Reliever Fathers Playing Catch with Sons

By Stefan Kanfer

Overweight and out of shape, he enters the Pittsburgh Pirates training camp and suits up. Facing a pitching machine, he writes, "I take a practice swing. It's as if I dropped my pants in an old burlesque house--screams of laughter, hoots, catcalls." In the field, "my body already hurts so much I do not even care. I embrace my wounds. I am St. Sebastian." He also answers to another name. A boy holds out an autograph book and later shows his grandfather the fat player's signature. The old man examines it knowledgeably: "Sure, I know him. He used to catch for the Pirates, years ago."

No he didn't. He never caught for anyone. By his own admission, Poet Donald Hall (Kicking the Leaves, The Toy Bone), is the nonpareil indoorsman. In school, when he went out for the baseball team, "they didn't cut me, they just laughed at me." He even dropped fly balls in the stands. Yet he kept up with the sport, attracted by "an endless game of repeated summers, joining the long generations of all the fathers and all the sons."

But we have been here before. George Plimpton humiliated himself with the pros. Roger Angell has described a pitcher standing on a "hill like (a) sunstruck archaeologist at Knossos." John Updike, Ring Lardner, Philip Roth, Mark Harris, Robert Coover and other "serious" writers have regarded baseball as a metaphor for the human predicament. What can a puffing 56- year-old add to the overloaded shelf of belles lettres on the summer game?

Enough to make Fathers Playing Catch with Sons an off-season refreshment. Hall is a bullpen man, not a starter. He is best over a short distance, writing verses about oldtimers' day ("On a green field/ we observe the ruin/ of even the bravest body") or recalling poets devoted to baseball. The game, he reveals, is not always an ennobling or enlightening muse. Walt Whitman covered some contests for the Brooklyn Eagle and in old age asked a friend if it was true that "the fellow who pitches the ball aims to pitch it in such a way the batter cannot hit it?" Marianne Moore, the doyenne of 20th century American poets, was reduced to doggerel when she contemplated the old Dodgers: "Ralph Branca has Preacher Roe's number: recall?/ and there's Don Bessent, he can really fire the ball."

In fact, the best lines in this idiosyncratic little work are not from writers but from players, recollected over some four decades. Asked how he could look forward to playing a doubleheader in midsummer heat, Joe DiMaggio replies, "Well, maybe somebody never saw me before." Umpire Tom Gorman, distracted by Yogi Berra's wagging tongue, is asked, "Hello, Tom, how's the family?" Gorman: "They died last night. Get in there and hit." Pitcher Early Wynn defends his right to knock down anyone holding a bat. "Suppose it was your own mother," demands a listener. Replies Wynn: "Mother was a pretty good curve-ball hitter."

Little about Fathers Playing Catch with Sons is new, but then, little about baseball is new. That constitutes its charm: the repetition of timeless patterns, refreshed by talent, energy and humor. Game-starved aficionados, it is less than two months to opening day. Until then it is well to remember the name and work of the old knuckleballer Donald Hall. How do you spell relief?