My Thoughts on Nicholas Dawidoff’s Edits to Stephen Jay Gould’s Review of Michael Seidel’s Book

As I start writing this post, I’m about halfway through Stephen Jay Gould’s posthumous collection of baseball writings, Triumph and Tragedy in Mudville: A Lifelong Passion for Baseball (W. W. Norton, 2003). At this point the weaknesses of the book have become quite apparent to me: Gould has a habit a reusing the same anecdotes across multiple pieces, the length restrictions of newspaper columns prevent him from fully developing ideas, and the introductory memoir—in fairness, written during the author’s terminal illness—suffers from incredibly stilted syntax.

Nonetheless, Triumph and Tragedy in Mudville shines with Gould’s amateur passion for baseball; I feel the pleasure he gets in taking a break from paleontology to wax rhapsodic about his favorite players. It doesn’t quite work when read straight through, but this seems like a pleasant book to dip into and out of for a few minutes at a time.

I first became aware of Gould’s baseball writing while I was preparing to teach a class on sports literature (something that, in a shamefully Gouldian fashion, I’ve mentioned several times on this blog). His essay on DiMaggio’s 56-game hitting streak during the 1941 season, entitled “The Streak of Streaks,” was included in one of my main source books for the class, Baseball: A Literary Anthology (edited by Nicholas Dawidoff). The essay is among the highlights in Dawidoff’s anthology, and it was one of the last pieces I cut from my syllabus before I had to submit it for approval.

Gould’s focus in “The Streak of Streaks” is on probability, specifically how people have difficulty analyzing things like hitting streaks in probabilistic terms. He cites Amos Tversky’s research on shooting streaks in basketball, which found that the “hot hand” phenomenon doesn’t actually exist: players who make a basket on one shot are no more likely to hit on the next, and players’ “hot” streaks can be predicted entirely based on their overall shooting percentages. Gould doesn’t bring up this research to denigrate athletes’ accomplishments, though. In fact, it serves as the context in which to celebrate DiMaggio’s hitting streak. Gould also cites Ed Purcell’s research on baseball streaks and slumps, and Purcell found that DiMaggio’s hitting streak was the “one sequence so many standard deviations above the expected distribution that it should not have occurred at all” (p. 177).

That revelation honestly shocked me when I first read it, as I had regarded DiMaggio’s streak record as a vulnerable one. Beating it would be mighty difficult, yes, but surely a batter just would need to get “hot” for nine or ten weeks. But if, as Purcell found, baseball would need 52 career .350 hitters for even a 50-game hitting streak to be likely (actual number of such hitters: 3), then DiMaggio’s accomplishment is truly incredible. In his characteristically statistical way, Gould finds a way to place his baseball hero into the realm of the divine. As baseball has become ever more analytic, as launch angles and exit velocities and wins above replacement increasingly dominate discussions of the sport, the fact that DiMaggio’s hitting streak is nigh inexplicable becomes all the more important to me: there is still mystery in this weird little game.

I had gone back to Dawidoff’s anthology to re-read “The Streak of Streaks” multiple times. It was only when I got to that essay in Triumph and Tragedy in Mudville, however, that I learned that the essay was originally a book review. Specifically, “The Streak of Streaks” reviews Michael Seidel’s book Streak: Joe DiMaggio and the Summer of ’41, which purports to cover precisely that. Had I read the acknowledgments section of Dawidoff’s anthology, which mentions that the review portions of the essay had been omitted, this would not have been a surprise to me. But alas I had not, and I could not help but think: why would Dawidoff choose to cut such a significant chunk of the original piece?

It seems especially strange to make such an edit in a book called Baseball: A Literary Anthology, as Gould’s original review makes a point of placing Seidel’s book in the context of baseball’s literary history. Gould sees Streak as part of a trend of “serious, scholarly books treating baseball as something that might even get you tenure at a major university (as something other than an athletic coach)” (pp. 178-179). It’s as though Gould went out of his way to justify Dawidoff’s efforts over a decade before the anthology came out.

One may argue that removing the book review passages from the “The Streak of Streaks” makes the piece more accessible for general audiences, who are statistically unlikely to have read, or even have heard of, Seidel’s book. Better to leave the intertextual elements for the Gould completionists, no? But if that were indeed the goal, Dawidoff doesn’t fully commit to it, because Gould’s review is also a response to an article by John Holway called “A Little Help from his Friends: Hits or Hype in ’41,” which ran in a 1987 issue of Sport Heritage. Readers probably have as much knowledge of Holway’s article as they do of Seidel’s book—less, even, because Gould devotes less time to summarizing it.

Yet, having now read the original version of Gould’s essay, I do think that Dawidoff’s edits make the piece stronger. For one thing, the review portions include some rather self-indulgent quotations from Omar Khayyam and Alexander Pope, in an attempt to link sports streaks to our quest for meaning in a world dominated by chance. I appreciate the effort, but even as a baseball fan I find there’s something bathetic in Gould’s sincerity here. We are still talking about grown men playing a children’s game in oversized pajamas, and I’m not sure the subject can support a straight-faced digression on Absurdism.

More importantly, Gould’s discussion of probability with regards to DiMaggio’s hitting streak has little bearing on his review of Seidel’s book. Seidel, from how Gould describes his work, seems more interested in placing DiMaggio’s streak in the context of then-current events; Gould likens the book’s weaker passages to “reading old newspapers and placing the main events in order” (p. 179). The most Gould can do to make Seidel’s book relevant to his main point is to say that it “will help us to treasure DiMaggio’s achievement by bringing together the details of a genuine legend” (p. 181), which is about the vaguest praise possible. I do get the sense that Gould enjoyed Seidel’s book, but I get a stronger sense that Gould saw this review as an excuse to publish a different article that he was actually excited about writing.

For comparison, I would look at something like “The Cruelest Sport” by Joyce Carol Oates—which, coincidentally, did make the cut for my sports literature syllabus. “The Cruelest Sport” is a review of two books about boxing by Thomas Hauser, but it begins with a gripping discussion of the aesthetics and ethics the sport. Oates is simultaneously entranced and repulsed by the cruelty inherent to boxing. She spends the first six pages of that review exploring the tension between our humanitarian impulse that wants to abolish the deliberate violence of boxing and our spectator’s desire to see a satisfying, consciousness-crushing KO.

That tension is clearly what animates Oates to write that essay, but what makes “The Cruelest Sport” successful as a whole piece is that the opening discussion ties into the books that Oates is reviewing. The first is a biography of Muhammad Ali, an all-time great performer whose well-being boxing devastated; the second is an account of the grimy underbelly of the boxing establishment that belies the Las Vegas glitz surrounding the sport. Whereas Gould’s statistical discussion of DiMaggio’s hitting streak is at most tangential to the book he’s reviewing, Oates makes a persuasive case that her pet interest is central to the works before her. It’s true that someone like Dawidoff could easily excerpt those first six pages as a stand-alone essay, but they would not be improving the piece by subtracting from it.

It’s not as though I’m disappointed that Triumph and Tragedy in Mudville retained the review elements of “The Streak of Streaks”. That book is meant to be a compendium of Gould’s career work on baseball, so the need to accurately reflect his work ultimately trumps aesthetic considerations. Dawidoff’s anthology, meanwhile, is free of such requirements, and so it can tinker with pieces as much as it likes. There may inevitably be some hubris to that endeavor, but at least in this instance, it works out for the best.

I would love to hear your response to my thoughts on Nicholas Dawidoff’s edits to Stephen Jay Gould’s review of Michael Seidel’s book, if only to put as many brackets around this discussion as possible. What do you think about making cuts to essays for inclusion in anthologies? Do you have a favorite piece of baseball writing that you’re dying to share? Let me know in the comments!

If, on the other hand, you’d prefer to read more of my thoughts on Stephen Jay Gould’s work, I have a very old piece about his essay “Dr. Down’s Syndrome” that might interest you.

And as always, thanks for your time.

William Carlos Williams’s “[The crowd at the ball game]”: An Analysis

Here in the United States, baseball season is just around the corner. If you’ve been reading my blog for a while, you won’t be surprised to hear that I’m excited. In the past I’ve discussed the aesthetic qualities of baseball highlights, praised Álvaro Enrigue’s essay on baseball fandom, and even just mused on the experience of being at Yankee Stadium. On March 28, my beloved Yankees will host their first game of the season against the Baltimore Orioles. I alas will not be in the stands for that contest, but I can still experience that thrill vicariously, right?

After all, there is always poetry. This month’s poem, written by William Carlos Williams, is all about the experience of being at the ballpark, with all the messiness that goes with it. It’s called “[The crowd at the ball game],” which you can read at the Poetry Foundation website. Give it a look, and then we’ll start with some background info.

Poets have long been drawn to baseball as a subject, so it’s not exactly surprising that Williams dabbled in baseball writing. But David Ward, in an overview of baseball poetry published at the Smithsonian magazine website, suggests that Williams’s poem is a noteworthy piece within context of modernist poetry. Even though baseball has had significant influence on the American consciousness, modernist poets tended to ignore the game as a subject “because it was too associated with a romantic, or even sentimental, view of life.” That so prominent a modernist poet as Williams would choose baseball as a subject is thus surprising, though Ward laments that Williams is more interested in “the relationship between the crowd and the individual” than in the game itself, which is largely absent from the poem.

The opening lines present us with a thesis statement on the nature of the crowd, a direct account of why people have chosen to gather at the ballpark:

          The crowd at the ball game
          is moved uniformly

          by a spirit of uselessness
          which delights them— (lines 1-4)

The second stanza offers us the first surprise of the poem: the fact that the crowd can find the “uselessness” of watching a baseball game delightful. In Ward’s account, this is because baseball is “a time out from the hum-drum grind of daily work,” but I don’t find this answer satisfying. It might be a sensible response to James Wright’s “Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio,” which I’ve written about before. Wright’s poem is haunted by the imagery of the post-industrial Midwest, so of course in that poem sport functions as an escape from a laborious life. But there really are no such references to such work in Williams’s poem, so Ward’s analysis is purely speculative. I think we need to take Williams’s speaker more literally: the useless of the ball game is delightful not in contrast with something else, but in itself.

We might expect to find that delight in the action of the game, in the same way that the people in “Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio” find release in how the high school football players “grow suicidally beautiful / At the beginning of October / And gallop terribly against each other’s bodies” (lines 10-12). But Ward is correct in saying that baseball is not the actual subject of “[The crowd at the ball game].” The description of the game that the crowd is watching is hopelessly vague:

          all the exciting detail
          of the chase

          and the escape, the error
          the flash of genius— (5-8)

Compare this description of baseball to, say, Williams’s description of a fire engine in “The Great Figure” or a barnyard scene in “The Red Wheelbarrow”. Those poems are not exactly lush in their language, but they are precise in their details and remain evocative after multiple readings. But in “[The crowd at the ball game],” the words are inexact (“the chase / and the escape” from what?) and tend to lean on abstraction (“the flash of genius”); if we weren’t given the subject in the first line, I would never have guessed it from these stanzas.

This description is so uncharacteristic of Williams’s work that I can only conclude that it’s a deliberate irony: there is no “exciting detail” in the game itself, because that’s not where the excitement actually lies. The speaker may go on to tell us that these aspects of the game are “all to no end save beauty / the eternal” (9-10), but that’s only to set up the poem’s next twist: the crowd is the poem’s true site of beauty. The parallel is explicit in both form and content: “So in detail they, the crowd / are beautiful” (11-12). Williams’s choice to repeat the word “detail” and to reemphasize aesthetics with the word “beautiful” keeps the reader’s mind focused on the same ideas even as the subject shifts.

Granted, given how limp his description of the ball game is, this may also prime the reader for a further disappointment. While repeating “detail” and “beautiful” gives the poem’s argument cohesion, it also highlights how little has actually been said so far, how little detail and beauty we have encountered. And truth be told, there is little beauty to be found in the poem, at least in the conventional sense. The speaker says the crowd “is alive, venomous // it smiles grimly / its words cut” (14-16). It’s menacing, this crowd, although just how is unclear. Is this a harmless, playful fury, the sort that lies in the call to kill the umpire? Or is this a mob out for blood?

As we get more details of the crowd, its nature becomes both more worrisome and more ambiguous. The speaker highlights the diversity of people in the crowd, and how they relate to the greater collective:

          The flashy female with her
          mother, gets it—

          The Jew gets it straight—it
          is deadly, terrifying

          It is the Inquisition, the
         Revolution (17-22)

To paraphrase “The Red Wheelbarrow,” so much depends upon the meaning of “gets it”. One possibility is that the women and the Jew “get it” because they are the recipients of the crowd’s abuse, the people who the crowd’s “words cut”. In this interpretation, the diverse elements of the crowd are an unwelcome sight to the rest of it. Williams’s invocation of the Inquisition becomes rather loaded in this reading, as the Inquisition was an especially dark chapter in the history of antisemitism. To call the crowd “deadly, terrifying” in this context borders on understatement.

But there is another possible interpretation of “gets it,” and that’s to say that the women and the Jew understand the sentiment of the crowd and embrace it. They are included in the general passion; their words cut just as well, their smiles are just as grim. All members of the crowd are equal members in the Inquisition and the Revolution. You will note that this is still a rather sinister scenario, though at least the victims of the violence have been elided from the poem. In either case, we seem to be a long way from the sense of brotherhood one finds in “Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio.” Williams does not resolve this tension as the poem progresses. It is a tension that the reader must accept from start to finish.

But while the nature of the crowd remains ambiguous, the poem does develop the notion of beauty that Williams has in mind here. The speaker once again asserts that “beauty” can be found in this scene, but it’s not the sort that one can appreciate the way that one appreciates an artwork. This beauty “lives // day by day in them / idly” (24-26). This beauty is a potential that goes untapped the vast majority of the time, but can be unleashed in certain circumstances. (Ward may have overextended himself in linking this feeling to “the hum-drum grind of daily work,” but he was not completely off-base.) The occasion of the ball game allows something, specifically the passion of the inquisitor or the revolutionary, to express itself. It’s not for nothing that the speaker remarks on the time of year, as it connects the moment to something spiritual: “It is summer, it is the solstice” (29).

Broadly construed, both the spirituality of a solstice rite and the pastime of a baseball game are forms of play. Both occur in what the Dutch historian Johan Huizinga would call a “magic circle,” a metaphysical space where the ordinary rules of society are temporally suspended, whether for the purposes of law, religion, or entertainment. This goes back to the notion that the ball game has “a spirit of uselessness”: it happens outside the normal world. But just because it is useless does not make it worthless, in the same way that the “play” of ritual is still a serious matter. Just look at how Williams ends the poem:

          the crowd is

          cheering, the crowd is laughing
          in detail

          permanently, seriously
          without thought (30-34)

For as difficult as it is to figure out the nature of the crowd, for as difficult as it is to see what it is about baseball that makes this moment possible, for all of that—the sheer exuberance of the moment comes through strongly. Whatever the experience has done to the crowd, I believe the impact has been tremendous, that they have been “permanently, seriously” moved.

What are your thoughts on “[The crowd at the ball game]”? Do you have a poem or a story that puts you in the mood for baseball season? Then sound off in the comments below! If you enjoyed this deep dive into a poem, then you’ll be happy to know that I write one of these every month. Most recently I analyzed Tracy K. Smith’s found poem “Declaration,” so why don’t you start there and start exploring?

And as always, thanks for reading!

Five Fragments on a Picture of a Yankees Game

Yankee Stadium

I.

I took this picture on August 18, 2018, at approximately 1:09 p.m. EDT, from a seat in Section 107 of Yankee Stadium. This was not taken with the goal of capturing something, or the image of something, that I judged to have significant aesthetic value. It simply documents where I was when the photograph was taken. At any rate, I feel that I lack the skills a photographer requires to give what is effectively a landscape much meaning beyond it’s appearance. For the purposes of this blog post, this image is only the source for all subsequent fragments.

II.

The ostensible subject of the photograph is the ceremony held to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the 1998 New York Yankees, who won an MLB record 125 games combined between the regular season and the postseason en route to the club’s 24th World Series title. The team is technically within living memory for me, but I was five-years-old in 1998 and had not started following baseball yet. I have no memory of David Wells’s perfect game, or of Shane Spencer’s explosive September, or of Scott Brosius’s home run off Padres closer Trevor Hoffman. These events only exist for me as highlights on the YES Network, as anecdotes for radio play-by-play announcer John Sterling to recycle in-between pitches. That team is a part of history that, as a fan, I can claim, but only in the sense that, as a New Jerseyian, I can claim Washington’s victory at Trenton.

Absorbing a team’s history is, I feel, an under-appreciated part of sports fandom. Such study lacks the visceral appeal of watching a team in the present, or of listening to the yahoos yammering about them on sports talk radio, or of imagining the roster moves they might make as the deadline approaches. Those are the moments when the sentiments of hope and frustration and relief and so on are at their most intense beneath a fan’s skin. Box scores, encyclopedia entries, documentaries: these are intellectual pleasures, if “pleasure” is even the word for it. Yet what is the point of latching onto a uniform if not to connect with the community it represents, and the shared history that is so essential to it?

III.

If you look into the background of that photograph, you can make out the members of the 1998 Yankees milling about by the pitcher’s mound. You might gather from their distant appearance that we did not have a great view of the ceremony. In fact, we may have had the worst possible view of it in the whole stadium.

First, we were of course a fair ways away from the action, which is inevitable when one is sitting in the outfield seats. During a game, it’s not actually so bad, as when the game is in motion there is more information for one to perceive: the pitch, the check swing, the humpback liner into foul territory, the first base coach’s lunge out of danger. But during the ceremony, there was very little motion to speak of, just the slow approach of the athletes and the announcers talking into microphones. It’s not quite like observing a sculpture garden from an aircraft, but the feeling is similar.

You may be wondering why we didn’t just watch the ceremonies on the giant video feed on the scoreboard. Well, we couldn’t see that either. We were tucked under the second deck of outfield seats, which provided some cover from the rain that didn’t actually, come, but blocked our view of the scoreboard, or at least, the replay screen. Hell, we could barely see the TV screens playing the YES Network’s coverage of the event, because we happened to be directly underneath them. It was like watching a high school graduation from the third row of a movie theater: feasible, but bad for one’s muscles.

The obstructed view of the action is the trade-off one must make in exchange for seeing a sporting event live and in-person. One loses the variety of angles and vantage points that go into a television broadcast, that ensures the viewer at home can follow the action frame-by-frame. Can it be annoying? Certainly, at times (read the previous three paragraphs for proof). But what one gains by being there is more than just the aura of the actual experience. There’s a certain charm in not knowing whether Didi Gregorius got enough of the ball for a home run because of the mass of standing, taller fans in front of you, until you hear their buzzing become a roar and see, in your peripheral vision, Didi’s hustle become a trot. That’s the sensation one chases at a baseball game.

IV.

Moving to center-frame, you can see the right field foul pole. Foul poles are one of my favorite oddities of baseball, for despite their name they reside in fair territory. A batted ball that hits one of the poles on the fly is a home run, even if it brushes the outermost point of it. That point where they touch is all that counts.

During the game, from our vantage point, the foul pole did more than divide foul from fair. It erected a barrier between the pitcher on one side, and the batter, catcher, and umpire on the other. For an imperceptible instant, the pole would conceal the ball as it passed from the pitcher’s fingertips to the front edge of home plate. But I feel that on a symbolic level it revealed far more. That bright yellow division of mound and plate highlighted the distinction between the different disciplines of baseball. For the pitcher and the batter are only nominally playing the sport; they are dueling adversaries who at most speak different dialects of the same kinesthetic language. They even have separate living quarters during the game: the substitute hitters get the dugout, the relievers the bullpen. There are only so many Shohei Ohtanis in the world, and even he’s been a one-way player since his injury earlier this season.

V.

The part of the photograph that most interests me is a pure accident, something I didn’t notice until I looked through my gallery later on in the day: the fan in black standing by the foul pole, facing but turned away from the security agent positioned beyond the outfield fence. A deferred confrontation with authority.

I was halfheartedly thinking about such confrontation when my dad and I were entering Yankee Stadium, winding our way through the labyrinth of fencing separating us from the ticket-takers and metal detectors. We were moving at a rhythm and a speed reminiscent of airport security screenings, and so in one of my many failed attempts at acting like a stand-up comedian, I said to my dad, “It’s getting to the point where they won’t even let you say ‘Bronx Bombers’ at a ballgame.” I said this, of course, far from the ears of anyone who might do something about it. Even my subversive instincts are cowardly.

When we left the game, we passed through the same gate that we entered through, and by then the barricades had been removed, sent off to wherever it is that they’re stored. That’s honestly a more subversive occurrence: what was once erected may still be dismantled. Shame I didn’t think to comment on it at the time. I might have saved face with myself.

* * *

Thanks for reading! If you like this fragmentary style of reflection, then check out the previous installments in my occasional “X Fragments on Y” series: 13 Fragments on the 2017 National Book Festival and Four Fragments on Nothing.

Recommended Author: Álvaro Enrigue

Álvaro Enrigue first came to my attention while I was assembling materials for my sports literature course. I was looking for a strong piece of fiction to round out the week on tennis, and came across Pooja Makhijani’s list of recommended tennis books at Electric Literature. Both the brief plot description and the strikingly simple cover of Enrique’s novel Sudden Death (trans. Natasha Wimmers, Riverhead, 2016) immediately caught my eye, and as luck would have it the JHU library had a copy in its collection. I checked it out, and was soon transfixed.

Sudden Death is, by design, a difficult novel. The central action of Sudden Death is a fictional tennis match between the Spanish poet Quevedo and the Italian painter Caravaggio. Although, when I say “tennis,” I don’t mean the modern form of the game, the sort we associate with Roger Federer and Serena Williams, but rather the much older game of real tennis, which only passingly resembles the current version of the sport. A major challenge of the novel is figuring out the rules of real tennis; for example, serves had to bound off the roof of the spectator’s gallery to be valid. This fact makes the match itself difficult to follow, but also gives the proceedings the manic energy of a duel—which, we learn as the novel progresses, is exactly what this tennis match is.

But the duel between Quevedo and Caravaggio is really a mechanism for framing various digressions into history and politics, from the execution of Anne Boleyn to Spanish colonial administration in the Americas. It’s a novel that deliberately blurs the boundary between fact and fiction: presenting actual contemporary documents alongside fabricated ones, slowly stretching historical anecdotes before one starts questioning their veracity. For instance, it is true that Jean Rombaud was the executioner summoned from France to behead Anne Boleyn, but it is not true that he had tennis balls made from Anne Boleyn’s hair.

I will admit that, while I admire Sudden Death greatly, it’s a difficult novel to love. The research (and the “research”) can overwhelm the book at points, and the narration tends to distance the reader from the characters. It’s the sort of novel that will inspire you to write a thesis, but it’s not as likely to give you an emotionally transcendent experience. Fortunately, for those wanting a smidgen of sentiment with their stories, a new essay by Enrique will have you covered.

Recently published on ESPN’s website, Enrique’s latest piece explores his ever-changing relationship with baseball, from his childhood in Mexico, when he roots for the Cafeteros de Córdoba but can never see them play at their home park, to his adulthood in the United States, where he takes his son to as many Baltimore Orioles games as possible. While Enrique’s love of baseball never leaves him, what the game means to him evolves as he goes through life. It’s a wonderfully thoughtful exploration of sports fandom.

Though certainly not to the extent as in Sudden Death, history and politics play a role in his newest essay as well. His family’s support of the Cafeteros mark them as provincials in the more cosmopolitan Mexico City, and economic crises compel him to leave Mexico, and Mexican baseball, behind. But in this piece, personal reflections reign supreme, even when they take on some philosophical significance. Consider this passage on the sports fan’s greatest virtue, loyalty:

I think it’s impossible to change teams once one has made a decision: You can admire some generation of players or develop a deep respect or even some care for a franchise, but your team is your team because it becomes fixed in your brain at an age when small things are huge. Once, talking about soccer, the late Argentine writer Ricardo Piglia—an unbiased, philosophical, and quiet man—told me in an unexpected rapture of passion: “Only perverts change teams.”

Or take the essay’s conclusion, after Enrique and his son go to their last O’s game before the latter goes off to college:

Childhood is a planet with a population of one person, but on a very few lucky days, our memories and those of our children cross paths, like in an eclipse. That day I came out of Camden Yards understanding something that took me years to grasp: that loyalty to a team can be a two-direction road. We inherit objects of devotion from our parents, but sons and daughters leave a legacy for us too. The Coffee Drinkers stand untouched in the crystal box of my memory, but the Baltimore Orioles are my team. They are the unexpected bequest of my son.

Erudite and perceptive, bold and direct, Enrigue is a writer I’m glad to have found, and I eagerly await more of his work. I hope this short piece will encourage you to check him out, too.

If, after looking up Enrigue, you want more reading recommendations, I recently discussed Stephen King’s 1990 essay “Head Down,” which, coincidentally, is also about children and baseball.

The Hampden Horns: How Stephen King Finds the Uncomfortable in the Everyday

In an excerpt from America’s Dark Theologian: The Religious Imagination of Stephen King (NYU Press, 2018) recently reprinted over at Literary Hub, Douglas E. Cowan observes that King’s body of work, which encompasses a wide range of genres but not contemporary literary fiction, is often dismissed by the critical establishment a bit too easily. Setting aside simple matters of taste—critics are free not to enjoy King’s writing or his chosen genres—Cowan marvels that such critics don’t “seem to realize that many of King’s readers seek their escape in his sinister storyworlds precisely because of the plain, unremarkable, yet profoundly disturbing ‘us’ he presents.”

Let me begin with a confession: I’ve never read a Stephen King novel. He’s one of those writers I keep meaning to get to, and yet keep putting off. Still, I have little doubt regarding his ability to present the reader with a “plain, unremarkable, yet profoundly disturbing ‘us'” within the context of horror, fantasy, crime or what-have-you. Why? Because he manages to do just that in the one piece of his writing I have read, and that comes in the context of one of the most mundane subjects possible: youth baseball.

“Head Down,” originally published in the April 16, 1990 issue of The New Yorker (available, albeit paywalled, here) and later included in Nightmares and Dreamscapes (Viking, 1993), is an essay King wrote about the Bangor West Little League team—that is, his son’s team—which won the Maine state championship in 1989. It’s a well-written and empathetic piece about the 12-year-old boys who take the field and the middle-aged men who help organize the game. Indeed, as if to illustrate Cowan’s point about the reception of King’s work, when I mentioned “Head Down” to a former colleague a few weeks ago, he praised the essay and then cited it as evidence that King has “wasted his talent.”

So how does that haunting perceptiveness that Cowan finds in King’s work show up in an essay about middle-schoolers playing baseball?

Let’s set the scene.

Bangor West is on the road against Hampden, their arch-rival in the first half of the essay, the team they’ll later play against in the district final. It’s getting late in the game. Bangor West leads 2-0 in the fifth inning—Little League only plays six innings—when the wheels start coming off. Pitcher Matt Kinney hits a batter, and then second baseman Casey Kinney (no relation) boots what should be a double play ball, freezing up out of fear he’ll get stung in the face. The coaches try to calm the team down, but then this long passage happens:

Casey begins to relax, begins to get back into the game, and then, beyond the outfield fences, the Hampden Horns begin to blow. Some of them belong to late-model cars—Toyotas and Hondas and snappy little Dodge Colts with U.S. OUT OF CENTRAL AMERICA and SPLIT WOOD NOT ATOMS stickers on the bumpers. But most of the Hampden Horns reside within older cars and pick-up trucks. Many of the pick-ups have rusty doors, FM converters wired up beneath the dashboards, and Leer camper caps built over the truck beds. Who is inside these vehicles, blowing the horns? No one seems to know—not for sure. They are not the parents or relatives of the Hampden players; the parents and relatives (plus a generous complement of ice-cream-smeared little brothers and sisters) are filling the bleachers and lining the fence on the third-base side of the diamond, where the Hampden dugout is. They may be local guys just off work—guys who have stopped to watch some of the game before having a few brewskis at the VFW hall next door—or they may be the ghosts of Hampden Little Leaguers Past, hungry for that long-denied State Championship flag. It seems at least possible; there is something both eerie and inevitable about the Hampden Horns. They toot in harmony—high horns, low horns, a few foghorns powered by dying batteries. Several Bangor West players look uneasily back toward the sound.

For me, this paragraph is where “Head Down” goes from merely interesting to engrossing. Just considered in isolation, the prose here sparkles: the perfectly chosen details for the trucks, the dashed-off asides that stretch on and on, the question halfway through the reader didn’t know needed asking, etc. And to end the paragraph with the main kids looking on is just so ominous. If King applies this same level of craft to rabid dogs and rabid fans, then I want in.

The Hampden Horns, these mysterious and passionate fans, are a striking image in themselves, but when considered in context they approach the “profoundly disturbing.” After all, what kicks them into gear is a rally born of children suffering. There’s the hit batsman, which hurts the hitter’s body and the pitcher’s psyche, and the fielding error, which King describes as “an act of naked self-preservation.” The Hampden Horns sound like a fun group on paper, but are we comfortable with their antics when we know the source of inspiration? They’re really just an exaggerated example of how sports fandom works, right? I know the Yankees fan in me sure gets dark pleasure from watching that grounder skip beneath Bill Buckner’s glove.

What’s more, King doesn’t pass these people off as pure others. Their origins are unknown, sure, but King tries his best to imagine them within the local community, as familiar figures in an unfamiliar context. And the cultural signifiers he finds on their trucks are telling. The Hampden Horns are not reducible to a single stereotype, with the red-blooded sharing parking spaces with the latter-day hippies. Neither experiencing a war nor opposing it makes one immune to cheering children’s mistakes. The more I think about them, the more the Hampden Horns become both human, and menacing.

In sum: it may well be that Stephen King can find the uncomfortable aspects of humanity in a fantastical environment. But “Head Down” shows he’s capable of finding such darkness in the actual world as well.

If, instead of whetting your appetite for Stephen King, I’ve made you crave some more baseball writing, you may want to check out my recommended readings in sports literature, inspired by a short course I taught on the subject.

Recommended Readings in Sports Literature

I’ve recently finished teaching an intersession course here at Johns Hopkins—that is, a three-week course, held during the period between winter break and the start of the spring semester, on a topic of my choosing. As such, I’ve spent most of January thinking about the literature of sports, and how various writers manage to make the subject compelling to a general audience.

Speaking as someone who loves sports, someone who organizes dinner plans and reading schedules around “the game tonight,” I often find written descriptions of sporting events rather dull. I’ll read newspaper recaps or student stories about some athletic contest, and my eyes will start glazing over the text immediately. As a reader, I want more than a litany of individual events. I want an actual narrative, or an argument, or something musical.

As such, most of the pieces I selected for the syllabus take an indirect approach to sports. Rather than focusing on the outcome of the game—the thing we care about when watching sports—they tend to emphasize the beauty inherent in athletic excellence, or the personal significance that the sport holds for the characters, or what the sport tells us about society. Such approaches are not just more creative than the play-by-play method, but are also more appealing to a reader who doesn’t care about sports but still appreciates good writing.

What follows are a series of pieces from my syllabus that my students seemed to respond to the most. They all either provoked interesting discussions during class, or had a clear influence on their own creative efforts. Each of these works, I believe, tells us something about how successful sports writing functions.

“Analysis of Baseball” by May Swenson (link here)

May Swenson’s poem “Analysis of Baseball” breaks the title game down to its constituent parts, down to the people and equipment necessary for it to occur. That sounds like the driest poem in history, but it’s a blast to read because Swenson privileges sound above all else. The poem’s paratactic phrasing, insistent repetition and constant rhyming results in a work that is quite playful coming off the tongue. Consider the following excerpt:

Bat waits
for ball
to mate.
Ball hates
to take bat’s
bait. Ball
flirts, bat’s
late, don’t
keep the date. (lines 17-25)

Obviously we can see the heavy alliteration and rhyme, which would make for a sonically dense poem to begin with. But also consider how the enjambment creates tiny pauses right as we learn the pitch has fooled the batter. Just as the pitcher has played his foe like a fiddle, Swenson has the reader right where she wants them.

On the first day of class, I had my students write imitations of the various baseball poems we discussed, and “Analysis of Baseball” was the most popular model. Conceptually it lends itself to that exercise well, and it was quite fun to hear what happened when students allowed themselves to chase the sound while describing the sport of their choosing.

“Body and Soul” by B. H. Fairchild (link here)

One of my colleagues—a tip of the ol’ hat to J. P. Allen—sent me a link to this poem when I was first designing the course, and I’m forever grateful for that. Whereas Swenson’s poem homes in on how the game of baseball is played, B. H. Fairchild’s “Body and Soul” concerns itself with why people bother playing it.

An extended narrative about working class men playing sandlot baseball in Oklahoma, “Body and Soul” is at once a humorous yarn and a meditation on the nature of masculinity. These grown men, short a player for a full team, allow a fifteen-year-old to join them. The kid, to their shock, proceeds to hit a whopping five home runs against them—turns out the kid was a young Mickey Mantle. It’s the exact sort of plausible-enough tall tale you’d expect to hear from your grandfather at barbecue.

But it’s the sections where Fairchild explores the psyches of his characters where the poem really comes to life. Why, the poem asks, did the men keep on pitching to Mantle when he kept taking them yard? It all comes down to foolish, self-destructive male pride:

…they had gone through a depression and a war that had left
them with the idea that being a man in the eyes of their fathers
and everyone else had cost them just too goddamn much to lay it
at the feet of a fifteen-year-old boy. And so they did not walk him,
and lost, but at least had some ragged remnant of themselves
to take back home. (lines 97-102)

As a portrait of the everyday athlete, at once sympathetic and critical, “Body and Soul” is a difficult one to top.

“Pafko at the Wall” by Don DeLillo (link to excerpt here)

In this story—originally published as a novella, later made into the prologue to his 1997 novel Underworld—Don DeLillo chronicles one of the most celebrated days in baseball history: October 3, 1951, the day Bobby Thompson hit the Shot Heard ‘Round the World and the New York Giants won the pennant over their arch-rivals, the Brooklyn Dodgers.

Every baseball fan knows about this game, but DeLillo’s story makes it fresh by mostly ignoring the game itself. Instead, his narrative focuses on the spectators at the Polo Grounds, and the personal struggles they’ve brought to the ballpark. We follow the likes of Cotter Martin, a boy from Harlem who’s snuck past the turnstiles to watch his beloved Giants; Russ Hodges, the Giants radio announcer getting a sore throat at the worst possible time; and J. Edgar Hoover, the infamous FBI director who’s just learned about a Soviet atom bomb test.

My students found this emphasis on the spectators fascinating. Most sports literature—for an obvious example, think “Casey at the Bat”—treats the crowd as a single character, a chorus of approval or disapproval. Not “Pafko at the Wall”: each member of the crowd has their own inner life, their own motivations and fears. It’s a difficult task, and it requires a lot of space (the story runs about 50 pages in my anthology of baseball writing), but it’s a challenge worth accepting.

Me, I’m always struck by how DeLillo, on the few occasions he actually talks about the game, chooses to emphasize moments of comic failure: Bobby Thompson getting thrown out a second, Don Mueller hurting himself sliding into third, etc. DeLillo saves the beautiful descriptions for the fans, especially Cotter. The passage in which the kid sneaks into the Polo Grounds is just exquisite:

Cotter thinks he sees a path to the turnstile on the right. He drains himself of everything he does not need to make the jump. Some are still jumping, some are thinking about it, some need a haircut, some have girlfriends in woolly sweaters and the rest have landed in the ruck and are trying to get up and scatter. A couple of stadium cops are rumbling down the ramp. Cotter sheds these elements as they appear, sheds a thousand waves of information hitting on his skin. His gaze is trained on the iron bar projected from the post. He picks up speed and seems to lose his gangliness, the slouchy funk of hormones and unbelonging and all the stammering things that seal his adolescence. He is just a running boy, a half-seen figure from the streets, but the way running reveals some clue to being, the way a runner bares himself to consciousness, this is how the dark-skinned kid seems to open to the world, how the bloodrush of a thousand strides brings him into eloquence. (p. 658, in Baseball: A Literary Anthology, ed. Nicholas Dawidoff, Library of America, 2002)

Even in the bleachers, “Pafko at the Wall” tells us, athletics is transformative in more ways that one.

“Roger Federer as Religious Experience” by David Foster Wallace (link here)

A celebration of perhaps the greatest player in the history of tennis, David Foster Wallace’s essay does to Federer what Don DeLillo does to Cotter Martin: use language to convey a moment of kinesthetic brilliance. “Federer Moments,” Wallace calls them, and they require almost as much virtuosity to describe as they do to perform.

Wallace’s technique of choice here is the long sentence, and I do mean long: a single-sentence rally between Federer and Andre Agassi, for instance, lasts for over 250 words before finally reaching a period. But this is no show of self-indulgence. Rather, Wallace uses the long sentence to illustrate all the complexities of tennis that a player must understand simultaneously and intuitively, and also to suggest the sheer stamina needed in top-flight tennis. If you get tired just reading about Federer’s exploits, just imagine actually doing them.

But the part of the essay that most interested my students, and ended up framing a lot the discussion in subsequent classes, was an almost-digressive paragraph on the language we use to describe sports. Sports are often thought of as simulations of war, and the pageantry surrounding them, especially men’s sports, bears that out:

[I]n men’s sports no one ever talks about beauty or grace or the body. Men may profess their love of sports, but that love must always be cast and enacted in the symbology of war: elimination vs. advance, hierarchy of rank and standing, obsessive statistics, technical analysis, tribal and/or nationalist fervor, uniforms, mass noise, banners, chest-thumping, face-painting, etc. For reasons that are not well understood, war’s codes are safer for most of us than love’s.

In part, “Roger Federer as Religious Experience” is a corrective to this tendency in sports writing. It leads by example in praising the aesthetic qualities of a world-class athlete, asking us to see the emergent artwork in a point well-played. The world could certainly use more lyricism and less brute force, no?

Part II of Citizen: An American Lyric by Claudia Rankine (link to slighlty edited version here)

I’ve briefly talked Claudia Rankine’s Citizen before, as part of my list of modern classics in poetry. In particular, I noted how much I admired Rankine’s decision to use John McEnroe as a Greek chorus to discuss the various injustices Serena Williams has faced on and off the court. So I won’t dwell on that specific craft choice here.

Instead, I’ll highlight the section’s use images, as the mere presence of photographs and video stills made Rankine’s piece unique within the class. Sometimes, Rankine’s chosen images provide visual evidence of the incidents she cites, most notably the photo which closes the section: Caroline Wozniacki “imitating” Williams by stuffing towels into her shirt and skirt. But other times, they illustrate a point that’s rather difficult to express verbally.

In my most unfortunate omission this intersession, I neglected to include the image credits in my scan of the piece. As such, my students weren’t sure what to make of the image of one of Nick Cave’s Soundsuits: gaudily decorated performance art outfits that make a lot noise when worn. They are designed to call attention to the wearer’s body in a public space. Including the image of a Soundsuit provides a parallel to Williams’ position within the world of tennis: a black woman from Compton, standing in an historically white and wealthy space. Her body’s mere presence, Rankine suggests, calls attention to itself.

Someone whose image is notably absent from this section: Serena Williams. If that’s not a significant and deliberate choice, I don’t know what is.

Note: the version of this piece linked above lacks the embedded images that I’ve just been praising. Quite a shame, that. By all means, consider getting your hands on a physical copy.

“The Cruelest Sport” by Joyce Carol Oates (link here)

I’ll close with what is perhaps the most straightforward piece on this list. Taken from her collection of essays on boxing (titled, appropriately, On Boxing),“The Cruelest Sport” sees Joyce Carol Oates confronting the brutal realities of a sport she greatly enjoys. Boxing is not merely violent, like football—violence is part of boxing’s very essence, the intention of every fighter who enters the ring. Who can ethically justify watching a sport where the goal is not simply to win, but to cause one’s opponent to lose consciousness?

On top of the sport’s physical dangers, Oates doesn’t shy away from the socioeconomic conditions which underpin boxing. After all, what would drive someone to enter the world of prizefighting, if not economic necessity?

Boxing is only possible if there is an endless supply of young men hungry to leave their impoverished ghetto neighborhoods, more than willing to substitute the putative dangers of the ring for the evident, possibly daily, dangers of the street; yet it is rarely advanced as means of eradicating boxing, that poverty itself be abolished, that it is the social conditions feeding boxing that are obscene.

This article resonated with a lot of my students, because the harmful effects of sports institutions extend far beyond the boxing establishment. The head trauma crisis in the NFL and the appalling response to sexual abuse in US women’s gymnastics are just two recent examples. Sports are useful to a writer not simply because they’re exciting, but because they offer us a lens through which to view society. How does a business treat its workers? How do institutions treat their most marginalized members?

That’s enough from me. How about you? Are there any pieces of sports literature that you think exemplify a compelling approach to the subject? Let me know in the comments.

Baseball Highlights: Aesthetics and Context

Over at ESPN.com, Sam Miller recently wrote an article entitled “Dig the long ball? Here’s why home run highlight videos are the worst”. Clickbait title aside, Miller’s article has some solid points about why home runs might not make for the best highlight reels. I especially like how he draws attention to the hard cut which invariably comes when broadcasting a home run, breaking the flow of what is really a continuous action. (Compare that to a defensive highlight, where the cut serves as an act break: the batter makes the contact, then the fielder catches it.)

Continue reading “Baseball Highlights: Aesthetics and Context” →