Hitting for the Cycle: Nine
The time may be near when baseball as a theme in literature will be a completely absurd idea. Sure, the game will always be around in one form or another–as long as there are gym classes and shoe contracts and parents living vicariously as Little League coaches. But not baseball. Not the baseball that inspired Walt Whitman to write reams of poetry. Not the baseball that seduced Jack Kerouac into playing fantasy board games with his favorite players alone atop a mountain. Not the baseball that led Bob Dylan to write an ode to Jim “Catfish” Hunter or that inspired Bernard Malamud, Stuart Dybek, Ring Lardner, and Philip Roth to use the game as a metaphor for life.
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In anaesthetized, corporate facilities like the new White Sox park, where faceless, humorless, personality-challenged ballplayers rack up statistics and endorsement dollars, where droning announcers devoid of character induce sleep, where obstetricians pay top dollar to sit in club seats and talk loudly on cell phones, where noise-o-meter scoreboards tell the crowd when to cheer, the poetry that was baseball is all but gone. Perhaps it’s just as well that media saturation, combined with the greed exhibited during the baseball strike, has stripped the veneer off the pro game to present it as it is and probably always was–a kids’ game played largely by self-important, none-too-swift drunks, philanderers, and automatons. But there’s not much beauty or resonance in that image. And though there may always be a certain charm to baseball and its splendid geometry, chances are that we’ll have to rent Gary Cooper and Robert Redford movies to remember what it was that moved so many artists to take a game and transform it into poetry.
The second batter is never a team’s best player–he’s usually quick and scrappy, more concerned with making contact than knocking the ball out of the park. Arthur Kopit’s short, witty monologue Elegy for the House That Ruth Built is a slight piece about a replacement New York Yankees ballplayer who turned his back on the game when he realized that evil Yankees owner George Steinbrenner was luring him to tread upon hallowed ground. Cheekily reminiscent of the treacly film Field of Dreams, the monologue is unevenly performed by the normally reliable Will Casey in an unconvincing Bridgeport-ian cadence, but it’s cute and diverting enough to keep the opening rally going.
Score the whole evening up in the victory column. True, batting about five and a half for nine is not the optimum ratio in theater, but in baseball it’s almost unheard of. Especially these days, when our expectations of the game are quite a bit lower.
