Play (Fictional) Ball!
Categories: Sports , Staff Picks , Fiction
The Cincinnati Reds, baseball’s oldest professional team, opened their 136th campaign on Monday at Great American Ballpark. In no particular order, here are a few baseball novels this Red's fan has enjoyed over the years.
The Southpaw by Mark Harris. A 1973 film starring Michael Moriarty and Robert De Niro made famous Bang the Drum Slowly, the second book in the Henry Wiggin quartet . Published in 1953, The Southpaw was the first . Henry’s appealing, idiomatic narrative limns his rookie season in the big leagues. The Southpaw is one of those distinctive American narratives clearly descended from The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
If I Never Get Back by Darryl Brock. This baseball fantasy pays a homage to another Twain novel. San Francisco newspaperman Samuel Clemens Flower falls asleep on an Amtrak train in the 20th century, but awakens on a steam train in the company of the 1869 Cincinnati Red Stockings. A well-researched baseball story about the primitive professional game.
The Universal Baseball Association Inc, J. Henry Waugh, Proprietor by Robert Coover. Coover published this minor masterpiece in 1968. Henry Waugh invents an eight-team baseball league and plays every game of an entire season. A roll of the dice determines hits, runs, and outs, and Henry becomes the mad god of a microcosmic world. (Attention fantasy baseballers: get a life!)
Shoeless Joe by W. P. Kinsella. An Iowa farmer plows under his corn and builds a ballfield in Kinsella’s magical novel about baseball legends, fathers, and sons. Made ridiculously famous by the 1989 film, Field of Dreams.
Strike Three You’re Dead by R. D. Rosen. Outfielder Harvey Blissberg is nearing the end of his career on the roster of an American League expansion team. He finds his roommate, a relief pitcher, murdered in the clubhouse whirlpool. A breezy, wisecracking, sports mystery with convincing locker room scenes and some very funny lines.
The Great American Novel by Philip Roth. This rollicking and provocative satire of baseball and American life (and easily Roth’s funniest novel) follows the 1943 season of the Ruppert Mundys. The team, playing in “the third major league,” embarks on a season-long road trip after its home field is requisitioned by the War Department.
Murder at Fenway Park by Troy Soos. Old Mickey Rawlings looks back to 1912, when he was a rookie utility infielder with the Boston Red Sox. A Sox player is murdered, and light-hitting Mickey goes to work solving the crime. This is the first in a series of satisfying retro-baseball mysteries. (Mickey plays for a different team in each book, and a player, or somebody close to that team, always gets killed. Some teammate.)
