Leading Off: Opening Lines, Part 3

"It's when you're good that they throw at your head."

"In the summer of my thirty-seventh year, when the air began leaking so conspicuously from my life that remaining oblivious to it soon required my full attention, my father fell into a pig-rendering fire and, of his unspeakable injuries, perished."

"From the dugout where Grouchy sat, the whole field spread itself out before him, the diamond not a diamond at all but what it really was, a square with players at every corner."

"This was supposed to be a book about losers."

"It was bad enough going 0-for-5 and committing a dumb-ass error that led to two unearned runs in the bottom of the ninth that beat you."

"My name is Gideon Clark and, like my father before me, I have on more than one occasion been physically ejected from the corporate offices of the Chicago Cubs Baseball Club, which are located at Wrigley Field 1060 West Addison, in Chicago."

"They were the laughing boys of the American League."



(Strike Three You're Dead, Rosen; Blue Ruin, Boyd; Keystone Kids, Tunis; All G.O.D.S. Children, Craig; The Dreyfuss Affair, Lefcourt; The Iowa Baseball Confederacy, Kinsella; The Seventh Babe, Charyn.)

Is this (a little patch of) Heaven?

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.