Summer Reading: A Refulgent Novel and an Erudite Sports/Social History

 

First, the novel: Paul Auster’s The Brooklyn Follies is another under-the-radar American classic, joining others I’ve read and written about in this space, Paula Fox’s Desperate Characters, John Williams’ Stoner, and A Fan’s Notes by Frederick Exley

 

The likeable narrator and protagonist, Nathan Glass, is a lung cancer survivor, now retired from a life insurance company.  He is divorced and seeks anonymity by relocating to his old Brooklyn neighborhood of Park Slope.  He envisions it as the place for his life’s ending.  Instead, it would be a new beginning.

 

Park Slope is the perfect setting for the metafictional parts of the novel as Auster himself lived there.  He passed away earlier this year; it was his obituary that reminded me to read him.  I was interested in this particular novel as I too had lived in Park Slope as a young adult during my first marriage. 

 

Nathan has no relationship with his ex wife other than being disdained by her.  He is estranged from his only daughter, Rachel, and Auster engineers their reconciliation as the consequence of a subplot.

 

So much of modern literature is about families coming apart.  Instead, Auster sees Nathan as a change agent, endowing him with a charisma that is instrumental in bringing families and people together, including a niece Aurora (“Rory”) and nephew, Tom.  In this regard, this is an unusually joyous post modern piece of fiction of redemption and second chances, so deeply satisfying.

 

Tom was a brilliant graduate student when Nathan last saw him years before.  Chance encounters plays a significant role in the novel such as when Nathan finds a dispirited Tom working in Brightman’s Attic, a local bookstore.  That encounter sets everything in motion.  He takes his nephew to lunch at Cosmic Diner where Nathan flirts more than usual with his favorite waitress, Marina, not only to impress Tom but because he was in “such buoyant spirits. I hadn’t realized how much I’d missed [Tom}, and now it turned out that we were neighbors – living, by pure happenstance, just two blocks from each other in the ancient kingdom of Brooklyn, NY.”

 

From there, a cast of unrelated characters are brought together in some way:

  Tom, his nephew and Rory, his niece (who was held captive by her second husband, a religious cult member).

  Rachel, Nathan’s daughter.

  Lucy, Rory’s nine year old daughter (who Rory sends alone to Tom in a daring attempt to free her daughter from the cult).

  Harry Dunkel (aka Brightman), ex convict, gay, a lover of books but engaged in art and manuscript forgery.

  Nancy Mazzuchelli (aka the “B.P.M. – Beautiful Perfect Mother”), who Tom has an unrealistic crush on, Uncle Nathan straightening that out, and who figures prominently at the novel’s denouement.

  Stanley Chowder, proprietor of the Chowder Inn in Vermont, which Tom and Nathan think of buying with Brightman, their idea of “Hotel Existence.”

  Honey Chowder, Stanley’s daughter, a 4^th grade unmarried teacher who invades Tom's life.

  Joyce, Nancy’s mother, a widow, who unexpectedly becomes Nathan’s lover.

 

There are more characters in the air, but these are the ones who Nathan, survivor of chemotherapy, keeper of “The Book of Human Folly,” his notebook of "every blunder, every pratfall, every embarrassment, every idiocy, every foible, and every inane act I have committed during my long and checkered career as a man,” comes to touch or rescue in some way.  He literally rescues his niece, Rory:  “Aurora chose to talk to me because I was the one who had gone down to North Carolina and saved her, and even if we had been out of contact for many years prior to that afternoon, I was nevertheless her uncle, her mother’s only brother, and she knew that she could trust me.  So we got together for lunch several times a week and talked, just the two of us, sitting at a back table in the New Purity Diner on Seventh Avenue, and little by little we became friends, in the same way her brother and I had become friends, and now that both of June’s children were back in my life, it was as if my baby sister had come alive in me again, and because she was the ghost who continued to haunt me, her children had now become my children.” 

 

234 Lincoln Place

I had such a personal investment in reading this book as I lived at 234 Lincoln Place for a couple of years.  I remember running from that brownstone apartment, frantically trying to get a cab on Flatbush Avenue at 2:00AM one night in late February, 1965 to get my ex wife who was in labor to the Brooklyn Hospital.  Auster mentions The Berkeley Carroll School at 181 Lincoln Place which would have been a half block from where we lived.  Such a school could not have existed then, before gentrification.  In fact, that is what stands out so strikingly reading the novel: the degree to which the neighborhood has changed just during my lifetime.  It’s become Brooklyn’s version of the Upper West Side of Manhattan, another one of my old abodes.  Many of the places he mentions, the diners, the bookstores, the schools, didn’t exist then.  But streets, such as Carroll Street, where our friends at the time, Morris Eaves and his wife lived, and 7^th avenue where we did our shopping, and of course Prospect Park, resonate.  The mention of Carroll Street reminded me of Morris, so I Googled my long forgotten acquaintance and school-mate who became a Professor and a well known William Blake scholar.  I thought I’d write him, sadly only to find his recent obituary. 

 

We moved from Park Slope as my ex wife wanted to go to graduate school after our son was born, so we moved back to downtown Brooklyn to be near LIU. 

 

I envy that Auster had developed deep roots there and his love of everything Park Slope glitters in this novel. 

 

Our protagonist/narrator, Nathan, after performing such healing reconciliations and introductions, has a medical emergency which again parallels one that deeply resonates.  He had all the symptoms and the pain of a heart attack.  And suddenly he’s in a hospital.  He was convinced his life was over. “I was in there with myself, rooting around with a kind of scrambled desperation, but I was also far away, floating above the bed, above the ceiling, above the roof of the hospital.  I know it doesn’t make any sense, but lying in that boxed-in enclosure with the beeping machines and the wires clamped to my skin was the closest I have come to being nowhere, to being inside myself and outside myself at the same time.  That’s what happens to you when you land in a hospital.  They take off your clothes, put you in one of those humiliating gowns, and suddenly you stop being yourself.”

 

In the ER and in his room, while tests are being made, other patients come and go; they face a common foe.  I’ve been there myself on a number of occasions, and I know the feeling which Auster painfully resurrects.  While lying there his mind works overtime, trying to make sense of all of it and he has an epiphany for a business: “to form a company that would publish books about the forgotten ones, to rescue the stories and facts and documents before they disappeared – and shape them into a continuous narrative, the narrative of a life” (Actually, a damn good idea as he envisions the financing to be a surcharge on a life insurance policy – something he knows something about.  In effect, it’s a vanity book, but fully paid for via the insurance policy.  Why not?)

 

“[O]nce the pages had been printed and the story had been bound between covers, they would have something to hold on to for the rest of their lives.  Not only that, but something that would outlive them, that would outlive us all.”…“One should never underestimate the power of books.”  I emphasize the last sentence as it aptly describes The Brooklyn Follies and I can imagine the author talking to me, as a motivational statement to finish my own memoir which I now have in draft form, dragging my heels to complete merely because of ‘who cares?’ outside family and friends.  I think Auster would say “who cares who cares?”

 

Spoiler alert here about the ending (although I knew it in advance – there is even some foreshadowing --and the knowledge only intensified the impact for me).  Luckily for Nathan, the presumed heart attack turned out to be merely an inflamed esophagus and he is discharged from the hospital and is on his way home early in the morning on Sept. 11, 2001, in a joyous mood about the future. “Overhead, the sky was the bluest of pure deep blues.” The conclusion of this early post 9/11 novel comes down like a sledgehammer.

 

There is a segue from the Auster book to the second, a work of non-fiction:  Auster was a baseball fan and in fact it was said he became a writer because as a kid he had an opportunity to get Willie Mays’ autograph but he didn’t have a pencil.  From there on in, he carried one, and a pad, and that began his writing career.  (No doubt the beginnings of “The Book of Human Folly”.) So as I was reading the Auster novel I was finishing what would most aptly be called an encyclopedic narrative, The New York Game, Baseball and the Rise of the New City, by Kevin Baker.  It really deserves its own full blown entry, but how does one review an encyclopedia?  It has New York City in common with Brooklyn Follies, and like the novel it makes a special personal connection.

 

The story of the unique, almost symbiotic development of the city and baseball is laid out by Baker as a Dickinsonian novel with a huge cast of characters.   “Whitman called it ‘America’s game; it has the snap, go, fling of the American atmosphere; it belongs as much to our institutions, fits into them as significantly as our laws; it is just as important in the total of our historic life’” “To Mark Twain it was ‘the very symbol, the outward and visible expression of the drive and push and rush and struggle of the raging, tearing, booming, 19th century’“.

 

Mirroring American life, the game’s owners were “in the game for the most American reasons: organize commercialize monopolize“

 

Before 1890 its development was a somewhat random event.  By then it began to resemble the game which we follow today and became our only major professional sport at the time.

 

In NY it was a multi ethnic affair, mirroring the city itself, German, Irish, even eleven known Jewish players, but like other sins of society, Afro Americans were not accepted, even in NY.  They began to develop their own leagues; many of those teams and players of major league caliber. 

 

As the sport grew, “the vertical city was born, “skyscrapers, bridges, churches, museums but perhaps the greatest creations during the beginning of the century were the city’s train stations.  “Built less than 10 years and a few blocks apart, “the new Beau Arts Grand Central terminal, lavish with statues and it’s soaring, 125 – foot ceiling adored with a gorgeous blue map of the zodiac. And across town, Charles McKim’s Pennsylvania station, a symphony and steel and honey marble, large enough, in the novelist, Thomas Wolf’s phrase ‘to hold the sound of time’ yet still a structure of measureless beauty.“

 

It’s all here in this definitive work, with all the heroes and miscreants that made up our national pastime and the building of the world’s greatest city.  The writing is spellbinding such as these two pages describing the glories of the city in the 1920’s.  The reader feels a part of a previous era:

 

Baseball, NY, and the 1950’s was my childhood.  On our way to school we’d argue about who is the best centerfielder in NY.  I said Mantle, a Dodger fan said Snyder, and the lone Giant friend said Mays.  He was right of course. 

 

Mays and Ruth are a category onto themselves.  The book ends before the Mays era though.  In fact I was finishing this book when the Say Hey Kid’s death was reported.  He began his career in the Negro leagues, playing briefly for the 1948 Birmingham Black Barons joining Ruth as the greatest baseball player ever.  Ruth‘s heroic feats and gargantuan appetite for everything life had to offer though are covered in detail in Baker’s book.

 

Negro Leagues Kansas City Monarchs 1920-1965

So many of the minor players can be found in its pages; such as Phil Rizzuto who went to my high school and was rejected by the Dodgers and Giants, but the New York Yankees recognized his fielding, bunting, and love of the game and the rest is history.  When Ann and I were having dinner at the Stadium Club sometime in the 1980s, and he was broadcasting with Bill White, they came in to have dinner before the game.  He called out to everyone that he had a headache and was wondering whether anyone had an aspirin.  My wife’s handy pill box came out while she exclaimed, “I have some, Phil.”  He came over to the table and I told him that my father went to Richmond Hill High School with him to which he exclaimed his patented “Holy Cow.”

 

I can’t remember another social / sports history that can compare to The New York Game, Baseball and the Rise of the New City, by Kevin Baker.  Holy Cow!

 

Baseball and a Sense of Normalcy

 

Beautiful.  The field.  The playing of the National Anthem.  The stuff we took for granted, not knowing what its absence would mean.  A year lost.

Minor league baseball has resumed.  I feel for the young players, their own dreams put on hold.  A year is an eternity to these kids.  They play the game with heart and professionalism.  One of the plays in Thursday night’s Class A ball game between the Jupiter Hammerheads and the Palm Beach Cardinals involved Jupiter starting pitcher Chris Mokma unleashing a wild pitch with a man on third, his rushing to home to cover it while the catcher caught the ball on a rebound from the backstop, firing it to Mokma, the ball arriving just as the Jupiter player slid into home.  It’s one thing for a catcher with his protective gear to tag out a runner from third but the pitcher is naked.  Mokma fearlessly dove at the runner for the out.  It just demonstrates heart playing the game.

Mokma gave up three runs quickly but then took command on the mound.

I like to “scout” watching minor league ball – which players might make it all the way to the majors and in a big way.  I’ve watched several in this ballpark mature and correctly called their future success, including Giancarlo Stanton (then Mike Stanton).  Perhaps I’ve witnessed another Stanton in the making , the Cardinal’s 6’5” third baseman Jordan Walker (only 18 years old!), hitting for power in his first few professional games and a .400 average.  He has quick hands at third, a strong arm, and went over the railing for a foul ball (showing heart!) and he will move on to the next level.  At 18, the Cards will probably hold him back for a couple of years.  But #37 reminds me of a young Stanton.

The “sleeper pick” is the Card’s starting pitcher, John Beller.  He was an undrafted free agent out of USC.  Just shows what a good scout can uncover.  I’m biased when it comes to Beller as he is a lefty (as am I ), and a crafty one.  Watching him feeds my old baseball fantasies.  He doesn’t have the overpowering fast ball, but his breaking stuff, makes his high 80’s fastball effective.  In his nearly 7 innings the other night he threw a 3 hit, 0 run game and with 12 strikeouts, demonstrating the effectiveness of his mixing his fastball with curves, changeups and a slider.  At “only” 5’11” he is smaller than most major league pitchers but so was lefty Bobby Schantz at 5’6” from my boyhood years, a pitcher who had great success because of similar tools as Beller.  Would be nice to see him go all the way, perhaps a Cinderella story in the making.

The final score (5-3 Cards) was meaningless to me.  Just to be out there again, under the canopy of a Florida night, watching the field of dreams of some future major leaguers, meant everything.

Baseball.  Another step towards normalcy.  Breathe.

The Pitch Captures the Essence of the Game

Everything you wanted to know about pitching but were afraid to ask: Tyler Kepner’s K; A History of Baseball in Ten Pitches

My hard cover collection of books is mostly by novelists and short-story writers I have admired over the years as well as hard-to-toss gems from my years as a publisher and even some reaching back into my college days. 

So, it was unusual for me to spend the 20 bucks or so for a baseball book, but I did so as it addresses the heart of the game, pitching, and as a former sandlot pitcher in my salad days, a crafty lefty as I thought of myself, using “’junk” pitches to get guys out who were accustomed to seeing only fast balls from my contemporaries, I thought this book would be ideal to feed boyhood fantasies.  Having played the game adds to the appreciation of what (I think, but I’m prejudiced) is the most perfect game invented, mirroring the game of life itself.

I liked the way Tyler Kepner describes his history, devoting “a chapter apiece to the fastball, the curveball, the sinker, the slider, the cutter, the changeup, the splitter, the screwball, the knuckleball and the spitball.”  Finally I thought to myself, here is a book about baseball from the inside, not just players recollecting about the old days, but much about strategy and the execution of these pitches. 

I threw some of them myself, although back then, and I’m talking the 1950’s, we didn’t have the variety of names for all of them and when I was throwing my fastball (which given my size was not very fast), it was with a hope I could place it accurately.  Mostly, I relied on a curve ball, slider and the little thrown and understood screwball.

Kepner does not cover the natural movement of a lefty’s fastball.  Lefty pitchers simply have more movement on their fastballs away from right handed hitters, although he does acknowledge that “because lefties are harder to find, they tend to get more chances to stick….Lefty relievers invariably need a breaking ball that moves away from a lefty hitter; once they have that to go with a fastball, there’s usually little need for a third pitch.”  Well I did need a #3 and my screwball was simply a more exaggerated variation off my fastball, at a slower speed and a bigger break.  In effect it was my changeup.  My bread and butter pitch to right-hander hitters, the big decision being when and how often in a batter’s pitch count to throw it.

One thing that adequately comes across in Kepner’s book is one of the reasons I could never move beyond high school with my pitching skills.  The bigger you are, the harder you could throw and generally the larger your hands. 

Small-in-stature pitchers were and are a rarity. No wonder my idol as a kid was 5’6” Bobby Shantz who played for a number of teams in the 50’s and 60’s, including the NY Yankees.  He pitched with guile and a great curve ball and earned the MVP award in 1952, when I started to follow him, with 24 wins.  He ended his career with a 3.38 ERA which, today, would get you a $10 million a year contract over multi years.  Bobby never saw that kind of $$ and Kepner’s book doesn’t mention him although he does address the size issue and, not surprisingly, under the screwball chapter.

Left hander Daniel Ray Herrera of the Reds “made 131 appearances from 2008 to 2011, and without the screwball, he would have made none.  He used it because he could not throw a changeup and it distinguished him just enough to give him his modest career.  Herrera’s quirky profile fit the pitch: 5 foot 6, and at the time of his debut, no pitcher had been shorter in more than 50 years,” perhaps a veiled reference to Shantz.

Of course, he can’t cover everyone, and that is not why I was slightly disappointed by this book.  Maybe I was expecting too much, an easy to follow and interesting narrative of these ten pitches, how they’re thrown, and the strategy of throwing them when they are thrown.  Kepner does address these issues, but in an encyclopedic, almost academic way.  After all he interviewed some 300 people and this book is distilled from those interviews, almost chaotically, and a little repetitiously I thought.  It was nice to hear the inside stories of so many of the pitchers I admired over the years, but this book often fails to be a coherent narrative.  Sometimes it reads more like a dissertation without the footnotes.

Nonetheless, being so familiar with the game itself, there were revelatory elements.  What especially stood out is the “hand me down” nature of throwing these pitches, how one generation passed on the skill to others.  And that is part of the mystery of pitching as well; each pitcher modifies these pitches to fit their unique hands, delivery, and to compliment their other pitches.  No pitcher throws all ten and few throw and hold the pitch the exact same way.   This is why it’s an art as much as a science.

All pitchers though in the majors need some kind of fast ball even if it is “only” in the high 80 mph range, to make their other bread and butter pitches more effective.   I used to experiment with fork balls, splitters but my hands were just too small to hold those pitches properly.  This comes through so clearly in Kepner’s account:  if you want to pitch in the big leagues, throwing hard and having large hands are clear advantages. 

There are anecdotes galore in this book, a gold mine of information, but trying to piece them altogether into the narrative I had expected was frustrating.  Still, I now have it as a reference work. Play ball!

Maybe There is Hope

Why?  Because baseball continues to reflect and give voice to the American Dream.  Work hard, have talent, succeed, in spite of ethnicity or humble beginnings.  It stands as a bulwark against the tide of dystopian xenophobia promoted by no less than the President of the United States.  It is rule based and while it has succumbed to instant replay challenges, pitch clocks, and exotic statistical metrics, it has essentially changed to remain the same.

There used to be a similar familiarity about the checks and balances of our three branches of government, comforting as a citizen, but we now have a disrupter in the White House, someone who has no sense of history, a disdain for culture, and who measures everything in clicks, sound bites, and winning and losing.  And now he is set to ignore an equal branch of government, Congress, and apparently Republicans there are willing to be accomplices, their sacred vow “to affirm support for the Constitution” relegated to mere hollow words.  If baseball was played this way, players might as well refuse to return to the dugout after strike three is called, saying the people want to see hitting, so let’s make it 4 or 5 strikes before one is called out.  Just tweet it and it shall be.

The recent political developments would normally envelop my blog with multiple entries, as well as more on gun control because of the recent tragic Colorado school shooting, However,with the publication of my book, Waiting for Someone to Explain It, I vowed it would serve as a cathartic statement on such topics, thus allowing my writing life to return to some kind of new normalcy as well.

“As American as apple pie” frequently gets conflated with baseball.  The baseball of my youth was mostly all white players with Jackie Robinson breaking the color line in the National League in 1947 and Larry Doby the American League a few months later.  As an adult I once sat next to Roy Campanella  (who came up to the Dodgers the year after Robinson) at a luncheon; it was sometime in the 1980s.  He was in a wheel chair because of the automobile accident that ended his playing years.  We briefly talked about the old days, not about race, but about baseball.  He was interested in my childhood dreams of pitching but of course I tried to turn the discussion to him, but he was reticent in that regard, I think there was an inherent sadness about missing his buddies, and his last years in baseball. After Jackie Robinson he was the second black player inducted into the Hall of Fame.  I remember his humanity and putting up with me and my questions.

I think of him from time to time especially as the landscape of American baseball changes to reflect our immigrant heritage.  It is truly an international sport and it is no more apparent than here in the United States.  One wonders, if baseball could change and still be the great sport of yesteryear, why not America?  Isn’t that what it means to “make America great?”

And it is nowhere more apparent than in the Miami Marlins’ farm system.  As the Marlins’ CEO (and one of my favorite Yankees of my adult life) Derek Jeter said: "We want Miami to be the destination for top international talent.  This organization should reflect the diversity of the South Florida community."  And indeed it does.

Although we’ve already seen a few Jupiter Hammerheads’ games this season, the Marlins’ Class A+ team in Jupiter, this was the first opportunity to write about one and although Wednesday night’s game involved dropping a 5-1 decision to the St. Lucie Mets, it was notable in other ways.

The first thing that caught my eye after the singing of the National Anthem was the image of the American flag in the background with the Hammerhead’s pitcher, Edward Cabrera, standing in the foreground waiting for the sign.  

He joins the ranks of players from the Dominican Republic, boasting probably more professional baseball players per capita than any place on earth.  We’ve truly, rightfully assimilated the best of the best on the field.  We just need to do so as a nation of citizens.

I was looking forward to seeing him pitch; a highly touted, skinny 6’4” ballplayer who can routinely throw in the high 90s.  His young, 21 year-old body still has time to fill out and will make him even more formidable.   During his last start he had struck out 13 and now has more than 20 scoreless innings to go along with his 1.50 ERA.  While he pitched well for 2 innings (scoreless, and 2 K’s), apparently he had a fingernail problem and had to leave the game.  But one sees how he gets his speed from his whip like delivery.  Edward Cabrera is a player to watch for MLB action, or at least moving up a notch in the minors this year.

He was replaced by Daniel Castano, a lefty who caught my fancy, my being a lefty with baseball dreams which never went beyond my teenage years.  When the Miami Marlins traded away Marcell Ozuna, they got three highly ranked minor leaguers and sort of as an afterthought the left-handed pitcher Castano was thrown in.  He’s labored in the minors but has good control.  His low base on ball to strike out ratio is an attribute of a more mature pitcher.

In five innings he allowed five hits and four runs, although two were unearned, and he struck out five. His ERA is still around 4.00, but his mechanics were powerful, mustering up speed and good breaking stuff.  He was at the low end of the draft (picked in the 19^th round) and he is one of the “old guys” on the team at the age of 25.  He’s listed at 6’4” but seems smaller as at 230 lbs he is stocky.  Somehow I think this guy has some chance of making the majors.  Here he is in action:

But that is not the end of the multicultural story.  The shortstop Jose Devers, only 19 years old, is another Dominican.  Disappointingly, my New York Yankees traded him to the Marlins.  He is now one of the high ranking shortstops in the minors, hitting around .370.  If the name sounds familiar, he’s the cousin of Red Sox third baseman Rafael Devers.  How cool would that have been if the NYY held on to him for the Sox / NYY rivalry?  During Wednesday night’s game he went 2 for 4. 

Also on the team is the highly touted 22 year old Cuban Victor Victor Mesa who the Marlins signed for about $5 million, along with his 17-year-old brother, Victor Mesa, Jr. for $1 million. To my knowledge, the latter is yet to play minor league ball, but his older brother looks like he has the right stuff.  They’re sons of the famous Cuban baseball player – you guessed the name, Victor Mesa.  Here’s Victor Victor at bat:

Finally that game was the first rehab assignment for one of the Marlin’s regulars, Garrett Cooper, who unfortunately made a bush league error playing left field and seemed to have difficulty getting back into the grove, but the last I looked he was batting over .500 so I can only assume he’ll be joining the parent club soon.

It was one of those special Florida nights, a cool breeze and on the field the kind of multiculturalism which is to be embraced, not feared.