Best Baseball Fiction Book Ever?

[Archive]

Posted By: David R

The Wall Street Journal had an article today in which it listed a deadball era baseball book as the best baseball fiction novel ever. The book is "You Know Me Al" by Ring Lardner, published by Scribner in 1918. The article says the book is about a hay-in-the-hair pitcher from the Indiana heartland named Jack Keefe, who comes to the big city to make his fortune. The book takes the form of a series of letters home from Keefe to his "Friend Al" Blanchard.

I'd be interested to hear if anyone has read this book and what you think?

David R.

[Archive]

Posted By: Tom Russo

I have read it several times over the years. It's really very good and has some very funny stuff but also gives a glimpse into the life of the busher trying to make good in the big leagues. Incidently, I believe the first edition is 1916 published by Doran but there are many editions out there.

[Archive]

Posted By: Steve

My copy is a Towers books example from 1945. It is a 2nd printing.

I read it years ago. Prolly around 1975.

Steve

[Archive]

Posted By: boxingcardman

Alan Hager's price guide

Sic Gorgiamus Allos Subjectatos Nunc

[Archive]

Posted By: Joe D.

the SMR

[Archive]

Posted By: Steve

many say the SMR but over the past 60 days i have sold 9k worth of cards and SMR for them was about the same.

many buyers use the SMR as a guide. Of course we all have examples where SMR is off.

But in general (at least for the stuff I sold) SMR was right there.

Steve

[Archive]

Posted By: Andy Baran

The Ring Lardner book is excellent, but I would rate all of the Darryl Brock books (especially "If I Never Get Back"), The Celebrant, as well as several others, ahead of You Know Me Al. Just my opinion.

[Archive]

Posted By: Bob

http://tiny.cc/JEaFu

[Archive]

Posted By: John S

It's been a while since I read his books, but I do recall enjoying the baseball mysteries of Troy Soos. His stories are set in 1910's. There was a fictional utility player who was central in his books...can't remember his name.

[Archive]

Posted By: Jodi Birkholm

I've mentioned them before, but my favorites in the genre include "The Curious Case of Sidd Finch" (Plimpton) and "Hoopla" (Harry Stein).

[Archive]

Posted By: Steve

John S

I think you are referring to Mickey Rawlings.

Steve

[Archive]

Posted By: Bruce Babcock

Like Andy, I go with Darryl Brock and "If I Never Get Back." (Full disclosure - Darryl is a personal friend.)

[Archive]

Posted By: Anonymous

I would probably vote "The Celebrant" #1, but I also like "Shoeless Joe", "Bang the Drum Slowly" and "The Natural", all of which are better than the movie adaptations, especially "The Natural" which has a dark and unhappy ending that works better than the film version.

[Archive]

Posted By: Frank Wakefield

Yes, I've read the Lardner book.


Without any reservation, here's a list...


#1. The Celebrant, by Eric Rolfe Greenberg. Before I'd read this, I could not believe that there was a book out there better than If I Never Get Back... better than Bang The Drum Slowly... or The Natural. There is. This is the One. Go back in time and meet Christy Mathewson. Read this book and feel like you're watching McGraw's Giants... I can smell the hotdogs, and the beer, just typing about it.

#2. If I Never Get Back, by Darryl Brock. This was my #1 until I'd read The Celebrant. Old Baseball, the Redlegs, the beginnings of professional baseball.

#3. Bang The Drum Slowly, by Mark Harris. "From here on in I rag nobody." A good book. A great baseball book. And a fine baseball movie. I heard Mr. Harris speak in the mid 70s, a nice man.

#4. You Know Me Al, by Ring Lardner, Jr. A pretty good baseball book, by a great writer. I read this after Bang the Drum Slowly, but before #1 and #2 up there.

#5. The Natural, by Bernard Malamud. A 1952 book that is slightly outshown today by the fine 1984 movie. I have a Roy Hobbs card somewhere in my pile of stuff. And I have a prop scorecard from the movie. A good book. But not as good as The Celebrant.


I can't see how anyone who's read The Celebrant could list it anywhere but first.

[Archive]

Posted By: Jim Manos

book sounds really good. email is jmanos@columbus.rr.com Thx, Jim

[Archive]

Posted By: Jodi Birkholm

Here's an idea: Would anyone be interested in getting involved in a baseball book exchange? We would have to set some very basic ground rules (nothing valuable to be exchanged, books to be returned within a month's time, etc.), but perhaps in this way we could all enjoy a good read or two for the price of return postage. I have several hundred baseball-related titles, mostly nonfiction. People could post requests for certain books which are out of print, etc. What does everyone think?

[Archive]

Posted By: Andy Baran

I am in agreement with you that The Celebrant was awesome, but I think that that If I Never Get Back was slightly better. This is all opinion. It's like saying that I prefer the Lobster over the Fillet. I think that I like Brock's book better because I am more interested in 19th Century Baseball than in Early 20th Century Baseball.

[Archive]

Posted By: Andy Baran

Since you are a friend of Darryl's, is there any chance that you know when his next novel might be released? I feel like I have been holding my breath for years.

[Archive]

Posted By: Frank Wakefield

Hey Andy...

I recall that the first time I read If I Never Get Back, it wasn't like reading a book, it was like stepping away from the present and warping back to the days just after the Civil War. I'm in total agreement that it is a superb baseball novel. I suspect that my enjoyment of the 1912 era of baseball, about the time the white border tobacco cards are out, and the caramel cards, that is what has me choosing The Celebrant in the number one slot. So the point is well taken, it depends upon what era in baseball the reader likes the most.

I also recall laughing out loud in bed as I read the next letter to "Al", while I read Lardner's book. My wife just wouldn't accept that a baseball book could be that funny.

[Archive]

Posted By: Bob

I guess I am in the minority but having read The Iowa Basball Confederacy by Kinsella, I'd put it and Havana Heat both above the Celebrant and If I Never Get Back, two good books but not the top in the top three in my mind. Shoeless Joe by Kinsella (light years better than the movie, Field of Dreams) is still tops for me.

1. Shoeless Joe
2. The Iowa Baseball Confederacy
3. Havana Heat
4. If I Never Get Back
5. The Natural
6. Collected works of Ring Lardner
7. The collected series by Wilfred McCormick of Bronc Burnett books
8. The Celebrant
9. Blue Ruin
10. The Year the Yankees Lost the Pennant (Damn Yankees based on this book)

[Archive]

Posted By: Rob D.

This doesn't come close to qualifying as the best baseball fiction book, but The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop. by Robert Coover (1968) is a wonderful read, even more so if you've ever been addicted to playing Strat-o-Matic or APBA. You can knock it out in 2-3 days without really trying.

For a synopsis, here's Wikipedia's entry on the book.

[Archive]

Posted By: Frank Wakefield

So what about The Card, that book of about a year ago?


I left it out because it doesn't rank up there with these other fine books that are mentioned above. But it is pretty close to a work of fiction in places...





(And I liked Shoeless Joe.)

[Archive]

Posted By: Bruce Babcock

I checked with Darryl Brock and he has no plans to write another baseball novel. The interest from mainstream publishers for baseball-themed books is just not what it once was. At present, he is enjoying spending time with his family.

So we are left with "If I Never Get Back," "Havana Heat," and "Two in the Field."

Darryl was very gratified to know that NET54 folks have enjoyed and continue to enjoy his books.

[Archive]

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.

[Archive]

Posted By: T206Collector

Favorite Fiction:

A Prince at First: The Fictional Autobiography of Baseball's Hal Chase (Paperback) by Ed Dinger (Author)

http://www.amazon.com/Prince-First-Fictional-Autobiography-Baseballs/dp/0786413301/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1210102263&sr=8-2


Favorite Non-Fiction:

Crazy '08: How a Cast of Cranks, Rogues, Boneheads, and Magnates Created the Greatest Year in Baseball History (Paperback)
by Cait N. Murphy (Author)

http://www.amazon.com/Crazy-08-Boneheads-Magnates-Greatest/dp/0060889381/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1210102358&sr=1-1


Cobb: A Biography (Paperback)
by Al Stump (Author)

http://www.amazon.com/Cobb-Biography-Al-Stump/dp/1565121449/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1210102415&sr=1-1




_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

Visit http://www.t206collector.com to see signed pre-war card galleries, articles, my blog and more!

[Archive]

Posted By: davidcycleback

"Either one of Pete Rose's Autobiographies"