TITLE: SOMETIMES YOU SEE IT COMING
AUTHOR: KEVIN BAKER
PUBLISHER: CROWN; 326 PAGES; $20
TITLE: THE MUSEUM OF CLEAR IDEAS
AUTHOR: DONALD HALL
PUBLISHER: TICKNOR & FIELDS; 120 PAGES; $18.95
THE BOTTOM LINE: The batted ball and the printed word ride together into the sunset.
Year by year, baseball's sunlit magic withers (good field, no dreams), done in by domes, fake-o-turf, salary stats and the fact that TV's three-man, pitcher-batter-catcher game misses most of the point. Tube ball ignores what beguiles the wide-angled human eye at a real ball park: the splendid grass and the huge, contained space; the centerfielder's arrogant slouch as he taunts the batter by playing in too far; the way the shortstop leans forward when he knows the next guy is dangerous; the cocky way (unseen by the camera, because TV slicksters are peddling razor blades) the teams jog on and off the field, each full-grown millionaire taking care not to step on the foul lines, which is bad luck.
Yet if the sport these days has diminished itself to a snore, the perplexing truth is that marvelous writing about baseball seems to turn up every three weeks. Is it just that the skinny, unathletic kids who grow up to be writers can fantasize comfortably about a game that involves a lot of standing around and occasional light exertion? Or that two dying art forms, the batted ball and the printed word, have decided to keep each other company?
Since Bernard Malamud (The Natural) and Mark Harris (Bang the Drum Slowly) made it O.K. to get all misty about guys in funny-looking knickers, the first- base box seats have been full of writers. To cite a few, W.P. Kinsella wrote Shoeless Joe (Field of Dreams, in its film version), and George Plimpton came up with the sly and flaky The Curious Case of Sidd Finch. New Yorker sage Roger Angell wrote about spring training over and over, decade after decade, in words so fine that people who would rather have their teeth fixed than go to an actual game can quote paragraphs of Angell to each other. Even George Will, the frowning dominie of conservative political columnists, wrote Men at Work, a baseball book the prudent reader avoids because he is afraid it will prove what he suspects, that ballplayers are Republicans.
This green new season, the winner so far is Kevin Baker's first novel, Sometimes You See It Coming. This one ends the way a baseball story should: three and two, two out in the ninth, legend at bat. It starts with a young phenom, a rangy, unsmiling white kid named John Barr, who turns up in the shabby locker room of a Class A team in the West Virginia coalfields. He hasn't played organized ball. He doesn't even own a set of spikes.
Of course, since this is a fable, he turns out to be a marvel, a natural, who hits .444 that first season. A couple of years later, as Barr leads the New York Mets to a championship, sportswriters tell themselves that he isn't a better ballplayer than Gehrig, or Mays, or Williams. He couldn't be, could he? Better than DiMaggio? But his teammates know he is. They just don't know why. More than most athletic wonders, baseball skill is hidden, supernatural; just flick your wrists and it's a triple to left.