Birthday greetings go out to Michael Bishop (11/12), author of Brittle Innings (Bantam: 1994). Bishop is an accomplished and award winning author and poet, primarily in the science fiction genre. His account of baseball in segregation-era Georgia, though, in Brittle Innings is outstanding. And, in my opinion, Brittle Innings is one of those works in baseball fiction that should be included in a Top 20 (if not Top 10) list of the genre. Bishop's writing style, his development of a wide range of different characters, and unique story line, make Brittle Innings one of my favorites. Bishop has often focused on humanity and the human condition, and Brittle Innings is no exception.
A day late, but here's a salute to our veterans. In baseball fiction, we can add the following to the list of those who have served our country.
There's Roy Tucker(1), pitcher for the John Tunis' fictional Brooklyn Dodgers who was shot down over France and returned after the war to lead his team to the World Series). Rick Norman's Jax "Gooseball" Fielder(2), pitcher for the St. Louis Browns, was also shot down - over Japan - and tried to help out a Japanese father see his son realize a baseball dream amidst the closing days of World War II. Army Air Corps. members feature prominently in baseball novels. In Jumpin' Jimminy(3)An entire B-17 flight crew takes up baseball in neutral Sweden after their damaged plane has to make an emergency landing there after a raid over Germany. As part of their detainment, they take on the crew of a similarly stranded crew of a Japanese submarine.
From the ranks of those who served in earlier wars we have General Oakhart, commissioner of the fictional Patiot League in Philip Roth's The Great American Novel(4), and the members of Company L, 14th Brooklyn Regiment who play a series of games against their Confederate foes during the 1864 Overland Campaign(5). From the Confederate side, there is Joseph "Rebel Joe" Tyler(6) who as a prisoner of war uses his baseball skills to escape, but later stars with the Terryville (NY) Niners after the war. In a similar story, we have Win McNaughton(7), a Union prisoner in a Confederate prison camp in Texas, who uses baseball to survive and later prosper after the war.
Finally, from the non-player ranks we have Joe Tinker and Joseph Burke. Donald Honig's Joe Tinker(8), a postwar newsreporter and World War II veteran, investigates a murder which will lead him to conspiracy surrounding Jackie Robinson's breakthrough year with the Dodgers. Robert D. Parker's character, Joseph Burke(9) is a former marine, and wounded veteran of the Battle of Guadalcanal, who becomes bodyguard to Jackie Robinson during that same season.
(1) The Kid Comes Back, John Tunis, Morrow: 1946
(2) Fielder's Choice, Rick Norman, August House: 1991
(3) Jumpin' Jimminy - A World War II Baseball Saga, iUniverse: 2004
(4) The Great American Novel, Philip Roth, Henry Holt & Co.: 1991
(5) Play for a Kingdom, Thomas Dyja, Harcourt Brace: 1997
(6) Perfect Silence, Jeff Hutton, Breakaway Books: 2000
(7) Camp Ford, Johnny D. Boggs, Thorndike: 2006
(8) The Plot to Kill Jackie Robinson, Donald Honig, Dutton: 1992
(9) Double Play, Rober D. Parker, Berkley Books: 2005
If Steve Shilstone’s Chance (Breakaway Books : 1996) were written in the third person it could be termed a lighter, gentler The Natural (or perhaps it would be more comparable to the movie version of that novel). Chance is the story of phenom shortstop Chance Caine who breaks into the Majors at age 18 and plays 22 seasons with the fictional Lions of the National League. Along the way, he amasses 21 Gold Glove Awards, plays in several World Series, and hits .400. The story is told years later, after Caine’s retirement, by a self-proclaimed “old weird guy poet” who Caine has asked to write his story. During the course of the novel, we are introduced to various people who have been a part of Caine’s life, including teammates, coaches, wives, lovers, and radio announcers. And we are treated to the story of Caine's life through these characters, as well as through Caine's own words. Featured is Caine’s meteoric rise to stardom, his marriages, and his feats on the diamond.
The comparison to The Natural is present, of course. Similar to Roy Hobbs’ encounter with Harriet Bird, Caine is seduced by a young girl (“I want you because you’re going to be in the Hall of Fame”); and Caine is also shot (but not by his lover, and not with a silver bullet) so he will go out “on top”. But Chance Caine is not Roy Hobbs. While Caine knows he’s good (“I am the best ever to play my position”), there is no arrogance or self-proclaimed destiny about his situation. He is a likeable, and loved, character, even if a little quirky. And there is no darkness to the story, no sudden downfall. Caine plays until he’s 40 and then walks away – on his own terms; his skills by that time already declining (errors mounting and batting average falling). Caine leaves the game on his own terms, marrying a supermodel who doesn’t know anything about baseball, but whom Caine has recognized as his ultimate soul mate (despite spending the previous 20 years married to someone else).
While the story is narrated in a light, humorous tone, it is not overdone. The novel is sprinkled with excerpts from Caine’s diary, which was recorded during his last season with the Lions. This mechanism allows Shilstone to further develop Caine's character. And added to the voices of Caine’s peers the “personal” feel of the story is enhanced, as well. Chance is less a lighter The Natural than it is a combination of Man on Spikes with a dash of Almost Famous and a measure of Mark Harris’ Henry Wiggen. While not on the caliber of Man on Spikes, or Harris’ novels, Chance is worth the read. It is a fun and entertaining read.
Playing first base for the 1943 Highbridge (GA) Hellbenders in Michael Bishop's Brittle Innings (Bantam: 1994) is Henry "Jumbo" Clerval - a 7' soft-spoken, yet highly intelligent vegetarian pacifist. Oh, and he's also a monster - literally. According to Clerval own admission, he's the monster created by Victor Frankenstein and immortalized by Mary Shelly some 125 years earlier. Following his last-known appearance at the pole, he took the name of Frankenstein's best friend, and made his way to America where he determined that baseball was the best method for assimilating into society and learning to become human.
Clerval is a complex character, particularly because of his pieced-together origins. His features, apart from his exceptional height, resemble a set of slightly mismatched puzzle pieces put together: "His face was out of alignment somehow, like a pumpkin cut in two and put back together wrong." He is described as a "disjointed wreck" where shoulders, elbows, knees, and head jutted awkwardly and made it seem that he was one step away from unhinging and falling apart. Because of this, he found that children, women, and a few men were uncomfortable around him and would avoid his presence. Dogs also didn't like him, and there are numerous passages where his passing evokes(?) their barking. Despite his mixed "assembly", Clerval is actually a well-grounded individual. He's not entirely comfortable with his non-humanity, but he knows his limitations.
Henry Clerval is not the mute, grunting monster as portrayed by Boris Karloff, but rather the monster of Shelly's creation. He has a deep, articulate voice (not unlike the voice of actor Brad Garrett, IMO). His extensive vocabulary comes from reading "philosophy, science, religion, medicine, Victorian novels, and current
events."
As a player, Clerval is all arms and legs. Because of his lack of speed and agility, he plays a deep first base, standing on the grass behind the bag that able to snag ground balls that would otherwise get by him. Despite being slow and rather awkward, he is a presence at the plate and makes his hits count. He leads the league in home runs and eventually receives attention of the parent club for a late season call-up.
Clerval serves as a stabilizing influence, despite his eccentricities, for protagonist Daniel Boles. Boles is assigned as Henry's roommate and has his own demons he is battling. Henry, of course, has a number of secrets in addition to his origin that have Boles wondering about until Henry finally feels comfortable enough to start answering. Henry's experiences with the Hellbenders become intertwined
with that of Boles until a circumstances result in violence and tragedy. In the end, though, Clerval has impact and influence on Boles eventual reconciliation with his past, while Boles' loyalty and friendship help Henry move closer to realizing what he has longed to become: a real person.
Happy Halloween!
Looking for other possible Halloween baseball treats? Try one of the following:
Child's Play, by Sal Conte
Tartabull's Throw, by Henry Garfield
Southpaw, by Frank King
Blockade Billy or The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, Stephen King
World Series, by John R. Tunis (Harcourt Brace: 1941)
In Tunis' sequel to The Kid From Tomkinsville (Harcourt Brace: 1940), Roy Tucker and his Brooklyn teammates took on Cleveland and their ace hurler, Gene Miller (modeled after Indian Bob Feller). The fictional series went seven action- and drama-filled games, including attempts to cheat, beanings, and sensational home run saving catches. Tunis, of course, had the Dodgers take the Series (4 games to 3). The Dodgers appeared in the actual 1941 Series, but lost to the Yankees. (During the 1940 season, the Dodgers and Indians each finished second in their respective leagues, and when crafting his second Tucker novel, Tunis may have thought the two would have a good chance at meeting in the series).
Here are a few other novels that include World Series play:
Curveball, Kate Angell
Blue Ruin, Brendan C. Boyd
The Greatest Slump of All Time, David Carkeet
This is Next Year, Philip Goldberg
A Pennant for the Kremlin, Paul Malloy
Just Joe: Baseball's Natural, as Told by His Wife, Thomas Perry
How I Helped the Chicago Cubs (Finally!) Win the World Series, Harper Scott
The Final Game, Robert W. Shoemaker
Hoopla, Harry Stein
Killing the Curse, Jeff Stratton
Good luck to the Giants and Rangers in this year's championship.
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.
Ernest L. Thayer’s poem, “Casey at the Bat” (1888), is not the earliest piece of baseball fiction, but it is likely the best known of the 19th Century, if not of all time. When it was first published in the San Francisco Examiner, it received little attention, but today it is one of the most recognizable poems in American literature. It is a rather short (13 stanzas), concise poem in which each line presents a vivid image of the moment. The poem’s brevity, however, has resulted in a number of unanswered questions: Who was Mudville playing? Was Casey modeled after an actual person? What was Casey’s story, and what happened to him after the game? Since its original publication, many authors and poets have expounded on the original, whether to address unanswered questions, or satisfy some deep-seeded need to see Casey redeemed.
In 1906, sportswriter Grantland Rice penned a sequel, “Casey’s Revenge”, where Casey – now nicknamed “Strike-out” - is given a second chance. In Rice’s story, the team goes into a slump in the days following their famed loss. But in a rematch against the same pitcher a few weeks later, and their team trailing 4-1 in the last inning, Casey gets his redemption: he hits the ball with three men on, to win the game. Rice was such a fan of the poem that he actually wrote a couple of other related poems about Casey, including “Mudville’s Fate” (1910) in which the town folds up after the failure of their team to win.
Two years after "Casey's Revenge", Clarence McDonald of the San Francisco Examiner wrote “Casey – Twenty Years Later”, a poem that features Casey sitting in the stands watching a game when the catcher is hurt and can’t play any longer; Casey volunteers to bat for him with predictable results.
Casey’s restoration from goat to hero is a common theme. Burgess Fitzpatrick’s novella, Casey’s Redemption (Greenwich Book Publishers: 1958) features a grandson making up for Casey’s strikeout by making a winning play. In Dan Gutman’s Casey Back at Bat (HarperCollins: 2009) the great hitter gets a second chance and hits the pitch so hard that it not only travels out of the park, but around the world. An odd tale of Casey’s redemption is “Mighty Casey’s Ghost”, in which Casey returns from the dead to relive the moment of his failure.
On the poem’s 100th anniversary, sportswriter Frank DeFord posed an alternative telling of Casey at the Bat (Sports Illustrated, July 18, 1988) which created a back-story for Casey with that of the song “Take Me Out to the Ball Game.” He later expanded his article to book form called Casey on the Loose: What Really Might Have Happened (Viking: 1989). In DeFord’s retelling, Casey has a number of adventures in Boston that lead him to that fateful at-bat. In DeFord’s version, Casey strike’s out on a passed ball and the winning runs actually score to give Mudville the win.
From an alternative perspective, there are the works that try and address who may have struck Casey out. Robert Coover, who wrote The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., Jerry Waugh, Prop. (Random House: 1968) penned the short story “McDuff on the Mound” (The Iowa Review: Fall 1971), similarly is Thomas Fronchowiak’s poem, “Thatcher on the Hill” (Baseball Almanac: 2008) And an anonymous author calling himself (or herself) Sparkus, wrote “The Man Who Fanned Casey” sometime around the time DeWolf Hopper made his recording of the Thayer poem. In this work, the pitcher’s name was Hagen and hails from Frogtown. Interestingly, his catcher is named Thatcher.
There's something about this poem that makes it timeless. Countless retellings have been produced, in prose, book, on film and on television, that both retell the original, expound upon it, or re-create it in another setting (sometime, take a look at the Twighlight Zone re-do). Perhaps it's because it's a tale of failure that intrigues us, rather than one of expected success.
Listen to DeWolf Hopper reciting "Casey at the Bat"
Birthday greetings go out to Michael Bishop (11/12), author of Brittle Innings (Bantam: 1994). Bishop is an accomplished and award winning author and poet, primarily in the science fiction genre. His account of baseball in segregation-era Georgia, though, in Brittle Innings is outstanding. And, in my opinion, Brittle Innings is one of those works in baseball fiction that should be included in a Top 20 (if not Top 10) list of the genre. Bishop's writing style, his development of a wide range of different characters, and unique story line, make Brittle Innings one of my favorites. Bishop has often focused on humanity and the human condition, and Brittle Innings is no exception.
