Why is it So Hard To Write a Good Baseball Novel?

This article was originally published in The SABR Review of Books, Volume II (1987).

 

I asked Cappy Gagnon, former SABR president and aficionado extraordinaire, what he thought the best baseball novels were. Without hesitation, Cappy replied, “That’s easy. There aren’t any. Baseball fiction is not as interesting as baseball history. Why make up stories, when better ones already exist?” This raises an interesting question: is there a good, let alone great, baseball novel? Most of us, backed into this comer, would probably say The Natural, but I don’t know who would want to argue that Bernard Malamud’s book is a great novel, or even a great baseball novel. 

There are three ways to write a baseball novel. The first, and The Natural is the best example, is to create a fictitious story in a real setting. The team in Malamud’s novel is the New York Knights and its owner and players are fictional, but the league is the National League, and New York is the recognizable city of realistic fiction. The second method is a fictitious story in a fictitious setting, which is another way of saying fantasy: the Alice In Wonderland approach. This is the least plausible method, but it’s been done. W.P. Kinsella’s Shoeless Joe is such a book, and people claim to like it. I find that Shoeless wanders so far into sentimentality that prose describing those magical cornfields, fecund Iowa dirt, and that “when-you-wish-upon-a-star” ballfield becomes as sugary as pancake syrup, but Shoeless has its following. 

Another book which trifles with reality is Robert Coover’s remarkable The Universal Baseball Association, Inc.; J. Henry Waugh, Prop., which proves that there’s nothing wrong with surrealism if it works — if it provides a commentary on this world and judiciously follows the laws of its own. Lewis Carroll did this brilliantly, Coover has more trouble, but Hamlet says, “By indirections find directions out” and if we’re looking for the essence of the game, we may have to look in a surreal mirror.

The third method, and I think the most successful, is a fictional character put in a real setting. This is Conrad’s method of placing the narrator in the action, but not making him the hero. F. Scott Fitzgerald used this strategy in The Great Gatsby and think how silly that story could be if it were narrated by Gatsby with the Conradian method, to paraphrase Emerson, the author hitches his wagon to a star, and can inject a consciousness of his own creation into an historical situation. I think this technique is superior to a Ragtime treatment where the author provides us with the thoughts and “inferiority” of an historical figure. The Ragtime approach can deteriorate into a “dramatization,” or become the hybrid of the 1960s, the non-fiction novel, where an author is freed from the constraints of writing accurate history, while not having had to create a world like a novelist. This is the slipperiest slope on the mountain of fiction. 

A novel which employs the Conradian method is Eric Greenberg’s The Celebrant, where a jeweler idolizes Christy Mathewson, and tells both his and Mathewson’s story. Harry Stein’s Hoopla combines the Conradian and Ragtime methods. The book has two narrators, one not directly involved in the 1919 World Series, a reporter named Luther Pond; and Buck Weaver, who though a principal in the story of the fix, was an observer to it rather than a participant. The problem I have with Hoopla is I have no idea what the real Buck Weaver would have talked like in 1944, but Stein’s Weaver talks like Ring Lardner’s Busher. Stein tries to cover his literary tracks by having Weaver dislike You Know Me Al, but the voice is practically the same. Stein’s Weaver, however, is a good vehicle to comment on the men who did sell out, particularly his friend Eddie Cicotte, and Hoopla is a successful novel. I prefer The Celebrant and the less adulterated Conradian method, which allows the author to operate freely in an historical situation without forcing him to pretend to know what was actually in the minds of real people. This is an effective way to recreate, comment on, and explore the motivations, ambiance, and guts of another time.

I may be foolish to look for a great baseball novel. There have been decades when the notion of the Great American Novel dominated the public’s expectations. The 1890s cried out for a GAN while dismissing Huckleberry Finn as children’s literature, and not knowing Moby Dick. The 1920s also waited for the GAN like a tenth century hermit expecting the Messiah, and though that decade had as many contenders as any since the 1850s, those readers who wanted our literature sanctified by one big book were disappointed. Perhaps looking for the great baseball novel is as silly, but my question is: Can there be a great baseball novel? Or does the nature of the game make this impossible?

Philip Roth titled his baseball book The Great American Novel, and one assumes he did this with tongue in cheek, rather than as a critical guide. My problem with Roth’s GAN is that something ridiculous happens. Gil Gilmesh, (if you want to read something great, read the Mesopotamian epic Gilgamesh: it’s one of the world’s great stories, but alas, no baseball), the greatest pitcher of all time, kills an umpire with a pitch. I got lost after that because I didn’t find this probable, and the book hadn’t convinced me it was fantasy. It was a realistic novel that veered into the fantastical, and I stopped reading.

To return to Cappy’s argument: how can a novelist improve on baseball history? Indeed, how could a novel which contained a game like the sixth game of the 1986 World Series be credible? It would seem that the author had taken liberties. That game makes no sense, except that it actually happened. Serious novels do not try to out-sensationalize life: that can’t be done. They heighten life and explain it. They put reality under the glare of imagination, and this is different from an escapist fantasy. 

If fictional baseball can’t outdo the bizarre happenings of actual baseball without seeming contrived, perhaps fiction can provide insights into the game, in the same way that non-baseball novels provide insight into non-baseball life. I don’t believe a realistic baseball novel can get to the essence of the game. The Natural succeeds because of its non-baseball elements. What makes that book so good is that every male harbors a dark fear that if he were really “the best in the world” at something, there would be women who want to destroy him. This fear is as old as Adam and Eve, and Samson and Delilah. Please note, I said this is a male fear, not a universal truth. Roy Hobbs’ self-destruction at the end of his one big league season is not brought on by something unique to baseball, but by his own slovenly, infantile personality. One gets a feel for a certain type of man from that book, not a type of ballplayer. The Natural is a good novel, but only a fair baseball novel.

The second approach to baseball fiction may be more promising than it first appeared. If realistic fiction can’t compete with real baseball (Why should it? Baseball, the quantifiable game that started in 1876, with all its numbers and anecdotes, is one long collective dream, one long collective American fiction — how can one book made up by one author compare with this collective majesty?), then perhaps the “Alice in Wonderland” method can by indirection find the game’s Direction. Perhaps surrealism can succeed where realism fails.

The key to Robert Coover’s book is that he explores the psychology of a baseball fan, not the psychology of a player. J. Henry Waugh plays a game, not unlike APBA baseball (thank God he didn’t have a home computer — there’s something marvelously down-to-earth about throwing dice on a board), but what makes the novel so interesting is that J. Henry goes a step farther than most of us. He not only roots, but invents his own league, his own players, and writes biographies of them, giving his creation life, like a novelist peopling his “own postage stamp of earth,” as William Faulkner said. The sense of Waugh’s imaginary world, its complexity, and its reality to its inventor, show more about the psychology of being a baseball fan than any book I can think of. Part of it is Coover’s phenomenal ear. The names he makes up are worthy of the Baseball Encyclopedia: Long Lew Lidell, Whistlestop Busby, Raglan Rooney, etc. Where The Universal Baseball Association stumbles is when imaginary baseball is left for reality, then J. Henry seems like just another alienated character in a modern novel.

Imaginary worlds can be interesting when they run parallel to this one. They are less satisfying when they intrude into our “reality.” Coover ends the book with an unconvincing leap into the future where a baseball death is re-enacted every year as ritual; but despite this rather English professory leap into anthropology, the book captures a dimension of being a fan — the obsessiveness about documentation and lust for a complete world that a fan can enter like Alice going through the looking glass — that we all share, and rarely discuss.

Kinsella’s looking glass world is too silly for me. The narrator, also called Kinsella, repeatedly says he’s sentimental about baseball. That’s no sin. We are all sentimental about baseball. Ray Kinsella’s problem is he’s sentimental about literature. A make-believe team of the 1919 Chicago White Sox with Ray’s dad as catcher. If Chick Gandil showed up in my backyard, I’d ban him. Shoeless Joe attempts, like Coover’s book, to explore the psychology of a baseball fan, and indeed, there is a sentimental side to us all, but Kinsella’s down home anything-can-happen-day magic field, makes me wonder if he ever actually rooted for a team, or has he always drifted in the pantheistic “Everything’s OK, I’m a baseball fan” mist that Roger Angell substituted for a description of the 1986 World Series in The New Yorker. At one point Kinsella tells us rain makes “the field an orgy of rainbows.” I’m wary of rainbow orgies.

The Conradian Celebrant explores another aspect of being a fan: hero worship. Jake Kapp idolizes Christy Mathewson, makes jewelry for him, and becomes his friend. What makes this novel work is that Kapp is also concerned with his own life, family, and the family business. Baseball is his passion, and Mathewson is the embodiment of baseball, but Kapp has a life, witnesses some momentous games, like the Merkle “boner” game, the final game of the 1912 Series, and some of the 1919 Series, but he also contends with family politics, a brother with a growing gambling mania, and suffers the death of a child in the influenza epidemic of 1919. In other words, Jake Kapp is a human being, not just a vehicle. When he visits the stricken Mathewson in ’19 in a hotel in Chicago to get Matty’s opinion of the crookedness of the Series, (Jake must decide if he should put money on Cincinnati to balance brother Eli’s $40,000 on the White Sox), Kapp has the stature of a fully developed literary character and the scene is powerful. To use a Kinsella dichotomy, Jake Kapp is a fan, not a spectator; and of life, not only baseball. That scene is memorable. Jake’s decision does seem to be a matter of life and death. Greenberg understands when to retreat into characters of his own making, rather than let a John McGraw or Christy Mathewson do his talking.

Hoopla starts out like it’s going to be a great novel as a young Luther Pond (he’s much easier to take before he becomes a combination of Westbrook Pegler and Walter Winchell) covers the Jack Johnson-Jim Jeffries “Fight of the Century” in 1910. The Ragtime style cameos of Johnson, Gentleman Jim Corbett, and Jeffries are done with just the right mixture of history and panache. Perhaps these cameos work because we know less about old-time fighters than Ty Cobb, who is a character; and who, supposedly drunk, tells Pond about his father’s murder. This I find unlikely; and I also think it unlikely that Cobb would cry, as he does for Pond. Cobb did tell Al Stump about Hershel Cobb’s death, but that was fifty years later, and Ty was dying. 

Luther Pond becomes a caricature too quickly and Buck Weaver talks like the “Busher,” but the evocation of the sporting world in the first two decades of this century is done so well the book achieves the novelists’ state of grace: the whole is bigger than the parts. Can a great baseball novel be written? I’d like to think so. The novel, let alone the baseball novel, has been pronounced dead as many times as boxing, but both seem to hang on. Baseball novels are difficult because they compete with the game’s history, which reads like a great novel, but men like Coover, Greenberg, Stein, and Malamud deepen our understanding of baseball and ourselves.