THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, April 2, 1995 TAG: 9503300614
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J2 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY TIM WARREN
LENGTH: Medium: 100 lines
THE ANNOTATED BASEBALL STORIES OF RING W. LARDNER, 1914-1919
GEORGE W. HILTON
Stanford University Press. 631 pp. $35.
OUT AT THE OLD BALL GAME
BERNIE BOOKBINDER
Bridge Works. 278 pp. $21.95.
BASEBALL HAS always lent itself well to fiction, and it's a good thing, considering the pathetic realities surrounding the sport these days.
With the major league strike in its second year, Opening Day promises to be baseball's shabbiest and most distressing ever. If that's not enough to make you wince, contemplate how the sport has been taken over by geeks and nerds, who have transformed a perfectly enjoyable kids' game into some spiritual endeavor. Now, to be a fan, you must weep at the mention of Iron Man McGinnity, and gaze in hypnotic wonder at Ken Burns' overblown PBS series.
No, this is the time to reread Bernard Malumud's The Natural, or Mark Harris' Bang the Drum Slowly. I'd even recommend W.P. Kinsella's fine baseball fiction, despite its having spawned the unspeakable movie ``Field of Dreams,'' responsible for so much mythological excess. Baseball's rural roots, its sense of timeliness, its players of working-class origins, its unvarnished Americanness - all of these qualities provide rich material for the inventive fiction writer.
The Annotated Baseball Stories of Ring W. Lardner, 1914-1919 and Out at the Old Ball Game, representing the earliest and the latest in baseball fiction, should be more than sufficient antidotes to any queasiness that the words ``replacement players'' may cause you.
I especially enjoyed rereading some of Lardner's old stories. They burst with vivid writing, humor and knowledge of and affection for the game.
As a nationally known sportswriter, Lardner (1885-1933) knew baseball from the inside out - the owners, the players, the managers. He was especially gifted at capturing the essence of the players - most of them rough, unsophisticated and only marginally literate - and his Jack Keefe character was one of his best.
Keefe was the wise-fool narrator of Lardner's You Know Me Al, a collection of short stories that were first published in the Saturday Evening Post. Lardner's device for framing the stories was ingenious: They were built around letters that Keefe sent home to Al Blanchard, an old buddy in Indiana. Keefe, writes editor George W. Hilton, ``is immature, semiliterate, arrogant, unstable, miserly and vain, but he manages to carry a self-image of shrewdness and great ability through all his experiences.''
Through Lardner, an especially gifted observer with a keen sense of nuance, Keefe is the perfect instrument for a multilayered narrative. He's not a reliable narrator, but he's an engaging and often quite funny one. Here's a sample, from ``The Busher Comes Back'':
``Well Al you know by this time that they beat me today and tied up the serious. . . My arm wasn't feeling good Al and my fast ball didn't hop like it had ought to. But it was the rotten support I got that beat me. That lucky stiff Zimmerman was the only guy that got a real hit off of me and he must of shut his eyes and throwed his bat because the ball he hit was a foot over his head.''
Some of Lardner's baseball stories aren't especially strong; his later ``busher'' stories in particular feel forced. But his best are magnificent. ``Alibi Ike,'' about a hapless player who had an excuse for every occasion, is a carefully controlled comic masterpiece.
Hilton's analyses of Lardner's works are for the most part thoughtful, but one of the book's selling points - its annotation - is ultimately annoying and unnecessary. Lardner frequently interspersed real baseball players amid his fictional characters, and this volume tells in great detail who these players were, what they hit and so forth.
Maybe some people need to know that the ``Zimmerman'' in the passage quoted above refers to Heinie Zimmerman, the old Cubs third baseman, but shouldn't Lardner's fictional talents suffice?
Lardner was perhaps unmatched in writing from over-the-top, a quality that Bernie Bookbinder could have used in Out at the Old Ball Game. This novel, about an all-gay major league team, is loaded with potential but undone by its constant shifting of tones.
Bookbinder, a retired Newsday editor and writer, can't seem to decide whether Out at the Old Ball Game is a comic novel or an earnest screed about gay rights. The dust jacket says he and his wife are members of Parents, Families, and Friends of Lesbians and Gays, and throughout the book he issues heavy-handed passages about understanding and tolerating homosexuals.
Then he shifts gears and gets off some good zingers about stuffy and stodgy Major League Baseball, quaking at the thought that some of its best players are gay. Back and forth, he goes, from satirical to preachy.
None of the characters seems especially believable. Bookbinder makes an effort with Dick Toote, the gifted first baseman who is the first to come out of the closet (one New York tabloid calls him ``Tootie Fruitie''), but why make his parents such intolerant, homophobic members of the Christian right? It's an easy and transparent way out in a novel that begs for more subtlety. MEMO: Tim Warren is a book critic who lives in Silver Spring, Md. by CNB