Quotes of the Day
Listen to Walt Whitman on baseball. "Baseball is our game: the American game: I connect it with our national character," he said in 1888. "We are some ways a dyspeptic, nervous set: anything which will repair such losses may be regarded as a blessing to the race." Nice, isn't it? Just as compelling, in its own way, is the simple fact that Walt Whitman wrote something about baseball.
What draws intellectual types to the sport? There's something about the mere act of punishing a ball with a stick that brings about a truce in the eternal struggle between jock and nerd, and lures such luminaries as John Updike, Richard Ford, George Plimpton and the late Stephen Jay Gould to take their cuts. Are they slumming for street cred, trying to show that, like good postmodernists, they can switch-hit: both high-and lowbrow?
|
|
||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||
This year the three finest living baseball writers — Pulitzer prizewinning journalist David Halberstam, lifelong baseball scribe Roger Kahn and Roger Angell, a writer and editor at the New Yorker — have each, as if by a common agreement among the game's village elders, produced a new book, making the spring of 2003 quite possibly the all-time greatest single season of baseball writing ever. But it raises the question once again: Why do people who have way more important things to think about think about baseball?
Halberstam was born not far from Yankee Stadium, but The Teammates (Hyperion; 217 pages) deals not with the Bronx Bombers but with their eternal archrivals, the Boston Red Sox and not so much with their playing careers as with the diamond-shape holes baseball left in their lives when they left the game. Halberstam, whose previous subjects include Vietnam and Bill Clinton, focuses on the four players who formed the core of a powerhouse Boston lineup in the 1940s: Johnny Pesky, Bobby Doerr, Dominic DiMaggio (kid brother to Joltin' Joe) and the troubled, tyrannical genius Ted Williams, the last man to finish a season with a batting average over .400.
The curtain rises on the twilight of the boyhood idols: in October 2001. Williams, "the Splendid Splinter," was on his deathbed in Florida. Pesky and DiMaggio, both in their 80s, embarked on a 1,300-mile car trip to visit him. Halberstam braids together the story of their road trip — that other great American pastime — with an account of their bittersweet seasons as Red Sox. Though they played as a foursome from 1942 to 1951, minus a few years for World War II, they never won a World Series, and in 1949 they lost the pennant to the New York Yankees on the last day of the regular season on a dying-quail blooper. ("I can still see it with my eyes closed," Williams would remember, five decades later. "It's funny how you can remember something so painful so clearly.") Halberstam captures the full Housmanian drama as time catches up with them one by one. "Growing old in America, the country of the young, is never easy," Halberstam writes, but these four men, whose lives up to that point had prepared them only for permanent adolescence, do it gracefully, if reluctantly. Their lives are definitively American, and although they lack second acts, Halberstam has given them a glorious, flaming, autumnal epilogue.
It's doubly sad whenever time claims a ballplayer, because the game is predicated on the suspension of ordinary temporality. "Uniquely among team sports, baseball proceeds outside of time," Roger Kahn observes in his new book October Men (Harcourt; 382 pages). "There is no clock." But the air of eternity that lingers over the grass only shows up the ephemerality of those who play on it — baseball is not a sport of the gods, it's a sport of mortals, and ballplayers are even more human than other athletes. They tend to be of average size and weight, unlike the Star Wars cantina of humanoids who participate in football and basketball. October Men is about a baseball team that was all too human.
Baseball is often held up as a microcosm of or a metaphor for America, and it's rarely true — but in 1978, in the Bronx, it was. A turbulent country was reflected in the tempestuous Yankees locker room, where racial tension crackled, where women sportswriters were allowed for the first time and where the first wave of baseball's free agents — led by two Yankees hurlers, Catfish Hunter, the son of a North Carolina sharecropper, and Andy Messersmith — were pulling down astronomical salaries. At the center of the maelstrom, stirring it for all he was worth, was manager Billy Martin, a man who once took pitcher Goose Gossage aside — before a spring-training game in which he would face a black player — and told him, "I want you to drill the little n_____ in the head." Meanwhile the team's slugger was Reggie Jackson, an emerging black superstar who the previous year had hit four home runs in the World Series with four successive swings of his bat. The irrepressible Jackson, who had an IQ of 160 and quoted Frost fluently from behind his mirror shades, is the book's hilarious, hyperverbal hero. He once baffled a reporter with this spitball of a question: "If my team loses a big one, and I strike out with the winning runs on base, are you aware that 1 billion Chinese don't care?"
This was before the days of the flacks and handlers whose job it is to make athletes talk like robots. With owner George Steinbrenner fanning the flames, the Yankees butted heads in the ugliest, most public manner imaginable, then pulled it together to triumph over the hated Red Sox in a one-day tie-breaker play-off that remains one of the most beautiful, jewel-like ball games ever played. Kahn's glittering group portrait paints the Yanks as both goats and heroes, and they are vividly, engagingly, enragingly human in both roles. Kahn is the author of The Boys of Summer — which SPORTS ILLUSTRATED named last year as the second greatest sports book of all time (behind A.J. Liebling's The Sweet Science) — and he has been covering the Yankees for 50 years. His prose is the quintessence of the newspaper school of sportswriting — he can epitomize a player with a single swing of the pen, as it were. If you're wondering how that's done, consider his 18-word skewering of Yankees centerfielder John Milton ("Mickey") Rivers: "He may well be the only person named for John Milton who has never heard of John Milton."
Roger Angell, by contrast, comes from the magazine writer's school of sportswriting: calm, meditative, not deadline driven or space cramped, free to follow the fast-and-slow, squeeze-and-relax rhythms of the game. His new book, Game Time (Harcourt; 398 pages), is a collection of pieces written for the New Yorker. Culled from 40 years and around a million words of baseball writing, they have a certain aged, triple-distilled quality: each one has the internal complexity of a novel. Angell likes to skirt the edges of the diamond: he keeps a lonely big-league scout company as he roves bedraggled backwoods ball parks in search of talent, he hunts down the aging grandmaster Bob Gibson in retirement, and he joins Shakespeare-quoting baseball announcer Tim McCarver in the broadcast booth. The pieces are arranged to follow the chronology of the season rather than of the century, a configuration that doesn't make sense until you start reading, and some of the best writing comes at the beginning, in the chapters covering the meaningless, sun-soaked overture of spring training. There, sitting in the stands with the senior citizens in Sarasota, Fla., watching a trio of trainee pitchers share a joke, Angell confronts the hidden pain nursed by every bleacher bum: "We would never be part of that golden company on the field, which each of us, certainly for one moment of his life, had wanted more than anything else in the world to join." It's like being a Muggle with your nose pressed up against the gates of Hogwarts.
Born in 1920, Angell is now one of those senior citizens, old enough to have bumped into a retired Babe Ruth on the street wearing his (Ruth's, that is) signature camel's-hair coat and cap. But in the autobiographical chapter "Early Innings," Angell allows us to glimpse the moment when he, a control-challenged junior-high screwball hurler, gave up his big-league dreams and "took up smoking and irony in self-defense." He must have outgrown the irony too — otherwise how could he describe with such tender eloquence a forgettable player, onetime New York Mets shortstop Tony Fernandez, taking batting practice, "laying each bunt down like a necktie on a bed." Hopping adroitly from decade to decade, backward and forward, Angell blows the dust off such near forgotten minor marvels as the switch-hitting Cleveland Indian Carlos Baerga crushing two home runs in the same inning from opposite sides of the plate, and a game in 1933 (Angell was there) in which one Luke Sewell, catching for the now defunct Washington Senators, tagged out two bunched-up runners at the plate (Lou Gehrig was one of them) with a single grand, sweeping, run-cancelling gesture. Angell writes like an outfielder at the warning track, performing a running plie with outstretched glove, gracefully saving priceless wonders like these from the bleachers of oblivion.
One of Game Time's many virtues is that — unlike, say, the last sentence of the preceding paragraph — Angell never for a moment forces the game to carry a meaning, metaphorical or otherwise, that it doesn't ask for. A deep thinker he may be, even an intellectual, but whatever baseball's true meaning, he has the good grace to write around it; he leaves the unutterable unuttered. The lure of the game, what draws the Nobelists and the laureates, may be the elusive but ever present possibility of perfection: the no-hitter, the flawless diamond of a double play, even the ruler-straightness of a well-kept base path. But perfection brooks no summing up, and neither baseball nor its fans need a committee of scribes to stuff it full of meaning. Like Angell, the best baseball writers let the game speak for itself. In "For Openers," an essay on the occasion of Opening Day 1982, Angell meets up with a 92-year-old pitcher named Smokey Joe Wood, a member of the 1912 Red Sox who had been present at the first official game ever played at Fenway Park. Naturally, in the presence of such an oracle, Angell asks him what the game was like, and he has the wisdom to quote the oracle's answer in full. "I have no idea," Smokey Joe replies. "Can't remember a single thing about it. I didn't pitch — that's all I know. Just another ball game." Whitman couldn't have said it better.
- Lev Grossman