When author Del Jones recently reached out to me on reviewing his book "At The Bat" (see review in previous post) he also mentioned that he was going to write about the availability and thoughts from various people on baseball fiction. He did talk to several people, including myself, and the article he produced is very good. I am happy to share the following article on baseball fiction.
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GOODREADS 10 GREATEST BASEBALL NOVELS OF ALL TIME
By Del Leonard Jones
Baseball more than any sport inspires wonderful writing, says Tim
Wiles, former director of research and the public services librarian for the
National Baseball Hall of Fame Library.
“There are dozens of great baseball novels, if not hundreds,”
Wiles says, and the game also has inspired a mountain of short fiction, poetry
and essays. Baseball contributes in Ruthian ways to many non-baseball novels,
including The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Earnest Hemingway’s The
Old Man and the Sea and The Catcher in the Rye, by J.D. Salinger.
Salinger even appears in the W.P. Kinsella novel Shoeless Joe.
Justin McGuire, host
of the Baseball by the Book podcast, agrees that good baseball fiction abounds
and cites authors Robert Coover, Phillip Roth, Bernard Malamud and Don DeLillo.
“It’s noteworthy that in 2020, two women published excellent
baseball novels,” McGuire says and he recommends The Cactus League, by
Emily Nemens and The Resisters," by Gish Jen, a novel that examines
baseball in a dystopian future when most baseball novels travel to the past.
McGuire’s favorite is The Southpaw, which takes a more grounded approach
than books that mythologize the game, such as The Natural and Shoeless
Joe. The Southpaw is funny, filled with drama, and treats baseball
as a sport rather than a symbol, McGuire says.
Matthew DiBiase, formerly a historian with the National Archives,
interviews authors of sports books on his podcast “The Packaged Tourist Show.” He
says If I Never Get Back is his favorite baseball novel.
“Baseball is the literary sport,” Wiles says. “Beats the heck out
of all the other team sports combined.”
Some dedicated readers beg to differ. There have been 15
unassisted triple plays in the Major Leagues but Lance Smith, who has reviewed over 700 books on his website “The
Guy Who Reviews Sports Books,” suggest that great baseball novels
may be more rare. Smith says 95 percent of what he reads is nonfiction. His
favorite novel is The Natural, but he also enjoyed Saving Babe Ruth by
Tom Swyers, a legal thriller based on a true story, not about the Great
Bambino, but about a hapless league of players who have aged out of Little
League.
“Had Mr. Swyers not reached out to me, I never would have known
about it,” Smith says. Same with At The Bat: The Strikeout That Shamed
America. “Most authors who write in this niche are self-publishing or work
with small publishers and don’t have the marketing machines that authors like
John Grisham have to promote books.”
“Why craft fictional stories when you have the myth of Babe Ruth’s
called shot?” says Brina
Gonzalez, voted the No. 44 best book reviewer by the 20 million members of
the Goodreads website. She has reviewed 116 baseball books, mostly nonfiction.
“The 1951 shot heard round the world was either heart breaking or euphoric
depending on which team you rooted for.”
Baseball novels have often been noticed by Hollywood. Bang The
Drum Slowly, published in 1956, was made into a TV show starring Paul
Newman, then into a 1973 movie starring Robert De Niro. The Natural,
published in 1952, became a Robert Redford film success in 1984.
That inspired Kevin Costner’s Field of Dreams in 1989 from the
1980 novel Shoeless Joe. Grisham’s 2012 novel Calico Joe is in
development with George Clooney expected to direct. Critically acclaimed The
Art of Fielding is also being adapted into a movie.
There are 112 books on the Goodreads list of best baseball novels.
The latest addition to the Top 10 is At The Bat: The Strikeout That Shamed
America, a story I wrote that is built upon the 1888 poem Casey At The Bat.
The novel’s appeal is an unlikely narrator, the umpire the fans want so badly
to kill. As with baseball novel The Celebrant, At The Bat is an
examination of the fall of the proud hero and the rise of the unexpectedly
humble.
Among Wiles’ recommended baseball novels are The Brothers K,
Heart of the Order, Season of the Owl, The Natural, and Man on
Spikes. His favorite is The Iowa Baseball Confederacy, by the
Canadian W.P. Kinsella. “It's a novel of magical realism, and everything
I love about baseball is in it,” Wiles says.
Shoeless Joe is the favorite baseball novel of
Gonzalez, but she says it is the rare author who can compete with the true
stories of baseball.
Hopefully, that won’t stop novelists from trying. So far, two of
the Top 10 have been written in the 21st century.
“Even as baseball recedes in the national imagination, authors are
finding new ways to explore the topic,” McGuire says.
Here are the best baseball novels of all time as ranked by
Goodreads readers.
1.
The Natural by
Bernard Malamud (1952)
The concept is great, a player injured by a woman’s gunfire at 19
returns as a 35-year-old rookie phenom to take a hapless team to the top of the
standings. Baseball scenes are written well, but Gonzalez is among those who
say the movie is better than the book, which is full of dark characters. Unlike
the movie, the book does not end with fireworks and Roy Hobbs’ shattering of
the stadium lights with his bat Wonderboy. Smith says the characters are a
complicated mess who, when thrown together with baseball, create a great story.
2. Shoeless
Joe by W.P. Kinsella (1980)
On the other hand, several great scenes from this book were left
out of the movie Field of Dreams and readers tend to think the book is better.
Many rank Shoeless Joe ahead of The Natural. A struggling Iowa
farmer obeys the voice of Shoeless Joe Jackson of the 1919 Black Sox Scandal.
“If you build it, he will come,” Ray Kinsella hears, and insanely plows under
his corn field to build a diamond for the ghostly legends.
3.
The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach (2011)
Critics say it is much like baseball: 500-plus pages about a
college team that crawl toward extra innings. Literary critics, like true
baseball fans, shrug and say it’s worth the time invested. It’s great art,
though the reader might need a seventh-inning stretch. The perfect fielder at
last makes a throwing error that hospitalizes his roommate. The most successful
baseball novel in a long time because it has crossed over to the connoisseurs
of literary fiction.
4. If
I Never Get Back by Darryl Brock (1990)
Like Shoeless Joe, this is a time travel book except the
narrator does the traveling. He steps off a train platform and from a sad life
of divorce and into 1869. Just as At The Bat: The Strikeout That Shamed
America pulls in real-life characters, If I Never Get Back pulls in
the 1869 Cincinnati Red Stockings, Mark Twain and a love affair with a woman of
the past. Separated in history by 19 years, the two novels reveal a post Civil
War America and the changing game of baseball as it morphs into a professional
sport.
5.
The Celebrant by Eric Rolfe Greenberg (1983)
Go back in time once more to the days of New York Giants pitcher
Christy Mathewson and, toward the end, great prose about the 1919 Black Sox
Scandal. As with Mighty Casey, this novel is much about the pitfalls of hero
worship and the burdens of being a hero. Other historical baseball novels
portray the life of Irish immigrants. This one revolves around a family of
Jewish immigrant jewelers.
6. Bang The Drum Slowly by Mark
Harris (1956)
Harris is the only author of two books on this list, though
Kinsella rightly deserves to be another. Bang The Drum Slowly is a
sequel to The Southpaw in a four-book series. Pitcher Henry Wiggen
(played by Michael Moriarty in the movie) returns and has a bromance with his
slow-talking, disrespected catcher Bruce Pearson (Robert De Niro), who is
diagnosed with terminal cancer. The two keep it a secret from teammates and the
world. A heart-tugger.
7. The Universal
Baseball Association., Inc. by Robert Coover (1968)
True fantasy baseball. A reclusive accountant goes home each night
to play a baseball dice game he invented. Perfect games are pitched and players
killed by bean balls on a kitchen table where J. Henry Waugh is the god of
fate. A change of pace among baseball novels, quite different than the others
on this list.
8. The Brothers K by
David James Duncan (1992)
One more look back, but to the upheaval of the 1960s and the
Vietnam War. Once again, a baseball player’s career is ended by an accident and
he raises a family in tension. An examination of faith. The mother is a
Seventh-day Adventist; one son obsesses over eastern religions. Then, there is
baseball, the religion of so many. An emotional story that runs down the same
lane as The Art of Fielding.
9. At The
Bat: The Strikeout That Shamed America by Del Leonard Jones (2020)
Casey, though worshiped, is a flawed super-hero. The unknown
umpire, though despised and on the spectrum, calls balls and strikes. Stir into
the Mudville mix reporter Nellie Bly, Mouse Mathews (the winningest pitcher not
in the Hall of Fame), the racist Cap Anson and Moses Fleetwood Walker, the last
African-American to play Major League Baseball (1884) for a long, long time.
Anyone who knows the poem knows the ending. Well, not exactly, and that’s where
shame breaks across the plate and into the catcher’s glove.
10. The Southpaw by Mark
Harris (1953)
First of a four-book series, rookie pitcher Henry Wiggin takes the
reader from high school to the World Series with Huckleberry Finn-like language
and a confrontation of racism and segregation. A coming of age story, as are
many of the novels above.
Del Leonard Jones wrote more than 300 cover stories at USA Today
and was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in beat reporting. At
The Bat: The Strikeout That Shamed America is his
second novel. His first, The
Cremation of Sam McGee, was also built upon a 19th-century poem. He has written the
leadership book Advice
From the Top: 1001 Bits of Business Wisdom from the Great Leaders of the Recent
Past. He can be reached here
on LinkedIn.
