Ring Lardner, about whom I wrote a couple days ago, was once criticized by F. Scott Fitzgerald for squandering his gifts writing about baseball, "a boy's game." To which the poet and critic John Berryman, rising for the defense, responded:
Yogi Berra is a boy? Lardner wrote about big leaguers largely: not boys, men, in danger every second of demotion to the minors or focuses of national attention. They were nowhere, and they will be nowhere. Here they are in continuous crisis, dramatized in the key plays Lardner describes so well.
I'm on Berryman's side of the argument, but it's a little weird that he begins with Yogi Berra and, in the next sentence, slides into big leaguers who are "in danger every second of demotion to the minors," which was not Berra's problem. It's the stars who are the focuses of national attention. The struggles of a borderline player to make it to the majors, or stay in the majors, are the focus of only his own attention. Though not in the spotlight, it's easy to imagine that the struggle can be a desperate one. In the minors, you are riding buses between mid-sized cities and, assuming no 7-figure signing bonus in the recent past, probably hustling for extra dollars in the off season. The minimum major league salary currently stands at $563,500, and getting vested in the players' pension plan is a pass to spend the rest of your life watching Law & Order reruns, if that's what you want. Which world you're in, as Crash Davis explains in Bull Durham, depends on whether over a week's worth of Triple-AAA games you go 7-for-25 or 8-for-25. It shouldn't be a mystery why, scanning lists of players busted for steroid use, there are perhaps 40 unfamiliar names for every established big leaguer.
The Henry Wiggen books of Mark Harris that I've enjoyed so much may be said to cover this territory. The first, The Southpaw (1953), is in some respects a kid's daydream of being a big league star: in his rookie season, the narrator-hero Henry Wiggen wins the Player of the Year Award while pitching his team, the New York Mammoths, to the World Series championship. The final volume, It Looked Like Forever (1979), begins with the Mammoths unceremoniously releasing Wiggen. This isn't altogether unexpected, as he is 39 and now wholly dependent upon guile, which will not take you as far as a good fast ball, but Wiggen had expected to be the Mammoths' next manager and then that doesn't happen either. So a double disappointment leaves him suddenly adrift after a long and successful career—19 years, to be exact, after his fairy tale rookie season. The novel's epigraph is the Robert Frost poem that has the lines:
No memory of having starred
Atones for later disregard.
Or keeps the end from being hard.
In the rest of the novel Wiggen has many adventures while, as the self-actualizers among us might say, "reinventing himself," though he doesn't talk that way and would probably make fun of people who do. It's my favorite of the four Wiggen books.
Between these bookends stand Bang the Drum Slowly (1956) and A Ticket for a Seamstitch (1957). The former was made into a Hollywood movie starring Robert DeNiro and is probably the best known of the Wiggen books. It concerns the last season of Bruce Pearson, the Mammoths' third-string catcher who is diagnosed with Hodgkin's Disease before it begins. Lack of star power is not the only thing that distinguishes Pearson from Lou Gehrig. He does not have a dedicated day at the home stadium in New York in which he declares himself "the luckiest man on the face of the earth," but he does become a slightly better ballplayer in the short time before his progressing disease sidelines him—because, facing his end, he pays more attention, starts noticing how pitchers retire him so easily, and where the fielders are positioned when he bats, and is able for a short time to mount a kind of rearguard action against habitual failure. You can see how this might be a little hokey, and sometimes maybe it is, but it also could be a lot worse. Pearson dies in the off season and of his teammates only his road roommate Wiggen, who is a pallbearer, attends the funeral. This is partly because several of the Mammoths are black and Pearson was a racial bigot. Bang the Drum is an adult book, not Pride of the Mammoths.
A Ticket for a Seamstitch is the briefest of the Wiggen novels and was published the year after Bang the Drum, circumstances that have made me wonder whether at least the skeleton of it might have been cut from the earlier novel. In Ticket, the sense of abundant, bounding life that characterizes the other Wiggen books subsides and what one notices instead is a carefully constructed narrative, the two strands of which converge for a July 4, 1956, doubleheader between Washington and the home team Mammoths in New York. That is the day that Wiggen, pitching the nightcap, tries to win his sixteenth consecutive decision, which, had he succeeded, would have tied Carl Hubbell's record. It's also the day that the seamstitch of the title, having completed a transcontinental odyssey, realizes her ambition of seeing a big-league game featuring the Mammoths and, more particularly, her favorite player, Henry Wiggen. I think the climax would have been more satisfying if the separate but converging strands had been more fully rendered. Regarding the seamstitch, one gets the idea that the events of her journey are meant to establish her as the picaresque heroine of an American road novel. But we don't see enough of her. She has too few adventures and never becomes a vivid character. The situation is similar with the Mammoths and Wiggen's mounting win streak.
Yet the book gives pleasure. It's theme is congenial, at least to me, and certainly not what you'd expect from a baseball novel. Though the seamstitch's original fan letter had been directed to the married Wiggen, his new roommate, Piney Woods, replies, begins a correspondence, eventually recommends the trip, and eagerly awaits her arrival on July 3. The narrative interest generated by Ticket isn't much more than: What does the seamstitch look like, and what will happen when Piney meets her in the flesh?
Turns out she looks nothing like Woods had imagined, and he therefore deserts, leaving her alone with Wiggen, who spends the evening before his big game showing her around Manhattan and conducting himself like a charming gentleman. Here he is as narrator, indulging himself in a rhetorical flourish on the subject of the seamstitch and her half of humanity:
She has nice skin. You might as well say that for her, and decent hair and eyes and nose, average, nothing below average and nothing too much above, just exactly the average kind of girl you bump into everywhere you turn, waitresses and photo retouchers and switchboard girls, girls on trains and girls on planes, girls in depots and restaurants and nightclubs, girls in banks and insurance offices and tax offices, girls in the newspaper business and girls in the book business, girls selling tickets to the movies and girls tearing them in 1/2 at the door, girls in Queen City and all the towns of the 4-State Mountain League, and girls in New York and Chicago, girls, girls, girls, everywhere I go. I guess I ought to know. I keep an eye peeled. There was nothing wrong with the girl for God's sake.
A brief backwards glance. In Bang the Drum Wiggen, on his way to Pearson's hospital room in Rochester, Minnesota, meets up with an attractive airline employee who plainly signals her availability. Tempted, he nevertheless gives her the slip, and then congratulates himself on not "chasing after every pair of big white teeth" whose path crosses his. There are other incidents more or less like this in the Wiggen chronicle. He is interested, observant, "keeps an eye peeled," but, in the end, never asserts himself in the modest way necessary. His woman is his wife, Holly. When in a phone conversation he mentions to her the seamstitch, she replies:
"Maybe she will do your income tax for you, and nurse your baby through her cold, and write your letters to your fans, and keep on top of insurance matters, and polish up the grammar in your books, and live alone all summer."
Wiggen asks what else is new. "Well," she said, "today I been repairing the furnace."
The novel thus places bleared scenes of matrimonial realism opposite the hot imaginings of Piney Woods and suggests that the wise man be happy with the former while abjuring the latter. Actually, more than "suggests": a moment before Woods bursts through a door with the seamstitch, one of the Mammoths, Red Traphagen, who is often in these novels the voice of wisdom, says, "Finally what Piney will find out is there is no place on earth like earth, and he will find a woman less than perfect, and if he loves her all he can, and she loves him, and their children, too, that will be the nearest he can expect to the moon."
Traphagen had to state the theme, as you wouldn't want to hear it from a 25-year-old who had won two World Series and twice been named Most Valuable Player.
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