In the Manifesto for this new venture, LongBallStories.com, I have suggested that at present there is a dearth of good reportage about baseball, in particular about the game on the field. This is a sad state of affairs for what has been a long and rewarding relationship between baseball and literary expression. While that relationship might be self-evident to thoughtful long-time baseball fans, I realize that newer fans might not be aware of it. Because part of my goal for LongBallStories.com is to provide the background and insight needed to enable new fans to appreciate the richness of the game, I thought it might be useful to review briefly the history of baseball as a source for literary and filmic expression.
In addition, as I mention in the Manifesto, besides daily game stories following the Blue Jays during the 2016 season, I will be posting from time to time essays, articles, and notes on various topics related to baseball that fall outside the rubric of the daily game story, under the heading “Articles and Ephemera”. I offer the following reflection on the interface between baseball, writing, and film, as the first post of “Articles and Ephemera”.
It has long been a given that baseball is the most literary of games. There are many reasons why this would be so. It is the only team game not ruled by a clock. It is the only team game, other than its English cousin, cricket, where everything that happens in the game must commence with a confrontation between a single player from each team facing one another, and where the specific outcome of each confrontation determines the further course of the action. It is the only game in which offensive stardom is achieved by being successful only one third of the time, and defensive stardom is achieved by superior deceptive ability as much or more than by superior talent.
There is, therefore, an inherent drama to every moment of every game, to the outcome of every game, and to the arc of a team’s season. It should be no surprise, then, that the game of baseball has been the source of so much fine writing over the years, not only in the reporting of the game itself, but in its fictional treatment. Baseball has also inspired many wonderful and well-loved films, produced by an industry that has long recognized its value as both setting and subject.
So, from the earliest days of Ernest Thayer’s “Casey at the Bat” to the little-known but beloved baseball fiction of Zane Grey, the American writer better known for his cowboy novels of the American West, to the mid-century literary brilliance of Bernard Malamud, and the gritty Americana of Mark Harris’ Henry Wiggins novels, to the more recent work of W.P. Kinsella of Shoeless Joe/Field of Dreams fame, and of The Brothers K, by David James Duncan, to the very contemporary achievement of Thad Harbach’s The Art of Fielding, it is clear that no other sport has provided the setting for such a great body of fine writing. In fact, this brief survey is by no means exhaustive, and only scratches the surface of a topic that deserves a major retrospective overview.
Then there is the equally fine non-fiction writing that has been produced both by working journalists covering the game , and former and current players who have revealed the inner culture of the sport in their work. We have been enlightened and entertained by Roger Kahn’s tribute to the beloved Brooklyn Dodgers of the early fifties, The Boys of Summer, by Lawrence S. Ritter’s rich examination of the early history of the game, The Glory of Their Time, Tom Boswell’s more recent reflective essays on the game collected into a series of works starting with Time Begins on Opening Day, and most recently by Michael Lewis’ study of what it takes to achieve success in the contemporary major leagues, Moneyball: the Art of Winning an Unfair Game.
Former and even current players have also added important works to the body of baseball literature. Of course, there had always been co-written or “as told to” books by ball players, which ranged from innocuous puff pieces to shockingly frank personal stories such as Fear Strikes Out, in which Red Sox outfielder Jimmy Piersall first explained the strange behaviour he had often exhibited on the field by chronicling his life-long battle with schizophrenia. Journeyman pitcher Jim Brosnan was the first to achieve attention as the actual author of his insider’s diaries of two seasons, The Long Season and Pennant Race, works in which he focussed on the thoughts and feelings of players as they move through the season, Ten years later, the much rowdier and more scandalous inside look at the lives of ordinary ballplayers, Jim Bouton’s Ball Four, and its sequel, I’m Glad You Didn’t Take it Personally , first detailed the author’s experiences playing for the Seattle Pilots in the only year of their existence, and then dealt with the aftermath and reaction to his first book. Naive baseball fans learned for the first time through Bouton’s work that bullpen pitchers, for example, are often more focussed on speculating about the sexual availability of certain attractive fans in the stands than on the action on the field.
Bowie Kuhn, the Commissioner of Major League Baseball at the time, famously demanded of Bouton that he release a statement that the book was fictional, or he would be banned from the league. Bouton refused, and Kuhn backed down on his request. Then there was the even more outrageous work of the Montreal Expos’ great pitcher, Bill Lee, in whose book, The Wrong Stuff, he claimed to have spent most of his career playing under the influence of marijuana. It was not for nothing that Lee, an outspoken left-wing commentator on various issues, was known throughout baseball as “the Spaceman”. Bill Lee has just announced his candidacy for the governorship of Vermont. Among his campaign platform policies are a plan to erase the Vermont/Quebec border, so that he can enroll every Vermonter in Quebec’s health care system, and a plan to spearhead the return of baseball to Montreal by raiding Tampa Bay of their Rays. Typically, he says that they can only play in Montreal if they adopt the name “X-Rays”, an ingenious reference to their heritage coming from Tampa, yet echoing the name of the beloved Expos. That’s Bill Lee for you.
A more recent trend has seen the publication of memoirs by active players that reveal frank details of their personal stories. Notable in this group is current Jays’ pitcher R.A. Dickey’s Wherever I Wind Up: My Quest for Truth, Authenticity and the Perfect Knuckleball, in which he reveals that he had been sexually abused as a child and has struggled with depression and suicidal thoughts at various times in his adult life.
Turning now to film, I have to make a rather firm distinction between grown-up movies that deal with the subject of baseball, and all the others, movies meant for children, silly fantasies, romanticized feel-good films, and the like. I do not propose to discuss any of the latter type of baseball films here, directed as it is toward the intersection between good literature and film, and baseball. So I apologize in advance to all of the fans of The Bad News Bears, Rookie of the Year, Major League, Tigertown, The Sandlot, For the Love of the Game, and all the films of their ilk. I leave it to someone who actually enjoys films like this to chronicle their history and influence.
One of the measures of the attraction of baseball stories for the film industry is the number of serious, well known actors who have devoted themselves to such projects. Such luminaries as Robert Redford in The Natural, Kevin Costner, Susan Sarandon, and Tim Robbins in Bull Durham, Costner, James Earl Jones, and Ray Liotta in Field of Dreams, Tom Hanks, Geena Davis and even Madonna in A League of Their Own, Robert DeNiro, and Michael Moriarty in the brilliant but half-forgotten Bang the Drum Slowly, my personal favourite, Anthony Perkins in Fear Strikes Out, Tommy Lee Jones as Ty Cobb in Cobb, John Cusack in auteur director John Sayles’ gritty period piece about the Black Sox Scandal, Eight Men Out, and Brad Pitt as Billy Beane in Moneyball, have all appeared to great recognition in significant films about baseball.
Films such as these have taken a number of different approaches to the game. There is the mythical magic realism of The Natural and Field of Dreams. Some are biographical in nature, but in no way starry-eyed hagiography, such as the disturbing examination of the very tortured nature of the greatest hitter in the game, Ty Cobb, in Cobb, the hopeful summation of the life-long mental illness of Jimmy Piersall in Fear Strikes Out. The latter film may be said to have been made too soon, because it left the impression that Piersall had succeeded in conquering his demons, whereas events subsequent to the release of the book and movie made it very clear that his problems were never really over. There is the bawdy adult comedy of Bull Durham, and the gentle tragicomedy of Bang the Drum Slowly. Among films dealing with important events or topics in baseball history, there is the romantic tribute to the All American Girls Professional Baseball League, A League of Their Own, juxtaposed to the sepia tones of Eight Men Out, which treats the infamous 1919 World Series gambling scandal as an episode in American labour and social history.
In a category of its own, and perhaps pointing to a new direction in baseball movies, is the Aaron Sorkin project, Moneyball, based on the Michael Lewis book, which examines the attempt to build a winning team on the cheap in Oakland through the use of advanced analytics. A very recent movie, also notable for its A-list stars, Trouble with the Curve, in which Clint Eastwood plays an old-school baseball scout who is losing his sight, wouldn’t be included in this discussion on its merits alone, as being more than a little too lightweight and sentimental. However, what it does do is provide another consideration of the current tug-of-war going on in baseball between the traditionalists and the stats wizards. In this case, with Eastwood representing the old guard, you know how it’s going to turn out.
Finally, there is the movie musical Damn Yankees, adapted from the Broadway show of the same name, which if nothing else gave the world a number of familiar and well known show tunes, including “Whatever Lola Wants”, “You Gotta Have Heart”, and “Shoeless Joe from Hannibal Mo”. In an evolution of a story that could probably only have happened in mid-century America, Damn Yankees is based on the fantasy novel The Year the Yankees Lost the Pennant, written by the appropriately named Douglass Wallop. Wallop, in his turn, had adapted the Faustian legend and turned it into a baseball fantasy. This is not such a far-fetched notion: if you were a fan of the hapless Washington Senators in the nineteen fifties, and the Devil offered you your heart’s desire in return for your immortal soul, untold riches and fame might not be the first thing that springs to your mind. Damn Yankees is probably not a baseball movie for grownups either, but that’s okay, because when I first saw it, and waited breathlessly to find out whether Joe Boyd, returned by the treacherous Mr. Scratch to his dumpy middle-aged self, would beat the throw to the plate anyway, and give the pennant to his beloved Nats, I wasn’t a grownup yet either. And even as a kid, I could appreciate the delicious irony of the final moment of the story: for all his scheming, Mr. Scratch, the devil who loved the Yankees, could not influence an umpire’s call at the plate.
To end on a topic that brings us back to the beginning of this piece, anyone considering the impact of baseball on film can’t help but be struck by the number of now-immortal lines that have come to us through baseball movies, reaffirming yet again the richness of the literary tradition of baseball. What baseball fan among us doesn’t have a flash of instant recognition on hearing such lines as “If you build it, they will come”, and “I’m the player to be named later”, and “There’s no crying in baseball”, and my personal favourite, delivered by a very young Robert De Niro as catcher Bruce Pearson to Henry Wiggins, his starting pitcher, as he begins to confront the fact that he is going to die of cancer: “Arthur, I got a shit deal”. If you don’t know why Pearson calls Wiggins “Arthur” when his name is “Henry”, you need to read the book or watch the movie. Better still, do both. You won’t regret it.
So there you have it. If you take this piece as a guide to some remedial reading and watching, and at the end of your immersion in the literary and filmic art of baseball, you are still not convinced that baseball is the most literary of games, then you either don’t like baseball, or don’t like literature.
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