John Malamud Baseball Analysis

Jake Kaufman
Kevork Bardakjian
AAPTIS 474
20 March 2012
Baseball’s Place in American Literary Tradition and Culture As American culture has evolved through time, the game of baseball has remained a largely unchanged staple in our society. It is a game so culturally revered, so quintessentially American, that it has been forever dubbed our national pastime. Baseball also has an illustrious literary tradition that surpasses simply writing about a sport. The stories told on and off the field by some very distinguished twentieth-century American writers have undoubtedly carved out their own place in American literary tradition and have used the game as a metaphor for American childhood and innocence. John Thorn says it best in his 1995 essay
“Baseball: Our Game,” “Baseball is not a conventional industry. It belongs neither to the players nor management, but to all of us. It is our national pastime, our national symbol, and our national treasure” (Thorn). The first classic and perhaps still the most celebrated piece of baseball literature is Bernard Malamud’s 1952 novel The natural. The story’s protagonist, Roy Hobbs, is a young pitching phenom from California that is set on being remembered as one of the greatest baseball players of all time. He takes a train to Chicago to try out for the Chicago Cubs along with the best hitter in baseball at the time, Walter Whambold, and a few others. On the way up when the train takes a short stop, Whambold challenges Hobbs to strike him out, which he miraculously accomplishes. When the group gets to Chicago, Hobbs is shot by a woman they were traveling with who was lunatically obsessed with shooting the best baseball player in the world.
The story then moves forward sixteen years and tells of the now 34 year old Hobbs who has just signed on as a hitter with the last place New York Knights. He takes over as the starting right fielder after the Knight’s star player dies and inexplicably leads the team to a 17-game winning streak, just one game away from capturing the National League pennant. Along the way, however, he gets romantically involved with two women, the team manager’s niece Memo Paris and a mysterious Knights fan named Iris Lemon. When Hobbs finds out that Lemon is a grandmother, though, he turns his attention squarely to Paris. Because Hobbs was playing so well, a salary raise would be required to keep him on the Knights for many years to come, a price the team owner was not willing to pay. To try and get Hobbs off the payroll, the owner bribes Hobbs to lose the final game of the season so he could be released, which Hobbs initially does not accept. Before the final game of the season that could clinch the pennant, Hobbs collapses and wakes up in the hospital where his doctor tells him that he can play in one final game and then must retire if he wants to live. With a drastically changed life outlook, Hobbs accepts an offer of $35,000 from the owner to intentionally lose the final game and looks forward to starting a life with Paris. That night he is unable to sleep and reads a letter from Lemon, but throws it away when he reads the word “grandmother.” During an at bat in the final game the next day, he fouls a ball into the stands where it strikes and injures Lemon, and she tells him that she is pregnant with his child. He quickly decides that he will start a life with her and with a chance to win in the final at bat of the game, Hobbs strikes out ending the Knights’ season. After the game he finds Paris in the stands and tells her that he is leaving her. She fires a gun at him and then almost kills herself before Hobbs takes the gun from her. The story ends with Hobbs leaving the stadium that evening and seeing a newspaper headline that accuses him of throwing the game. A reporter asks him to say it’s not true, but he just breaks down and cries. In this novel, Malamud is able to brilliantly intertwine baseball and the natural loss of innocence that comes with growing up in our society.
Hobbs starts as a starry-eyed kid who dreams of making a living playing a game, but as life’s distractions of money and women enter his world, they pull him away from baseball and American innocence. Malamud’s writing style allows him to beautifully use baseball as a mechanism for describing the American quintessence. Hobbs, like many common men, is not perfect but strives for greatness. He has a self-centered desire for wealth and an upscale lifestyle which eventually lead to his ruin at the end of the novel. At the beginning of the story when he is still young, Hobbs says, “What I mean, […] is I feel that I have got it in me—that I am due for something very big. I have to do it” (Malamud). But as his life progresses and he grows up with American culture and traditions, Malamud uses baseball as a metaphor for Hobbs’ very “natural” progression through adulthood. This passage is when Hobbs first opens up to Lemon about his past: “‘What happened fifteen years ago, Roy?’ Roy felt like crying, yet he told her—the first one he ever had. ‘I was just a kid and got shot by this batty dame on the night before my tryout, and after that I just couldn’t get started again. I lost my confidence and everything I did flopped.’ He said this was the shame in his life, that his fate, somehow, had always been the same (on the train going nowhere)—defeat
in sight of his goal” (Malamud). This was the first time Hobbs ever opened up about his past and we see how he feels his baseball career had mirrored his efforts to improve his life—a flop. As he continues to talk to Iris, she imparts some wisdom on him in an attempt to justify the ever failing efforts he has put towards becoming a baseball legend. She says, “We have two lives, Roy, the life we learn with and the life we live with after that. Suffering is what brings us towards happiness” (Malamud). Harry Sylvester very eloquently sums up the message of the book in his 1952 review for the New York Times. He writes, “All the story is here of a natural man—hurt badly by his first love, recovering late for his profession, almost achieving greatness, then distracted or betrayed by people or objects or events all equated with elements in our environment. In his telling and always deliberate use of the vernacular alternated with passages evocative and almost lyrical, in his almost entirely successful relation of baseball in detail to the culture which elaborated it, Malamud has made a brilliant and unusual book” (Sylvester). Another classic baseball novel, W.P. Kinsella’s 1982 piece Shoeless Joe (the inspiration for the film Field of Dreams) clearly uses baseball to represent childhood, growing up in the heart of America, and following your dreams. The story is based around the main character Ray Kinsella and his family who live on a farm in Iowa. The farm is facing foreclosure and one day when working in the field, Ray hears a voice that repeatedly tells him “If you build it, they will come.” Against the financial advise from his brother-in-law, he does not sell the land and instead builds a baseball field on his farm with the firm belief that they will be able to save it. At first nothing happens and Ray faces financial devastation, but one day the legendary and dead Shoeless Joe Jackson appears on the field with the seven other players convicted in the famous 1919 “Black Sox scandal” that involved fixing the World Series for money. He is able to play baseball again with these late legends that appeared out of the cornfield. Later he hears more voices saying, “Ease his pain” and “Go the distance,” which prompt Ray to embark on a countrywide journey that involves finding the reclusive writer J.D. Salinger and allowing an unheralded young baseball player one more shot at playing with his childhood heroes. In doing this, Kinsella adds a few more magical elements to the storyline with some time travel and highly coincidental visions, but the trip serves to reaffirm his love for the game of baseball and all it represents in his life. When he gets back from his trip, Ray’s brother-in-law can finally see the players out on the field and agrees that they should not sell the farm. The story ends with an endless stream of cars driving towards the illuminated field and saving Ray from financial ruin. As the saying goes, “if you build it they will come.”
In this book, Kinsella uses baseball as a representative of what is purely American, true, and simple. It is seen as the constant in our lives that will always be a source of joy, never wavering. With the financial worries looming over the entire story, Kinsella shows that he realizes that in real life one cannot hold onto this game forever, but with the story of Ray searching for the joy that baseball brought him throughout childhood and his life, Kinsella is able to portray baseball as a staple in our society that is classic of one’s upbringing, especially in rural areas such as Iowa. Kinsella writes, “Baseball is the most perfect of games, solid, true, pure and precious as diamonds. If only life were so simple. Within the baselines anything can happen. Tides can reverse; oceans can open. That’s why they say, ‘the game is never over until the last man is out.’ Colors can change, lives can alter, anything is possible in this gentle, flawless, loving game” (Kinsella). In fact, for Ray baseball has become the essence of his very existence. He says, “A ball park at night is more like a church than a church” (Kinsella). Again, with his magic-realism writing style, readers cannot literally interpret this to mean that baseball is a religion and common men can depend on it for their livelihoods (just as one cannot expect to hear mysterious voices in cornfields or play baseball with the ghosts of legendary major leaguers), but simply that the importance of baseball to the fabric of our society is palpable and the game is culturally admired. This book is wildly popular and a staple in American baseball literature because it reminds readers of the simplicity of the game and what makes baseball is truly great.
As more time has passed, a new trend of statistical baseball literature that aims to analyze the game in a concrete way and calculate player value has emerged.
Probably the most well-known and critiqued piece of baseball literature in the past decade is Michael Lewis’ Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game which he wrote in 2003. Lewis tells the story of the 2002 Oakland Athletics and their general manager Billy Beane. The A’s were held to a very low payroll and competing with teams like the New York Yankees who spent about three times as much money seemed impossible, but Beane employed radical personnel evaluation methods with the help of Bill James’ revolutionary statistical analysis method called sabremetrics. Using these tools, Beane was able to guide the A’s to the 2002 playoffs against all odds (Lewis). Moneyball has been the subject of both strong criticism and acclaim. Its supporters believe that the book launched a new age of talent evaluation and essentially changed how the game of baseball is viewed for the better. The critics of Lewis’ book say that it dehumanized the game. Beane’s evaluation methods are almost exclusively based off of statistics, not what he sees on the field. Lewis even writes about how Beane doesn’t like to watch the games because it may skew his commitment to his statistics. Whatever the opinions are on Moneyball, it has clearly made an impact on how teams are operating currently and has become an important part of baseball literature.
Just as baseball literature changed, society changes through time and new ideas lead to new changes in both the game of baseball and our culture.
In my opinion, Moneyball does not pose a threat to the innocence baseball represents and the place it has in American culture and literature. No matter how the game is analyzed at the professional level, the American tradition that is baseball still remains. Kids will still play catch with their fathers and be excited about getting their first glove. Neighborhood pickup games will still occupy local parks in the summer. And cities will still hang on every pitch when the hometown nine makes it to the playoffs. For many kids in this country baseball is the single greatest tradition of childhood. When those same kids grow into adults, baseball will always hold a special place in their hearts and in turn will always be culturally revered in this country as the national pastime. Even today when American football gets the highest television ratings and most revenue, there is no doubt that baseball is America’s most literary sport. The special place it holds in American society allows it to contribute to this country’s literary tradition in a unique way. Baseball is a major representation of growing up in America and childhood innocence, and these themes are clearly represented in baseball literature which adds to America’s literary tradition.

Works Cited
Kinsella, W.P. Shoeless Joe. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1999. Print.
Lewis, Michael. Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game. New York: W.W. Norton, 2003. Print.
Malamud, Bernard. The natural. New York: Ferrar, Straus and Giroux, 1952. Print.
Sylvester, Harry. "With Greatest of Ease." New York Times 26 Aug. 1952. 1997. Web. 13 Mar. 2012.
Thorn, John. Baseball: Our Game. New York: Penguin, 1995. Print.