Green Thoughts

By Paul Gray

FIELDER'S CHOICE Edited by Jerome Holtzman Harcourt Brace Jovanovich 395 pages; $12.95

A spasmodic myth has it that writing is like prizefighting. Contemporary subscribers to the pugilistic analogy include Norman Mailer, a few markedly inferior knuckle-typers and the odd belligerent who would rather fight than think. If this macho conceit helps anyone get through the night or his work, fine. But the sport that most truly engages American writers was, is and probably will always be baseball. This anthology of 27 pieces of baseball fiction, the first such collection in 30 years, demonstrates the affinity and raises a question: Why have so many authors felt the urge to make up stories about this game?

The simplest answer rests in history.

Those under 30 may not realize it, but there was an age when interest in professional team sports meant baseball, period. Pro football, basketball and hockey were in varying stages of infancy or awkward adolescence. The date was still far in the future when ABC Sports would rush in a TV camera crew every time three starlets got up on skateboards. Baseball reigned coast-to-river, with St. Louis as its Western outpost, but the entire country knew it as the only game in town.

This may explain why such crafty old twirlers as Ring Lardner, James Thurber, Damon Runyon and P.G. Wodehouse spun tales about the sport. Usually they played it for laughs. Lardner's Alibi Ike dealt with a peculiar rookie, using comic vernacular: "I've heard infielders complain of a sore arm after heavin' one into the stand, and I've saw outfielders tooken sick with a dizzy spell when they've misjudged a fly ball. But this baby can't even go to bed without apologizin', and I bet he excuses himself to the razor when he gets ready to shave." Runyon's patented style, stilted formality mixed with slang, shone to good effect in Baseball Hattie: "There she is, as large as life, and in fact twenty pounds larger." In The Pitcher and the Plutocrat, Wodehouse turned the game into a society romp; a newly impoverished young man gets the girl and her father's millions by starring for the New York Giants.

Though newer sports gained popularity, baseball remained the preference of succeeding generations of writers, including Bernard Malamud, Irwin Shaw, Mark Harris and Philip Roth. The reason seems clear. Baseball is the most solitary of team endeavors. Nobody blocks for the batter or sets picks for the pitcher. A double-play combination may radiate exquisite timing and cooperation, but the process of getting two runners out is still linear, a matter of performing one delicate, discrete act after another. Small wonder that writers, sitting alone and laboriously putting words to gether, respond sympathetically to both putouts and errors. In writing and base ball, the risk of embarrassment is high and the distance between competence and true distinction enormous. Most American children are taught English, and kids on the sand lot learn baseball's vocabulary of moves. The hard part is turning such knowledge into art.

Sometimes the game has inspired an author's best work. In Harris' Bang the Drum Slowly, the relentless, impersonal demands of a tight pennant race counterbalance the emotions stirred by a third-string catcher's lingering, fatal illness.

Baseball contests can be totally re-created from statistics, a fact played with in Rob ert Coover's eerie The Universal Baseball Association, Inc. An obsessed loner builds an entire league, a cerebral world, through the use of imaginary statistics governed by the roll of dice.

The real-life legends that have collected around the game and its heroes would seem to leave little room for made-up stories, but this anthology proves otherwise. Baseball fact and fiction do not compete; there is plenty of room for both on the grassy, sun-drenched diamond that fans carry around in their heads. There, Babe Ruth can play on, perhaps coming to bat in the course of a long winter against the fireballing Gil Gamesh, an imaginary Babylonian pitcher in Roth's The Great American Novel. In Voices of a Summer Day, Irwin Shaw captures the eternal present tense that baseball conveys: "The generations circled the bases, the dust rose for forty years as runners slid from third, dead boys hit doubles, famous men made errors at shortstop, forgotten friends tapped the clay from their spikes with their bats as they stepped into the batter's box . . ." If real exploits have become fables, the opposite has sometimes happened too. In You Could Look It Up, Thurber imagines a manager so desperate to break his team's losing streak that he sends a midget named Pearl du Monville up to the plate to draw a base on balls.

"You got to admit," the narrator says, "it was the strangest setup in a ball game since the players cut off their beards and begun wearin' gloves." Some ten years later Eddie Gaedel, who was 43 inches tall, went to bat for the St. Louis Browns.

Editor Jerome Holtzman, a baseball writer for the Chicago Sun Times, has found the familiar chestnuts, excerpted sensibly from books like Malamud's The Natural and William Brashler's The Bin go Long Traveling All-Stars and Motor Kings, and turned up a surprise or two, including a tense softball game in Chaim Potok's The Chosen. The only glaring omission is Roger Angell's Over My Head, a funny double-reverse on George Plimpton, about a pitcher limbering up for his tryout as a writer. Though they can never get enough, baseball fans are grateful for what is given, and Holtzman is generous in the extreme. The book is here, a new season is approaching, the green thoughts in a green shade continue.

Paul Gray

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