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Barr is a closed-in, silent man whose quotes run to "I had it all the way," or "It was just a question of timing." Ask a hawk how it flies. But because Barr is unexplainable, there's a lot of time for lazy, raunchy, cow- flopping baseball talk. Ricky Falls, a black outfielder who plays alongside Barr and is as much of a friend as the phenom can accept, tells most of it. Falls and the rest of his teammates, except for Barr, lead their league in dalliance with the baseball annies who show up in the team hotel after away games. The players are prodigious sexists, though so are the annies, and nobody knows it better than Ellie Jay, the gorgeous sportswriter who follows Barr's team. Her first day covering another club was legendary. The entire team greeted her in the locker room, stark naked except for Halloween masks. Ellie made her rep forever by asking "O.K., which one of you little pricks struck out in the seventh with the bases loaded?"
Cal, the wise old manager, quits to concentrate on drinking and fishing, and is replaced by the Little Maniac, a pugnacious, team-wrecking Billy Martin caricature. Moses Yellowhorse, the lunatic fireballer, haunts the ball park, and so does Eileen the Bullpen Queen, an annie so astonishingly trashy that the players remember her name. The novel flows with lovely nonsense, summer after summer, until it is necessary to give Barr a slump so that he can recover and win the Series one more time. Author Baker slumps here, just a bit, then finds his groove again.
Put this one on the shelf with The Natural. But leave room for poet Donald Hall, who has written a book-length poem, called The Museum of Clear Ideas, strung on the nine-inning frame of a baseball game. Nine syllable lines, nine lines to a half inning, and so on. Extra innings as the poet reaches the end and finds himself still breathing easily despite intimations of mortality.
Hall is a distinguished, three-quarter-aged fellow who has earned his high reputation, mostly by writing deep, lyrical stuff that he woodcuts from the old family farm where he lives in New Hampshire. He is besotted by baseball and, like all the other writers who crowd the box seats, assumes dreamily that everyone will accept this.
At the Wilmot town hall, a couple of miles from his farm, Hall recently read from his gigantic baseball poem. "I would like to linger with Schwitters in the Fenway bleachers, explaining baseball . . . Well, there are nine players . . ." That's Kurt Schwitters, the defunct German Dadaist, Hall explained somewhat obscurely. Fenway needs no explanation; it is the ball park of tragedy where the Red Sox writhe.
Hall's listeners were his neighbors, a retired Navy officer, an antiques dealer, several social workers and perhaps a farmer, though farmers are rarer than poets in New Hampshire these days. They were on hand to honor Hall and English words, and even baseball, if that is what was asked. Though some of them probably imagine that Carl Yastrzemski and Ted Williams too still play for the Red Sox, and most of the rest never heard of these heroes.