Miles Wolff's Season of the Owl (Stein and Day: 1980) is a mystery and a coming of age tale set in the 1950s. The story is reminiscent of To Kill a Mockingbird; racial tension and murder swirl around behind the life of a young protagonist. In Mockingbird, Scout is that young person dealing with growing up. In Season of the Owl, Tom (whose last name is never revealed), is the nephew of Centerville Owls general manager, Will Hilton. The 1958 Owls play in the Class B Carolina League and are like an extended family to Tom, whose father left him and his mother when he was a child. His mother, not able to care for him, has sent him to live with his uncle.
Despite Tom's description of Centerville as the fifth largest city in North Carolina, there is more of a small-town feeling to Centerville from the moment the novel begins. But it is the team and its stadium that are, actually, the "small town" in Wolff's novel. Tom's school friends run the scoreboard (including a mechanical owl that pops up from behind the outfield fence when a home run is hit) and sell concessions. Will's girlfriend keeps the books, and the star right fielder is a close friend of both Will and Tom. And the batboy is the son of the local councilman.
Like To Kill a Mockingbird, there is a black housekeeper whose role parallels that of Calpurnia. Her role, combined with the team's ticket-taker, Mr. Johnson, is to link the main characters to the real-world events of desegregation just beginning to spark outside the stadium gates. How Will, and the Owls ownership, deals with these changes will affect the future of the franchise.
Wolff is adept at describing the day-to-day activities of running a minor league team, which comes from experience.* We get to see the behind-the-scenes running of the team through the winter and into the season. Players fret about making it to the next level all the while the team's viability is threatened because of boycotts by black leaders. At the same time, there is an investigation underway following the discovery of a body just outside the outfield wall. Who was killed and why are questions that answered slowly during the course of the story.
Through all this, Tom leads the life of a teenager - or at least the life of one who helps run the local baseball team. His story appears to be told from a distant future, remembrances of this season, but Wolff also attempts to set the tale in that year, as if Tom doesn't know what happened, or will happen.
Season of the Owl is a literary work in the same vein as Veteran's Park (Don J. Snyder, 1987) and The Brothers K (David James Duncan, 1992). The story is not necessarily about baseball, but baseball is the vehicle used to bind the characters together and help move the plot along to its ultimate destination. Wolff uses this mechanism well and the book is enjoyable, if not a little slow-paced at times.* Miles Wolff is a former general manager of several teams in the south, and owned the Durham Bulls, as well as several other teams. He is currently commissioner of the independent Can-Am League and American Association.
I recently obtained a copy of The Baseball Novel (McFarland & Co.: 2008) by Noel Schraufnagel. This is an invaluable resource for anyone who is a fan of baseball fiction. Schraufnagel has included an enormous amount of bibliographic information, including lists, plot capsules, and his own personal reviews. Schraufnagel presents summaries for over 400 titles between 1838(!) and 2008. Even if you find that you don't agree with Schraufnagel's conclusions as to the relative merits of a particular novel, this bibliography is valuable just for the list of titles. I found myself going through the book to identify titles I hand't heard of and I came across at least a dozen that I've added to my future acquisition list.
The reviews contained in The Baseball Novel are helpful and insightful. You have to place some level of credibility with Schraufnagle, just because of the sheer number of books he's read. I compared a few of Shraufnagel's opinions with my own. I was pleasantly surprised that his opinion of Veteran's Park (Don J. Snyder, Ivy Books: 1988) matched well with my own opinion: that it is a greatly over-looked novel of literary merit within the genre. In glancing through his reviews, I liked his side notes as to titles that are must-reads versus those that should be relegated to the "worst" of the category.
Schraufnagel admits to limiting his annotations to adult novels because of the likely similarly large number of juvenile baseball titles (particularly published prior to the 1960s). But the dividing line between adult and juvenile fiction is gray. Just note Schraufnagel's inclusion of the John Tunis series. But I'll go along with this, only because of the time it would have taken to include them all.
This is the first reference piece I've acquired to accompany my collection of baseball fiction. I've put Andy McCue's Baseball by the Books (William C. Brown: 1991) and Lauricella's Home Games (McFarland & Co.: 1999), among a few others, as other references I want to obtain, if nothing else, than to balance out opinions and deepen my understanding of baseball fiction.
I appreciate bibliographic references like these that treat full-length novels, but that's only really a segment of baseball fiction. In addition to novels (both adult and juvenile), there are novellas and short stories. I'd love to see someone put together an all-inclusive bibliography of all types - novels and short stories - categorized by sub-genre (e.g., adult, juvenile, mystery, science fiction, etc.) Sort of a "baseball fiction in and out of print" type of reference. Wow, now that would be reference book!
Iowa has an allure over baseball novelists. W.P. Kinsella has made repeated visits to this state in various novels (see Shoeless Joe or The Iowa Baseball Confederacy) and short stories ("Frank Pierce, IA", "K Mart", and "The Dixon Corbelt League"). Jerry Klinkowitz also shares this affinity in stories contained in his collection, Short Season, and in his novel Basepaths. They both, of course, have ties to the state. Kinsella attended the Iowa Writer's Workshop, and Klinkowitz was on the faculty at the University of Northern Iowa. The University of Iowa's Program in Creative Writing has also included such baseball writers as Tom Grimes (Season's End), Philip Roth (The Great American Novel), and Don J. Snyder (Veteran's Park).
Robert Curtis joins the ranks of honorary Iowans with his The Baseball Patch (iUniverse: 2001). Along the lines of Kinsella, The Baseball Patch is a quirky, magic-laden tale about the pursuit of dreams and immortality. Curtis presents two protagonists: John Evanston, a Phoenix sportswriter, and Harley Walker, a retirement home friend of Evanston's grandfather.
As boys, Walker, his cousin, and their friend set out from their childhood home (the stereotypically-named, Cornville, Iowa) to seek fame and fortune as baseball players. Being 11 or 12 years old didn't seem to concern them. Their little league team had "magic" and hadn't lost a home game since Babe Ruth had attended one of their games five years previous while on his way to the West Coast for some barnstorming. They ride the rails west and end up trying out for a minor league team in Bisbee, Arizona along the Mexican border. After the try-out, they go their separate ways and end up with a variety of life-long experiences, never returning to Iowa.
Evanston is known to his peers as "The Freak" for his propensity for writing odd feature stories. When he learns that there's a little league team in the middle of Iowa that may not have lost a game in 60 years he decides this is the story of a lifetime (pun intended). He convinces his flirtatious editor to let him travel to Iowa to cover the NCAA wrestling championships from where he'll leave to investigate the baseball team. His editor mischievously routes his trip to Iowa through Fargo perhaps, as Evanston supposes, so that she can meet up with him later in Des Moines.
As Evanston heads off to track down the mysterious story behind Harley's reminiscences, Walker is visited by his former friend Zach Jared, who made the trip with him to Arizona. Jared convinces Walker that it's time to locate Harley's cousin and go home (to Iowa). The novel is then a story of planes, trains, and automobiles as it follows the journey of Harley and Evanston until they meet up in the small Iowa town where time seems to have stopped.
There's a lot to admire about this little tale. While it is fairly short (the book is only 160 or so pages long), it contains a lot of period tidbits about the 1920s and 30s. I liked the description of how Babe Ruth's caravan of town cars came into town, and the imagery of the dusty landscape in southern Arizona. It's a fantasy piece, for sure, although the mystery of why the Cornville Little League team hasn't lost any home games since 1923 is quickly surmised. But it's a fun little story and the interaction between young and old is entertaining. The ending is wrapped up quick and neat, and perhaps could have used a little tension or some degree of conflict before the ending. But The Baseball Patch is actually fine the way it is: like the rolling Iowa countryside where it is set.
Miles Wolff's Season of the Owl (Stein and Day: 1980) is a mystery and a coming of age tale set in the 1950s. The story is reminiscent of To Kill a Mockingbird; racial tension and murder swirl around behind the life of a young protagonist. In Mockingbird, Scout is that young person dealing with growing up. In Season of the Owl, Tom (whose last name is never revealed), is the nephew of Centerville Owls general manager, Will Hilton. The 1958 Owls play in the Class B Carolina League and are like an extended family to Tom, whose father left him and his mother when he was a child. His mother, not able to care for him, has sent him to live with his uncle.
