The two men sat on stools at the tavern, eyes on the television set above the bar. The Cubs were playing the St Louis Cardinals. It was last Sunday night, opening day of a new Major League Baseball season, and a few minutes before the game began one of the men asked, “Like that new scoreboard?” to which the other replied, “I hate it. But, who knows, maybe it will help … somehow.”
And so it began in similar fashion across the country. The start of every season — and these two gray-haired men had seen more than their fair share — is always filled with hopes for the future, and so this night it was not surprising to hear one of the men say, “I’ve got a good feeling. This year is it,” to which the other responded, “You’ve had that same feeling for 28 years.”
Baseball can bring out the best and worst in barflies and in fans: The best being blind faith, and the worst being the desire to start silly arguments.
Opening day is also a time of involuntary reflection as the mind fills with images of seasons past, memories that often come in black and white, and some that come from words.
Baseball holds a special place for many of us and long has. When it was relatively new, poet Walt Whitman observed: “I see great things in baseball. It’s our game — the American game.”
He could never have imagined how many writers would be drawn to “our game” in newspapers, magazines and in books. Think of how durable early poems have proven: “Casey at the Bat” by Ernest Thayer (1888) and “Tinker to Evers to Chance” by Franklin Pierce Adams (1910).
For my money the greatest baseball novel is Bernard Malamud’s “The Natural” (1952), not to be confused with Robert Redford’s “The Natural” in 1984. In the nonfiction world I have always enjoyed, re-read every season, John Updike in The New Yorker on Ted Williams hitting a home run in his last at-bat in Fenway Park in 1960. It’s titled “Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu” and can be had at http://nyr.kr/Yg7pOS.
No other sport — and love is not a sport — has generated so many words as baseball, and with the arrival of the Internet that flow became a torrent.
James Finn Garner and Stuart Shea are the proprietors of Bardball. They came up with the idea in 2007 — “reviving the art of baseball doggerel” — and their website has been a lively cyberstop.
At bardball.com you can find hundreds of poems about teams, players, history, scandal, fans, ballparks and other topics in poetic forms that include haiku, sonnets, song lyrics, limericks and free verse. The quality varies, of course, but all teams are accounted for: the White Sox are featured in 108 poems and the Cubs 182. The New York Yankees claim the most with 208, while the poor Los Angeles Angels have accumulated a measly 24.
Garner is the author of the best-selling “Politically Correct Bedtime Stories” and other good books. Shea has written the fine “Wrigley Field: The Unauthorized Biography.” Baseball fans both, they have been their site’s most prolific providers, with 175 and 234 entries, respectively.
“Beginning in our second season, we’ve never found ourselves pressed for material,” Garner said. “What’s most surprising is the array of material we’ve received. We have professors from Carnegie Mellon, CUNY and Central Michigan who submit regularly but also grade school students and grandmothers. Once we received something over the transom from a man named George Bowering. I was shocked when an Internet search told me he had been the first Parliamentary poet laureate of Canada.
“We avoid cosmic highfalutin importance and stick with subjects like the previous night’s blown save or the price of beer. But we do doggerel, not poetry. We also post song parodies and videos. We are profound only by accident at Bardball. There’s enough stuffy bloviage written about baseball already.”
John Schulian is not a poet in the conventional sense. A former sports columnist here with the Daily News and Sun-Times, he later wrote for the Philadelphia Daily News and then went on to success in Hollywood. He has lived there for some time but has kept his pen in sports, producing stories for magazines, editing books (recently “Football: Great Writing about the National Sport”) and gathering his own work between covers (“Sometimes They Even Shook Your Hand: Portraits of Champions Who Walked Among Us.”)
Asked about his favorite sports book, he mentioned, surprisingly, a biography of Hank Sauer.
“Of course there are going to be people out there who don’t know that Sauer was the National League’s most valuable player in 1952, or that he hit 37 home runs for the woeful Cubs that season, or that the adoring denizens of Wrigley Field’s left-field bleachers used to shower him with bags of his favorite chewing tobacco,” he said. “All of which is true. I’m not making this up. Nor am I making it up when I tell you about checking Sauer’s biography out of the public library in the LA suburb where I lived when I was 10 years old.”
He goes on to mention Jim Brosnan’s “The Long Season” and Jim Bouton’s “Ball Four.” He also likes Bill Veeck’s “Veeck as in Wreck,” adding that “contemporary team owners tend to be too craven to do something as soulful as write a book.”
“In the wake of all the nonfiction, the fiction that baseball has inspired seems downright puny,” he said. But he does have a few favorites. He, too, admires “The Natural,” as well as Ring Lardner’s “You Know Me Al” and Robert Coover’s “The Universal Baseball Association Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Proprietor.”
“Coover’s book continues to sail below the radar,” Schulian said. “He tapped into something with his introverted, board game-loving protagonist. If he wrote a similar book today, it would be built on video games bearing MLB’s seal of approval. That just makes me sad.”
Schulian will have more to say 6 p.m. Monday at the Newberry Library, 60 W. Walton St., when he is joined by Lester Munson for a conversation about the relationship between baseball and writing.
That’s a lot to handle, but these boys of summer are ready.
Munson is a senior writer/legal analyst at ESPN and ESPN.com and a frequent guest on radio and TV. If you haven’t seen him on WTTW’s “Chicago Tonight,” you haven’t been watching.
Previously a longtime staff member of Sports Illustrated, he has for decades covered the increasingly dark side of sports: its crimes and scandals, money and violence, drugs and sex, and most recently the murder trial of former New England Patriots tight end Aaron Hernandez.
“There can be no better evidence of the link between literature and baseball than the fact that Major League Baseball hired as its commissioner A. Bartlett Giamatti (in 1989), a scholar of Renaissance literature and the former president of Yale,” Munson said.
He then mentioned Giamatti’s introduction to the second volume of “The Armchair Book of Baseball,” which includes this: “Genteel in its American origins, proletarian in its development, egalitarian in its demands and appeal, effortless in its adaptation to nature, raucous, hard-nosed, and glamorous as a profession, expanding with the country like fingers unfolding from a fist, image of a lost past, evergreen reminder of America’s best promises, baseball fitted and still fits America. It fits so well because it embodies the interplay of individual and group that we love and because it conserves our longing for the rule of law while licensing our resentment of lawgivers.”
“Can you imagine any other sport hiring a commissioner like Giamatti?” said Munson. He then adds this: “There has been writing nearly as great as baseball writing in horse racing and in boxing, but only baseball can produce a sentence like Thomas Boswell’s statement about spring training: ‘Time begins when pitchers and catchers report.'”
You would have a hard time finding two more intelligent, incisive and engaging people than Munson and Schulian, and their conversation is free and open to the public. It also provides a perfect pre-game to the 7:05 p.m. first pitch for the Cubs against the Reds at Wrigley.
“After Hours With Rick Kogan” airs 9-11 p.m. Sundays on WGN-AM 720.
Twitter @rickkogan
