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Posted By: Matt Goebel

You guys should all read "The Veracruz Blues" by Mark Winegardner

It's not technically about the Major Leagues, but it has many Major Leaguers in it. Wonderful historical fiction!!

THE VERACRUZ BLUES By Mark Winegardner. 251 pp. New York: Viking. $22.95.

FIFTY years ago, in the spring of 1946, Jorge Pasquel and his brothers shook the American baseball establishment to its foundations. They offered lucrative multiyear contracts to established major leaguers, some of them the biggest names in the game, to join the Mexican League. Though no stars of the highest magnitude took the offer, 27 players signed with the Pasquels, along with many Latin players (particularly Cubans) under contract to Major League Baseball. A large contingent of Negro leaguers were already in Mexico and others would follow.

Pasquel's dream was to upgrade the Mexican League to major league status. But in the process he uncovered the flaws of organized baseball and, by extension, those of the United States. Pasquel improved the quality of the Mexican game by developing a truly democratic, multiethnic league in which ability and the open market determined a player's worth. Weren't these ideals supposedly as American as baseball itself? In a fit of xenophobia as well as in fear of losing its monopolistic grip on talent, Major League Baseball reacted as if its boys were being wooed by the whore of Babylon. Commissioner A. B. (Happy) Chandler issued a five-year ban on all the players who went south. After all, playing in the major leagues was one of the privileges many of these men had just risked their lives for in World War II. How could they be so unpatriotic as to squander it by following the Mexican pied piper?

It is this dark aura of ideological posturing and cries of treason that Mark Winegardner has captured in his remarkable first novel. "The Veracruz Blues" is not just a baseball novel; it is the best baseball novel that I have read. It is not another tale about the glory and pain of athletic prowess, or about how an innocent sports hero is corrupted; rather, it is a book that delves deep into national myth making by looking at it from the outside, as only literature can do. Two American dreams collide in "The Veracruz Blues": the game of baseball and the yearning to write the Great American Novel.

The novel pokes holes in the pieties about breaking the color barrier in the major leagues. Racial integration in baseball has become a story about sacrifice and sublime courage that preserves the integrity of the American national game. But consider for a moment the following heresies: Branch Rickey was a pompous, money-grubbing hypocrite who cloaked himself in the mantle of a savior by signing one black baseball player (not the best one at that and one sworn to meekness) when there were dozens ready for the majors. Could breaking the color barrier redress decades of apartheid? With unbearable condescension, organized baseball passed off this revolting tokenism as a crusade for equality, while raiding the Negro leagues of their best talent and promising young black prospects the long shot of making the majors (the Boston Red Sox did not field a black player until 1959, and other teams had a quota system well into the 60's). At the same time, white players were supposed to be grateful for the chance to compete in the majors while earning ridiculously low salaries, and team owners basked in the glory of their stewardship of the national pastime.

Could such notions be thought, much less articulated, in 1946, during the frenzy of postwar jingoism? How many Americans would accept them even today? But as the protagonist of "The Veracruz Blues" discovers, these were the verities about organized baseball that were evident from Mexico, which had been a haven for Afro-American and Afro-Caribbean players since the late 30's. To them, leaving American baseball was not a difficult moral or patriotic choice. The outstanding shortstop Willie Wells once wrote that in leaving the Newark Eagles of the Negro leagues for Mexico, he was quitting not the team but "the country." To American whites in the majors, it was considered well-nigh betrayal even to contemplate abandoning the United States to earn a better living. Many of those who did left with a sense of shame.

The allure of sports is that in its mock wars nations invest their most urgent needs for common purpose and belief. It is curious that a mere game should stir deep-seated emotions, as if Enos Slaughter's dash home on a single in the 1946 World Series were as heroic as the Normandy landing or the storming of Guadalcanal. To a country of Don Quixotes, the mock heroes of sports become real, the "as if" becomes the seal of national bonding; coaches, managers, owners, commissioners and players, with no more moral mettle than most and ordinary intellectual prowess at best, become as revered as real warriors or statesmen. The fictions of sports (and here is where literature comes in) are as significant as any other aspect of reality because of their undeniable effect on communities as well as individuals. This is what the ambition to write the Great American Novel is all about: to reveal the core myth of the nation, in the way the ancient epics presumably embodied the essence of Greece and Rome.

The Veracruz Blues was the name of Pasquel's baseball team, the "eternal rival" of the Mexico City Reds. But the title of Mr. Winegardner's novel also refers to the mood of his protagonist, Frank Bullinger Jr., a ne'er-do-well sportswriter from St. Louis bent on writing the Great American Novel. He is now living, semiretired and in voluntary exile, in Veracruz; the novel we read is partly his literary effort, partly a chronicle of it. He winds up as press secretary for Jorge Pasquel, who is in the process of raiding the major leagues and coordinating what came to be known in Mexico as the "season of gold" of 1946. Pasquel, with unlimited funds and the kind of freedom that some American team owners past and present would envy, moves players from team to team, changes the schedule at will and acts like a combination of P. T. Barnum and George Steinbrenner. All the while, he is involved with Miguel Alemn, the shoo-in candidate for the Mexican presidency, the movie star Mar(TM)a Flix and the artists Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera.

The fictional Bullinger mingles with these real-life figures, who also include baseball players like Sal Maglie and Danny Gardella of the New York Giants, Theolic (Fireball) Smith, a pitcher from the Negro leagues, and the Cuban slugger Roberto Ortiz. He also tries to have a meaningful relationship with his marijuana-smoking mistress, an aspiring New York poet. Bullinger's literary ambitions have got him in deep trouble with women: he left behind in the States a son and a wife, who is suing for a divorce, and a mistress, a college professor who is pregnant with his child.

This is the stuff of melodrama. Happily, however, the story is told not only by the sportswriter but also by some of the ballplayers as well as by Mar(TM)a Flix, in "interviews" recorded and translated by Bullinger. "The Veracruz Blues" is, in the modernist tradition, the story of the writing of the novel Bullinger never quite completed. Mr. Winegardner has given a couple of fresh spins to this common modernist twist, and his book is highly readable and free of intrusive pyrotechnics.

The novel being written within the novel gives hints why Bullinger has not succeeded as a novelist: it is overwritten. (Little wonder that during a trip to Cuba, Ernest Hemingway advises Bullinger to forget about fiction and to concentrate on writing "true sentences" about baseball.) Bullinger cannot resist the temptation to include in his novel everyone who was in Mexico at the time. He also takes incidents that were outlandish enough to begin with -- like the ailing Babe Ruth's barnstorming visit to Mexico in 1946 -- and makes them even more farcical, and he cannot avoid clichs about life south of the border. The problem with writing the Great American Novel is that one has to swing from the heels, and in literature, as in baseball, one needs more subtlety as well as some luck.

In the book's concluding scene (set in the 1990's), Bullinger takes his daughter to the festivities of the Mexican Day of the Dead. In a cemetery, on the Pasquel family plot, he sees a statue of the Virgin of Guadalupe draped in the traveling jersey of the Veracruz Blues. The satire does not completely muffle the elegiac tone. There was grandeur, after all, in Pasquel's effort, even though he pathetically imitated the United States and hankered after recognition by the Americans. The Day of the Dead is a celebration of Mexico's defeats, which, in the face of ever-present death, are nevertheless precious. Theolic Smith, Roberto Ortiz and all the other great black and Latin players may have exhibited their talents in lesser arenas than the major leagues, but their efforts and triumphs deserve to be recorded, as Mark Winegardner has done in "The Veracruz Blues." This is the triumph of Bullinger, whose failure, like Pasquel's, makes for a moving and significant story.