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"
Pete Fromm, author of How This All Started (Picador: 2000), celebrates a birthday today. Fromm is a four-time winner of the Pacific Northwest Writers Award, including one for How This All Started.
Fromm is also a prolific writer of short stories (over 100). He currently is on the faculty at Pacific University.
Sandy Koufax sat out a World Series game instead of working on Yom Kippur. He did, however pitch regularly on the Sabbath during the season. Matti Sternweiss, the central character in Allen Hoffman's Big League Dreams (Abbeville Press: 1997) does not have quite that level of religious conviction when we are introduced to him at the beginning of the novel. An immigrant from Poland, Matti - or "Sirdy" as he's known in the baseball world - has grown up with baseball and sees a clear separation between the two. He has always determined what he wanted to do and then gone and done it.
Big League Dreams is set in the summer of 1920, amid the swirling rumors and accusations of gambling and game-fixing over the previous Fall's World Series between the Chicago White Sox and the Cincinnati Reds. Sternweiss is the starting catcher for the mediocre St. Louis Browns. We are reminded that players of that era worked basically as indentured servants to team owners; that it was the owners who raked in the profits and "didn't share." And for Matti, even though he has proven he is a good field manager (he is guiding two of his pitchers toward 20-game winning seasons), he knows that he will not reap any monetary rewards for his efforts. ("Who but [the manager] really knew how important Matti was to the club's success?")
Hoffman's Sternweiss, while professing no superstitions or adherence to religious rituals, is haunted by images of a recent mailplane crash in New Jersey. He is obsessed with images of the crushed fuselage, and envelopes of mail fluttering about in the empty field where the plane crashed. This is a recurring image in Matti's mind and Hoffman skillfully reveals it for what it is: a symbol of lost faith.
It's his loss of faith in his religion, but also in himself, and his fellow man, that moves Matti to consider involving himself in a gambling fix. He wants to earn enough money to marry his sweetheart (who was the nurse over his father's bedside when he died). He knows that his desire to someday be a manager will likely not happen (likely because he is Jewish). But a huge payoff could lead him to a better life.
Matti, though, must weigh the risks with the rewards: The risk of banishment from baseball versus the reward of marriage to the woman he loves. But when his plan is uncovered, he is taken before the leader of the small immigrant Jewish community from which Matti lives on the outskirts. Because many of the gamblers associated with the growing Black Sox scandal are Jews, if a Jewish player is discovered to have fixed a game it could result in a great backlash against the religion, as a whole. Will Matti pursue the monetary rewards, or be pointed in the right direction by the leader of his synagogue? He faces this decision as a game against Detroit and its star player, Ty Cobb, approaches.
Matti's story is a morality tale of temptation and redemption. Money and fame compete with and against each other. Matti knows he is a good player - and his efforts are noticed by the fans and press. Yet he knows his career is limited because of factors outside of his control. Matti eventually must decide whether his life's path is one he can control or rely on the faith he's seemingly lost to take him where he is destined.
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!
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.
