Letter? Where would the series go? As if they needed another example, American publishers of the 1910s had Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Sherlock Holmes’ creator had decided he was a spiritualist and wanted to spend his fortune propagating those ideas. Harper & Bros. lost the flow of stories from one of the most profitable publishing ventures.

From publishers’ nightmares like these arose their penchant for pseudonyms. While they are widely thought of as protecting an author from the immediate consequences of publishing something controversial, in popular fiction they are more often a publisher’s device. The character belonged to the publisher and if it was successful, there was always another hack available.

Stratemeyer made great use of pseudonyms, either the Capt. Ralph Bonehill or Arthur M. Winfield he favored for himself, or the dozens he created for other series. In fact, Stratemeyer made great use of all the tricks of popular fiction. The Syndicate, run by his daughter and others, lasted long after his death in 1930, and still exists as part of Simon & Schuster.

His syndicate created the Bobbsey Twins, the Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew, the Rover Boys, Tom Swift, Tom Swift Jr. and a host of less successful series. The books were written over generations by multiple writers and the syndicate was so well organized and so secretive that even today the authorship of many of the books has not been established.

Most of the Stratemeyer syndicate books were not about baseball. Many of the early works were historical. But the next big category Stratemeyer moved into was a series featuring a hero or a group of chums having adventures at school, camp, etc., much like the contemporary Merriwell material. And, as with Merriwell, many of these books featured baseball plots or games.

In 1910, having watched the success of the Merriwell series, Stratemeyer created a new pseudonym, Lester Chadwick, specifically to handle baseball books. Stratemeyer was a baseball fan (a crank in the parlance of the time) and chose the name to echo that of Henry Chadwick. The Chadwick pseudonym first appeared on a couple of books about Tom Parsons, a hayseed who goes to college and makes good through baseball.

In 1912, Baseball Joe appeared under the Chadwick name. Joe Matson was an important new type for boys’ baseball fiction. He was the first series hero who was primarily a baseball player. Others had been all-around athletes, such as Jack Lightfoot, or all-around paragons, such as Frank Merriwell. Joe, of course, became a detective, boxer, financial whiz, etc. as the plots demanded, but he sustained none of these.

He was also the first professional baseball player in a series. Merriwell, the other dime novel heroes and the characters springing up in the series books of Ralph Henry Barbour, Albertus True Dudley and Zane Grey were amateurs, generally high school or college players. Professionals were faintly disreputable, and frequently beaten by Our Heroes’ amateur clubs. Many of the early Baseball Joe books seem to be reacting against this. Joe explains to his mother that he can help more people as a ballplayer than as a minister, that he can make lots of money, that he can win the respect of the right people.

Baseball Joe actually began as an amateur, playing as a 15-year-old for the Silver Stars of Riverside, his vaguely New England home town. In the next books, he moves to prep school and Yale. But by the fourth book, in 1914, he becomes a professional. By the next year, and the next book he’s in the majors. The series eventually ran to 15 books and continued until 1926.

Stratemeyer wasn’t the only writer making the transition from dime novels and amateur baseball players.

After Patten begged out of the Merriwell series, Street & Smith made him editor of a new weekly called Top Notch. The magazine featured stories of sports and adventure, many written by Patten using the Burt L. Standish pseudonym. He began writing serials for the magazine with baseball themes and characters.

The most popular of these characters was Lefty Locke, and in 1914 the same year Baseball Joe became a pro, the first five books of Patten’s Big League Series were published. Most of these featured Lefty, but not all, for Patten was breaking even more new ground with this series. They were all set in the same Big League (that’s how the books referred to it) and many characters repeat from book to book. But the characters also come and go. Lefty was the central character of the first four books, but in the fifth, Brick King, Backstop, he has a cameo at the end, congratulating rival Brick on his play.

Patten, a more skillful and interesting writer than most of his contemporaries, was creating a larger world, one which would give him more freedom to choose characters and plots. The Big League Series ran 16 books and ended in 1928, a run very parallel to Stratemeyer’s Baseball Joe. Yet, Patten was never driven to the length of plotting and draracterization of the later Baseball Joe books, which reached absurd lengths.

Joe would pledge to lead the league in all the major batting and pitching categories and then do so. He would extend the cliche of the “well thrown ball nailing the bad guy” to beaning a shark. In Baseball Joe, Pitching Wizard, he uncovers a plot by two Giant teammates to throw the pennant race. He chases them out of the league, but two rookies take their place, and being rookies, are making errors in the clutch. For the crucial game with the Cubs, Joe comes to the only possible conclusion. He must strike out every enemy batter. Needless to say, he does so. Presumably unable to top this, the Baseball Joe series died.

Baseball Joe and Lefty Locke were merely the two most prominent of the series characters that popped up over these decades.

The writers varied greatly in skill and audience. Some, such as Barbour, Dudley and William Heyliger, wrote mostly of prep schools. The books were published in nicely bound editions with color illustrations. They chronicled schoolboy hijinks and other sports as well as baseball. They were more expansive and aimed at a “nice” audience. Barbour worked his way through a large number of series, none of which ran more than 11 books, and none of which were completely baseball. In all Barbour published an astounding 135 boys’ series books between 1899 and 1943, while writing other works as well. Many consider him, especially in his early works, the most skillful writer of the period. Robert Cantwell maintains Barbour’s game descriptions were a major positive influence on sportswriters of the period.

Others, such as Harold Sherman and various pseudonyms from the Stratemeyer stable, were published in cheap editions, with few black and white sketches, paper the first cousin of newsprint and cardboard covers. Sherman’s Home Run Series was a series mostly because of its title. Characters didn’t carry over from book to book.

Sherman also wrote some of the purpler prose in a mauve era, the kind of prose that has made the era a snicker for modern readers. This is a speech from a chapter called “The Flame of Feeling Grows” in Fight ‘Em Big Three. Speaking with “simple directness,” the old coach tells the team, “if any of you think that the satisfying of personal grievance means more than victory for Milford, go ahead and betray your fellow team-mates who are grving their all for the finest old high school in the world.”

The other notable series of the period was attributed to professional baseball players Christy Mathewson and Everett “Deacon” Scott but actually written by John Wheeler. The books were linked by their alliterative titles — Pitcher Pollock and Catcher Craig — but by little else.

These series went a long way to establishing the characteristics of the baseball series and some of the themes that would stay with it. The characters were positive role models. The books aimed at a moral lesson (teamwork is important, gambling will hurt you). With writers like Barbour, and the greater freedom granted Patten outside the Frank Merriwell stories, the plots and characters improved and became more believable.

From 1940 to 1955 – Juveniles

World War II slowed the production of both babies and baseball fiction. From mid-1942 until 1946, only two baseball novels were published, both by John R. Tunis.

But, with the end of the war, the production of baseball fiction shot up in part to meet the reading habits of the baby explosion which celebrated the end of the war. There were an average of 17.5 baseball novels produced annually during the 1950s, in contrast to the 2.8 of the depression-wracked 1930s or the 4.8 of the booming 1920s.

The traditional series books returned with expanded vigor.

Clair Bee’s Chip Hilton and Wilfred McCormick’s Bronc Burnett and Rocky McCune recreated the series hero of old. Chip, Bronc and Rocky carried real-man nicknames and did real-man deeds even though Chip and Bronc were teenagers. They won state and national championships in the big three sports. They defeated bad guys, outwitted gamblers, endured bad umpires and generally ignored girls. (There was always one on the edge of the story just to let you know our hero’s, uh, heart was in the right place.) They mostly played baseball. Even Bee, who before he created Chip was nationally famous as a basketball coach, wrote more baseball stories for Chip than either basketball or football.

Drane Decker’s Blue Sox stories were a distinct echo of Gilbert Patten’s Big League Series which featured the Blue Stockings. Decker’s books each follow a player who establishes himself in the Blue Sox lineup, with characters in the later books in the 13-volume series replacing those who had been the heroes of the first books.

But new themes were appearing too.

The most obvious was Little League, which was expanding across the nation in the 1950s. Curtis Bishop and Cary Jackson built series or groups of similar books in Little League settings. Many of the books, especially those from Jackson, included instructional sections to help young players.

Race also was popping up as a topic in the years after Jackie Robinson. The first was Skid by Florence Hayes in 1948. Others soon followed, and some of the series book writers took up the theme — Bishop in Little League Heroes and Archibald in Outfield Orphan.

The pivotal figure in this period was Tunis. He had begun publishing sports books in the 1930s with stories of Harvard snobbery and track. He wrote them for all ages, but his publisher marketed them as juveniles. Just before World War II, he turned to baseball.

Before Tunis, the values taught in baseball novels were socially very conservative. The themes constantly taught the young readers that the individual had to conform to the group. Individuals could be criminals or cheats, mean or jealous, but society as a whole was fine. The books showed these aberrant, individual evils overcome and society rendered whole again.

Tunis’s books rendered a much more liberal view of society. Some evils were broad. Keystone Kids, published during World War II, was a story of two brothers who’d fought their way to the big leagues from poverty. It was also a book about anti-Semitism, a social evil which had never served as a theme before. In fact, many turn-of-the-century books were filled with anti-Semitic remarks and slurs against other ethnic and racial groups, too.

Tunis’s theme gained power from his characters, who had many more dimensions than other writers. Most characters in boys’ novels reeked of a nobility unfound in the readers’ daily lives. The sneaks and the baddies were easily identifiable. Their “shifty” eyes or some such things would reveal them to the alert reader long before their cowardice or manipulations caused trouble for the hero. Tunis’s characters were grayer, and thus their struggles over their own selfishness (Highpockets) or insensitivity (Young Razzle) carried more weight.

Tunis even had the temerity to challenge that most sacred icon of juvenile baseball heroes — the former player who is now the main character’s coach. In Buddy and the Old Pro, Buddy’s admiration for his hero turns to disgust when the Stankyish old pro begins to teach him how to cheat.

From 1965 to 1990 – Updated Juveniles

Tunis’s work was just one signal of a broader societal change, a greater concern with the rights of the individual than of the society as a whole.

Books about baseball, a team sport, reacted slowly. Even in race, an issue where baseball had been something of a pioneer, the fictional reaction was slow. Black characters began to appear in books — Matt Christopher’s No Arm in Left Field, George Shea’s Big Bad Ernie — but so did a host of groups previously far from the mainstream.

Linnea Due’s High and Outside looked at alcoholism. Marilyn Levinson’s And Don’t Bring Jeremy was about learning disabilities. Barbara Aiello’s It’s Your Turn at Bat featured a kid with cerebral palsy. In addition to the other themes in these books, each one found society (the baseball team) must come to an understanding of the main character’s problem, rather than the character adapting to the group.

To be sure, authors such as Christopher and Bill Knott continued to turn out more traditional books. But even these authors broke non-traditional ground with Knott’s story of a boy who must cope with sitting on the bench while his sister plays or Christopher’s story of a boy struggling while his parents’ divorce.

The new trend of the post-baby boom years clearly was the role of women, or girls. They were not the non-competitive softball players of earlier books, but rivals. One, R.R. Knudson’s Zan Hagen, was even a superwoman of the Frank Merriwell/Chip Hilton ilk, beating all comers at all sports. They also appeared as Little League coaches.

Most of these books came down on the side that girls could and should play with boys. But one, David Klass’ A Different Season, while accepting the validity of all the feminist arguments, has the main character adamant that there are some things — the high school baseball team, a funky local driving range — that really should be just for boys.

In some ways, these arguments are echoed in a new genre of baseball fiction, one specifically aimed at girls, the juvenile romance. Here, girls are most often cheerleaders or ball girls or some other decorative role. Even when they do become players, as in Elaine Harper’s Short Stop for Romance they do so to attract the attention of a boy and quit when they get it. He’s supposed to be the sweaty sports hero. She’s really more into ballet.

Another development of the period was the growth in the number of books designed to be read to children of pre-school age. Before 1970, for example, there were only 14 juvenile books of 50 pages or less published. Since then, there have been 71.

While these books were proliferating, the traditional series had all but disappeared with Bee, McCormick and Decker in the 1950s. The most prolific writers of the period, notably Christopher, didn’t do any series. Throughout the 1970s, no series carried longer than the four books of Clem Philbrook’s Ollie’s Team.

Very recently, however, the baseball series book appears to be making at least a modest comeback. In 1989 and 1990, Random House’s Ballantine Books began publishing paperbound series which echoed many of the traits of the dime novels. They used a recognizable set of characters, were programmed to come out over the course of the baseball season and focused heavily on the game. The 1989 series, The Rookies by Mark Freeman, followed three boys from high school to the World Series in three years. I have not seen the 1990 series, The Angel Park All-Stars by Dean Hughes, but the publisher’s catalogue indicates it will be about Little League boys.

Adult Baseball Novels

While baseball books aimed at teenagers and smaller fry have had a long history, the adult baseball novel didn’t really flower until the 1950s.

There had been earlier attempts. Some early pot-boilers were aimed at adults. Heywood Broun wrote a rather interesting novel in the 1920s. And several murder mysteries were published.

The only pre-World War II baseball fiction which was judged to have any literary merit were the Jack Keefe and Danny Warner stories of Ring Lardner. Lardner thought they were simply dialect stories best treated as amusement, but luminaries such as Virginia Woolf found them interesting. Lardner never pursued the characters and the literary establishment made it clear they felt baseball and serious literature were incompatible.

This began to change with the publication of Bernard Malamud’s The Natural in 1952 and Mark Harris’s The Southpaw in 1953. Both were recognized as literary novels despite their baseball content. But Harris has recalled that at the time he had to do a lot of talking to convince critics that his was a serious book. Harris said he argued this so long that it took him years to acknowledge publicly his debt to the baseball novels he had read as a boy.

That’s interesting, because in The Southpaw, Harris has Henry Wiggen admit to having read Heyliger, Sherman, Tunis and Lardner, “although Lardner did not seem to me to amount to much, half his stories containing women in them and the other half less about baseball then what was going on in the hotels and trains. He never seems to care how the game came out. He wouldn’t tell you much about the stars but only about bums and punks and second-raters that never had the stuff to begin with. Heyliger and Sherman and some of the others give you a good baseball story that you couldn’t lay it down.” Henry describes his great delight at a series with strong echoes of Baseball Joe.

While Malamud and Harris were storming the literary gates, the publishing firms of A.S. Barnes was making an effort to create a body of adult baseball fiction in more popular form. In a decade from 1948 to 1957, they published a series of novels by Frank O’Rourke, Jack Weeks, Arnold Hano and Ed Fitzgerald which took a more adult view of baseball. It wasn’t sugar-coated. People lost more than a game at times. Players had trouble (but rarely actual sex) with women.

It was Malamud and Harris, however, who opened the baseball novel to serious litterateurs. Novelists began to use baseball to explore established themes and questions in a new way.

From alienation (Robert Coovey’s The Universal Baseball Association, Inc. J. Henry Waugh, Prop.) to fantastic realism (W.P. Kinsella’s Shoeless Joe), the themes and styles which dominated American literary writing in the last few decades have appeared in baseball novels.

As the publishing market changed and expanded in the decades following World War tr, all the styles and genres threw off baseball novels.

There were the 1950s screwball comedies begging to be movies — H. Allen Smith’s Rhubarb, Bud Nye’s Stay Loose, Paul Molloy’s A Pennant for The Kremlin. Later, the genre followed the imitators of Dan Jenkins’s football book, Semi-Tough, adding much more explicit sex.

There were the new types. Romances blossomed, from Lucy Kennedy’s The Sunlit Field in the 1950s to a host of paperback romances, such as Sheila Paulos’s Wild Roses, in the 1980s. Curiously, only the more explicit lines in the romance field used baseball themes. Science fiction produced a couple of baseball books, as did horror novels.

Older genres produced baseball books, too. The detective novel blossomed. one of Robert Parker’s early Spenser novels had a baseball setting. Richard Rosen turned out stylish mysteries with a former player as detective. Spy novels, from the grim Cold War seriousness of Robert Wade’s Knave of Eagles to the spoofs of Ross H. Spencer used baseball.

The first woman in baseball became a popular theme, ranging from the trashy A Grand Slam by Ray Puechner to Barbara Gregorich’s She’s on First. Some in this genre were in sharp contrast to the romances, which for all the statements about independence had some finding their fulfillment in their relationships with men. Books such as Michael Bowen’s Can’t Miss and Gregorich’s attempted to take a serious look at the issue and to have the main character be primarily a baseball player rather than a seeker of love.

Graham Greene once noted that literary figures are perfectly happy to acknowledge their debt to writers such as Joseph Conrad, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and Henry James. But they are, he said, less likely to recognize H. Rider Haggard, the turn-of-the-century writer of fantastic adventures who inspired Greene’s own imagination as a boy. Yet, it is writers like Haggard, he said, who bring us to a love of reading when we are young.

The baseball juvenile nurtured many of us in two ways. It created a sense of enjoyment in reading, a joy which we could take to reading of all kinds. It also created a sense of the game, its strategies, its characters, its traditions, the way baseball situations were always the same yet always just a bit different.

The novel may have always brought the winning run to the plate in the bottom of the ninth. But the man at the plate was never quite the same. Maybe he was weak from having escaped gamblers, like Frank Merriwell. Maybe he was tormented by past failures, like Pete Gibbs of the Blue Sox. Maybe he was a man so crippled he had to hit a homer because he couldn’t run, like Kirk Gibson.