On a Saturday earlier this month, I realized that I was pIanning to spend the weekend in Hudson, N.Y., just about the time that one of my favorite writers, MLB’s official historian John Thorn, was going to deliver his annual post-season wrap-up of the baseball season just past, right across the Hudson River in his hometown of Catskill, so I promptly invited myself to attend John’s talk. I’d never met him, though we’ve communicated from time to time, but he welcomed me warmly to attend. I think I’ll arrange my future weekends in Hudson around his schedule of talks, which apparently are followed by long and loose Q. and A. sessions from those in attendance.
We had a flat tire en route across the Hudson, so we walked in at just about the point, early on, when he was quoting Warren Spahn on hitting being timing and pitching being the art of upsetting timing. (The transcript is reproduced here: https://ourgame.mlblogs.com/bullpenning-sabermetrics-and-the-revenge-of-the-nerds-5a026e3ee2a1, though I wouldn’t swear that John stuck very closely to the script—seems to me I heard long sections that do not appear in this transcript, and I don’t remember the numerical table of swing-and-miss percentages being recited at all.) He spoke on the general subject of sabermetrics, and how it has (and hasn’t) changed the game, more or less the very subject I’ve been working on. Among the interesting opinions John spouted as he fielded questions from his audience was that he wasn’t concerned about the length of games, per se, so much as he was concerned about the pace of games.
"Why would two hours of enjoyable baseball," he turned the question back on his questioner, "be better than three hours of enjoyable baseball?"
The answer, it seemed to me, was obvious: it wouldn’t be. A three-hour game that demanded a viewer’s constant attention would be better than the two-hour version. The problem is that the current, three-hour+ model is jam-packed with static moments and all sorts of downtime, not that the game’s length is inherently problematic.
I posed only one question. I had written to him a few days earlier, telling him that I was working on a piece for BJOL (a piece I’ll publish in another day or so), provocatively enough entitled "How Sabermetrics Has Ruined Baseball," asking if he had found a rebuttal to my thesis. He mildly observed that my title was "clickbait," especially for this readership, but he said it with approval, knowing that engaging (and often enraging) readers is every writer’s prime duty. (This concept was also voiced by one of Roger Kahn’s editors, who defined a good column as "Entertaining but just short of libel.") John’s rebuttal was also mildly voiced: baseball is cyclical, he said, but my article projected that sabermetrics would continue changing baseball in the precise direction it has been changing in, whereas in his view, things like exceptionally high pitch counts that derive from sabermetrics may well reverse their patterns in another decade, cyclically returning the game to one prizing exceptionally aggressive batting styles. We could see low-pitch count games again, and then where would my thesis be?
I didn’t buy it, but it was a thought I hadn’t previously entertained. I will explicate my "ruination" thesis at length in the article itself, but rather than introduce that piece with a digressive literary discussion, I’ll just put the digressive intro here. In the Q. & A. session, one of his other answers had concerned baseball fiction, which he asserted really didn’t exist. All of baseball fiction, he confidently stated, was terrible, awful, unreadable stuff, with the exception of The Universal Baseball Association, J. Henry Waugh, Proprietor by Robert Coover.
I happen to admire this book inordinately. I have a particularly fond memory of its author, whom I introduced to a college audience on the evening of October 29, 1986. That date sticks so precisely in my memory because earlier that day, my oldest child was born. (My suggestion to name her "Mookie" got outvoted. We ended up naming her after her mother's favorite Jane Austen heroine and my favorite Confederate general.) I raced from the hospital to meet Coover for dinner before he gave his reading, arriving a few minutes late to the restaurant. When I told Coover my excuse, he beamed at me and inscribed the copy I’d brought of his novel The Public Burning—not to me, but to my newborn daughter, effusively welcoming her to life on planet Earth. (My copy of U.B.A. was a lowly paperback, and remains unautographed.) Since that dinner, Coover has been one of the authors I’m fondest of. But fond as I am, I couldn’t quite accept John Thorn’s flat decree that, with this one exception, there has never been a decent novel written about baseball.
I suggested that perhaps Bang the Drum Slowly by Mark Harris was pretty good, but that just resulted in John Thorn’s formidable array of eyebrows scrunching up on me. "The Southpaw," Harris’ previous baseball book, "was better," he told me, but it still stunk. And as much as John admires Philip Roth, "The Great American Novel was the worst thing he ever wrote. Or maybe The Breast was worse." At this point, I had to end the conversation: Roth has written many books, most of them excellent, with a few stinkers, The Breast and The Great American Novel not among them. I just published an essay on 1970s fiction, praising The G.A.N. to the skies, and when I taught a course in the contemporary novel, I tried to make the case that The Breast might be the most overlooked work of American fiction in the entire 20th century, the book Kafka might have written if he’d been born in New Jersey and were a talented stand-up comedian.
This was not an easy case to make: The Breast is (I argued) a profoundly tragic fantasy about a man who finds himself transformed overnight into a gigantic female breast, which everyone in his life (including the reader) finds hilarious. Visitors to his hospital room, where he lies, helpless, blind, terrified and mystified, start out amazed and somber at the sight of him, but end up cracking up in equally helpless paroxysms of laughter. So the narrator pleads with the reader to take his complaint seriously, but the images and the stories he tells are so comical that even the reader (even this reader) couldn’t quite empathize fully with the narrator’s plight. I mean, a giant tit? Inexplicably formed out of a man’s body? Ridiculous!! So I (as Roth intended) could not, finally, extend my empathy to his narrator, and that is Roth's human tragedy, the need we all share to distance ourselves from others' distress. Suffering as badly as anyone in his bizarre situation might be, he finds his plight is made much worse by the refusal of humans to take it seriously. Anyway, this interpretation became a very tough sell for me, in that my classroom was mostly populated by 20-year-old female English majors, who were not inclined to take their male professor’s assessment of a male author’s depiction of a male protagonist’s problem being turned into a female body part as anything other than grossly insulting to their gender. Since then, I’ve kept my evaluations of Roth’s genius mostly to myself.
Including John Thorn’s assessment, even harsher than that of the most doctrinaire feminist student in my class. It wasn’t a day for arguing, anyway—it was a beautiful fall afternoon in the Catskills, the kind of day that Rip Van Winkle got lost in the autumnal woods for a few decades, and I had plenty more examples of baseball fiction to propose, which I’m sure he could have shot down one by one. (He already had airily dismissed The Natural by Malamud as trash, and a few other examples of baseball writing that questioners had suggested as decent novels, short stories, and poems.) Besides, other people wanted to have a word with him, so I dropped it, and looked out over the vista of the Hudson River from a height, the very definition of "picturesque." When I mentioned that we wanted to visit the studio of Thomas Cole, a 19th century Hudson River School painter, that was just up the street from the 1837 Greek Revival mansion (http://www.greatnortherncatskills.com/arts-culture/beattie-powers-place ) in which he gave his talk, John had told us where we could find Cole’s grave, a few blocks from his studio, as well, so we skedaddled to take in the sights. I recommend a pilgrimage to Catskill to anyone who finds himself in upstate New York next November. His annual talks are free and open to the public.