the natural

by Bernard Malamud

I like baseball fiction and wanted to like this. But I couldn't. The main character was ultimately too damaged, and unredeemable. I couldn't connect to the women. The whole thing left me with a bad taste in my mouth. I haven't seen the movie but can't imagine it's much like the book.

more baseball books

In addition to Ring Lardner's You Know Me Al and Bernard Malamud's The Natural (in my stack), Jonathan Yardley recommends the following baseball books:

The Man Who Brought Joy to Mudville (By JONATHAN YARDLEY, September 25, 2006, Page C01)
Veeck -- As in Wreck, The autobiography of Bill Veeck

A Deal With The Devil That Still Pays Dividends (By JONATHAN YARDLEY, August 11, 2005, Page C01)
The Year the Yankees Lost the Pennant by Douglass Wallop

Pitcher Jim Brosnan, Throwing a Perfect Game (By Jonathan Yardley, April 7, 2004, Page C01)
The Long Season by Jim Brosnan.

Also see Mark Harris's books.

you know me al

by Ring Lardner

Still hilarious. Lardner ever-so-skillfully allows our hero, rookie pitcher Jack Keefe, to unwittingly reveal himself and his acquaintances in his letters home to his pal Al.

This book works on several levels. You can read it for the baseball, or for the humor, or just as a great piece of writing. For the baseball lover it's red meat. Jack Keefe plays against Ty Cobb, Christy Mathewson, Walter Johnson, and other greats of Lardner's time. Charles Comiskey, owner of the Chicago White Sox, is a prominent character. I was happily struck by the many respects in which baseball hasn't changed since 1914.

But one needn't love or even understand baseball to enjoy the book. My old Scribner's paperback includes an introduction by son John Lardner, who quotes Virginia Woolf: "With extraordinary ease and aptitude, with the quickest strokes, the surest touch, the sharpest insight, he lets Jack Keefe the baseball player cut out his own outline, fill in his own depths, until the figure of the foolish, boastful, innocent athlete lives before us."

Can Lardner be viewed as the American counterpart of P G Wodehouse?
Discuss. :-)

Favorite quote, this one from friend AS:

[Speaking of Walter "The Big Train" Johnson, one of the greatest fastball pitchers of all time] . . . he asked me what I thought of Johnson. I says I don't think so much of him. . . . He says What was the matter with Johnson's work? I says He ain't got nothing but a fast ball. Then he says Yes and Rockefeller ain't got nothing but a hundred million bucks. (p. 57)

My favorite:

Babys is great stuff Al and if I was you I would not wait no longer but would hurry up and adopt 1 somewheres. (p. 156)

SPOILER ALERT *** Yes, Keefe has a fastball, but he's immature and ignorant, a rube, and arguably a sociopath, always blaming someone or something else for his failures, and frequently on the verge of busting someone in the jaw. Redemption comes about two thirds into the book, when little Al arrives, and it's love at first sight for Keefe. ***

baseball books

I recently remembered Ring Lardner's great baseball book You Know Me Al (1914) which I'm re-reading. And that reminded me of another baseball book, Bang the Drum Slowly (1956), by Mark Harris. I loved it 30 years ago; wonder how it's held up.

I have it somewhere in a volume entitled Henry Wiggen's Books. Wiggens is the main character, a baseball player and author (or arthur) who appears in the three books, Bang the Drum Slowly, The Southpaw, and A Ticket for a Seamstitch. I vaguely remember being disappointed in the other two titles.

Bang the Drum Slowly is also a movie starring Robert DeNiro and Michael Moriarty, made in 1973.

Title is from the song Streets of Laredo sung by one of the ball players.