Tangents From A Wrongly Hit Baseball

There are writers I like reading, and among those, there is a smaller set of writers I want to write like. Ian Frazier is one of that smaller set. His essays nearly always make the reader feel smart and clever while they’re reading, in addition to rolling along enjoyably with flitting tone and cadence. There are two reasons I bring this up, regarding one of his latest essays, “Pensées D’Automne” in the New Yorker. The second reason is that he strikes a similar note to some of my sentiments here the last few weeks: getting all worked about aggravating matters can distract you from the enjoyments close at hand. The first reason is here:

Fall into a vexation-filled CIGNA reverie and you lose your concentration, go off your game, and start to mis-stomp acorns, so that instead of neatly flattening they squirt out from under your heel unstomped, or partly stomped, and bounce woundedly away. That is an awful feeling. Theologians have defined sin as “apartness from God,” but I think that sin, in practical terms, is a lot like the jarring, jangling wrongness of the wrongly hit baseball or mis-stomped acorn—a kind of teeth-grinding, bone-deep discord that makes the very keelson of the universe vibrate off key.

Thinking about this, two ideas come to mind. One is that he’s dead-on right. There are certain little things that are so unnatural as to resonate within us in some primary way, despite ourselves. The second idea is a question: why does even a writer like Ian Frazier use baseball metaphors?

I’ve been thinking about baseball and literature for a few weeks, ever since I read Saul Bellow’s The Adventures of Augie March, first on my list for the off-season. (Besides all the magazines I’m obviously catching up on.) Bellow lived just a few blocks from my old apartment in Wicker Park, and even nearer to where my sister and brother-in-law live. This book is set mainly in Chicago, and winds along – which I mean very literally – over several years following the Depression.

Except, there’s hardly any baseball. In fact, Bellow treats so many other aspects of American and Chicago culture in particular that its absence stands out. Of course I’m more sensitive to something like this than most readers, but only to a certain extent. But as Augie explores nearly every niche of the city, from Hyde Park student houses to Evanston mansions, there is only a brief mention of south side bars where you can hear the radio buzzing as men sit and listen to White Sox games in the heat while they drink beer.

I’m not interested in treating Augie March any more right now; it’s on plenty of top-100 anthology booklists and all that, so grab a copy if you want to read about a wonderful character whose particular noteworthiness is being a medium for other people’s hopes and schemes, mainly set all across Chicago. Here, I’m thinking more about why baseball and literature are so entangled, more so than any other sport. Why would Frazier choose a baseball? Why not a basketball swishing? Or a perfectly centered tackle?

Is it really the case that the feeling of fouling a ball off near our hands in cold weather still stings so clearly in our memory, more so than formative memories from other sports?

I don’t actually have an answer thought out, but I don’t think baseball's link with literature is arbitrary, or happenstance. It’s not just because baseball has a longer history. I can’t shake the feeling that there is something intrinsic to the sport that compels it to court writers, and vice versa. I don’t mean to get all haughty here, as if I’m trying to say how I’m a good writer or anything like that, either; that’s open to debate and also irrelevant, because there are a lot of writers far better than me who find themselves attracted to baseball, and not just sports journalists or journalists in general. (Although some of them write their finest work, of high literary quality, when writing about baseball.)

Maybe it’s the patience, and the time to think between action. Maybe it’s the way storylines take a long time to play out. Maybe it’s the long summer days, and the warm nights. Maybe it’s the similarity between the grace of a quick play and the turn of a phrase.

Maybe it’s all that and more. In fact, I’m sure it is. But, I’m starting to think that I have an essay coming on, about the arching narrative structure of baseball, almost a metaphysical take -- if you’re willing to be generous -- on the deeper structures and patterns of plays, and games, and seasons, and eras. I just can’t get past the feeling that there’s something there, unique and exceptional, and it’s that fuzzy quality that keeps some of us who catch glimpses of it piercing through coming back every game. Maybe it’s a case of apologetics, or working backwards, trying to develop an argument for something I already believe. Or maybe it’s a journey into why I fell for baseball in the first place. I don’t know. Like I said, the thoughts are just starting to form.

I’m reminded of an anecdote told by Stanley Fish, the man we can thank for the Reader-Response Theory of literary criticism. Fish used to demonstrate his theory with a story about the legendary umpire Bill Klem:

"Klem's behind the plate. The pitcher winds up, throws the ball. The pitch comes. The batter doesn't swing. Klem for an instant says nothing. The batter turns around and says, 'O.K., so what was it, a ball or a strike?' And Klem says, 'Sonny, it ain't nothing 'till I call it.'"

PS: Thanks to Eugene Madison, Jr. for bumping me up to 29th on Google searches for “Kerry Sayers.” Based on the page he found Agony & Ivy from, I was previously down in the 50s before he clicked me and commented. I think that means I’ve finally made it. Or something.