The Great American Novel (7 page)

Students of L. and fans, the story I have to tell—prefigured as it is in the wanderings of Huckleberry Finn and Nigger Jim, and the adventures in ostracism of Hester Prynne, the Puritans' pariah—is of the once-mighty Mundys, how they were cast out of their home ball park in Port Ruppert, their year of humiliation on the road, and the shameful catastrophe that destroyed them (and me) forever. Little did the seven other teams in the league realize—little did any of us realize, fella name a' included—that the seemingly comical misfortunes of the last-place Mundys constituted the prelude to oblivion for us all. But that, fans, is the tyrannical law of our lives: today euphoria, tomorrow the whirlwind.

Bringing us to our blood brother.

3.
Moby Dick,
by Herman Melville

Moby Dick
is to the old whaling industry (d.) what the Hall of Fame and Museum was
supposed
to have been to baseball: the ultimate and indisputable authority on the subject—repository of records, storehouse of statisticians, the Louvre of Leviathans. Who is Moby Dick if not the terrifying Ty Cobb of his species? Who is Captain Ahab if not the unappeasable Dodger manager Durocher, or the steadfast Giant John McGraw? Who are Flask, Starbuck, and Stubb, Ahab's trio of first mates, if not the Tinker, Evers, and Chance of the
Pequod
's crew? Better, call them the d.p. combination of the Ruppert Mundys—d.p. standing here for displaced person as well as double play—say they are Frenchy Astarte, Nickname Damur, and Big John Baal, for where is the infield (and the outfield, the starters and relievers, the coaches, catchers, pinch-runners and pinch-hitters) of that peripatetic Patriot League team today, but down with the bones and the timbers of the Moby Dick-demolished
Pequod,
beneath “the great shroud of the sea.” Their remote Nantucket? Ruppert. Their crazed and vengeful Ahab? Manager Gil Gamesh. And their Ishmael? Yes, one did survive the wreck to tell the tale—an indestructible old truth-teller called me!

Gentle fans, if you were to have bound together into a single volume every number ever published of the baseball weekly known as
The Sporting News,
as well as every manual, guide, and handbook important to an understanding of the game; if you were to assemble encyclopedic articles describing the size, weight, consistency, color, texture, resiliency, and liveliness of the baseball itself, from the early days when the modern Moby Dick-colored ball was not even mandatory and some teams preferred using balls colored red (yes, Mr. Chairman, not white but
red!
), to the days of the “putting-out system” of piece labor, wherein baseballs were hand sewn by women in their homes, then through to the 1910's when A.G. Spalding introduced the first cork-centered baseball (thus ending the “deadball” era) and on to 1926, when the three leagues adopted the “cushion cork center” and with it the modern slug-away style of play; if you were to describe the cork forests of Spain, the rubber plantations of Malaysia, and the sheep farms of the American West where the Spalding baseball is born, if you were to differentiate between the three kinds of yarn in which the rubber that encases the cork is wrapped, and remark upon the relative hardness of that wrapping over the decades and how it has determined batting vs. slugging averages; if you were to devote a chapter to “The Tightness of the Stitching,” explaining scientifically the aerodynamics of the curveball, or any such breaking pitch, how it is affected by the relative smoothness of the ball's seams and the number of seams that meet the wind as it rotates on its axis; and then if from this discussion of the ball, you were to take a turn, as it were, with the bat, noting first the eccentric nineteenth-century variations such as the flattened bat that Wright designed to facilitate bunting, and the curved-barrel bat in the shape of a question mark invented by Emile Kinst to put a deceptive spin upon the struck ball (enterprising Emile! cunning Kinst!), and thence moved on to describe the manufacture out of hickory logs of the classic bat shaped by Hillerich and Bradsby, the first model of which was turned in his shop by Bud Hillerich himself in 1884—the bat that came to be known to the world of men and boys as “the Louisville Slugger”; if you were by way of a digression to write a chapter on the most famous bats in baseball history, Heinie Groh's “bottle bat,” Ed Delehanty's “Big Betsy,” Luke Gofannon's “Magic Wand,” and those bats of his that Ty Cobb would hone with a steer bone hour upon hour, much as Queequeg, Tashtego, and Dagoo would care lovingly for their harpoons; if then you were to write a chapter on the history of the baseball glove, recounting how the gloves of fielder, first-baseman, and catcher have evolved from the days when the game was played bare-handed, first into something resembling an ordinary dress glove, then into the “heavily-padded mitten,” of the 1890's, the small webbed glove of the twenties, and finally in our own era of giantism, into the bushel-basket; if you were to describe the process by which Rawlings manufactures baseball shoes out of kangaroo hide, commencing with the birth of a single fleet-footed kangaroo in the wilds of Western Australia and following it through to its first stolen base in the majors; if you were to recount the evolutionary history of the All-Star game, beanballs, broadcasting, the canvas base, the catcher's mask, chewing tobacco, contracts, doubleheaders, double plays, fans, farm systems, fixes, foul balls, gate receipts, home runs, home plate, ladies day, minor leagues, night games, picture cards, player organizations, salaries, scandals, stadiums, the strike zone, sportscasters, sportswriters, Sunday ball, trading, travel, the World Series, and umpires, you would not in the end have a compendium of American baseball any more thorough than the one that Herman Melville has assembled in
Moby Dick
on the American enterprise of catching the whale. I would not be surprised to learn that his book ran first as a series in
Mechanix Illustrated,
if such existed in Melville's day, so clear and methodical is he in elucidating just what it took in the way of bats, balls, and gloves to set yourself up for chasing the pennant in those leagues. Today some clever publisher would probably bring out
Moby Dick
as one of those “How To Do It” books, providing he left off the catastrophic conclusion, or appended it under the title, “And How Not To.”

Only today who cares about how to catch a whale in the old-fashioned, time-honored, and traditional way? Or about anything “traditional” for that matter? Today they just drop bombs down the spouts to blow the blubber out, or haul the leviathans in with a hook, belly-up, those who've been dumb enough to drink from the chamberpot that once was Melville's “wild and distant sea.” How's that for a horror, Brother Melville? Not only is your indestructible Moby Dick now an inch from extinction
but so is the vast salt sea itself.
The sea is no longer a fit place for habitation—just ask the tunas in the cans. Two-thirds of the globe, the Mother of us all, and according to today's paper,
the place is poisoned.
Yes, even the
fish
have been given their eviction notice, and must pack up their scales and go fannon—which is just baseball's way of saying get lost. Only there is no elsewhere as far as I can see for these aquatic vertebrates to go fann
or
fin in. The fate that befell the Ruppert Mundys has now befallen the fish, and who, dear dispensable fans, is to follow?

Let me prophesy. What began in '46 with the obliteration of the Patriot League will not end until the planet itself has gone the way of the Tri-City Tycoons, the Tri-City Greenbacks, the Kakoola Reapers, the Terra Incognita Rustlers, the Asylum Keepers, the Aceldama Butchers, the Ruppert Mundys, and me; until each and every one of you is gone like the sperm whale and the great Luke Gofannon, gone without leaving a trace! Only read your daily paper, fans—every day news of another stream, another town, another species biting the dust. Wait, very soon now whole continents will be canceled out like stamps. Whonk, Africa! Whonk, Asia! Whonk, Europa! Whonk, North, whonk, South, America! And, oh, don't try hiding, Antarctica—
whonk
you too! And that will be it, fans, as far as the landmass goes. A brand new ballgame.

Only where is it going to be played?
Under the lights on the dark side of the Moon? Will Walter O'Malley with his feel for the future really move the Dodgers to Mars? There is no doubt, Mr. O'M., that you cannot beat that planet for parking, but tell me, has your accountant consulted your astrophysicist yet? Are you sure there are curves on Mars? Will pitchers on Venus work in regular rotation in temperatures of five hundred degrees? And fly balls hit into Saturn's rings—ground-rule doubles or cheap home runs? And what of the historic Fall Classic and the pieties thereof—plan to rechristen it the Solar System Series, or do you figure eventually to go intergalactic? Only when you get beyond the Milky Way, sir, do they even
have
October? Better check. And hurry, hurry—there is much scheming and bullshitting and stock-splitting to be done, if you are to be ready in time for the coming cataclysm. For make no mistake, you sharp-eyed, fast-talking, money-making O'Malleys of America, you proprietors, promoters, expropriators, and entrepreneurs:
the coming cataclysm is coming.
The cushy long-term lease has just about run out on this Los Angeles of a franchise called Earth—and yes, like the dinosaur, like the whale, like hundreds upon hundreds of species whose bones and poems we never even knew, you too will be out on your dispossessed ass, Mr. and Mrs. Roaring Success! Henceforth all
your
games will be played away, too. Away! Away! Far far away! So then, farewell, fugitives! Pleasant journey, pilgrims!
Auf Wiedersehen,
evacuees!
A demain,
d.p.s!
Adios,
drifters! So long, scapegoats!
Hasta mañana,
émigrés!
Pax vobiscum,
pariahs! Happy landing, hobos!
Aloha,
outcasts!
Shalom, shalom,
shelterless, shipwrecked, shucked, shunted, and shuttled humankind! Or, as we say so succinctly in America, to the unfit, the failed, the floundering and forgotten, HIT THE ROAD, YA BUMS!

1

HOME SWEET HOME

1

Containing as much of the history of the Patriot League as is necessary to acquaint the reader with its precarious condition at the beginning of the Second World War. The character of General Oakhart—soldier, patriot, and President of the League. His great love for the rides of the game. His ambitions. By way of a contrast, the character of Gil Gamesh, the most sensational rookie pitcher of all time. His attitude toward authority and mankind in general. The wisdom and suffering of Mike “the Mouth” Masterson, the umpire who is caught in between. The expulsion from baseball of the lawbreaker Gamesh. In which Mike the Mouth becomes baseball's Lear and the nation's Fool. A brief history of the Ruppert Mundys, in which the decline from greatness is traced, including short sketches of their heroic center-fielder Luke Gofannon, and the esteemed manager and Christian gentleman Ulysses S. Fairsmith. The chapter is concluded with a dialogue between General Oakhart and Mister Fairsmith, containing a few surprises and disappointments for the General.

 

W
HY THE
R
UPPERT
M
UNDYS
had been chosen to become the homeless team of baseball was explained to the Port Ruppert fans with that inspirational phrase of yesteryear, “to help save the world for democracy.” Because of the proximity of beautiful Mundy Park to the Port Ruppert harbor and dock facilities, the War Department had labeled it an ideal embarkation camp and the government had arranged to lease the site from the owners for the duration of the struggle. A city of two-story barracks was to be constructed on the playing field to house the soldiers in transit, and the ivy-covered brick structure that in the Mundy heyday used to hold a happy Sunday crowd of thirty-five thousand was to furnish headquarters facilities for those who would be shipping a million American boys and their weapons across the Atlantic to liberate Europe from the tyrant Hitler. In the years to come (the local fans were told), schoolchildren in France, in Belgium, in Holland, in far-off Denmark and Norway would be asked in their history classes to find the city of Port Ruppert, New Jersey, on the map of the world and to mark it with a star; and among English-speaking peoples, Port Ruppert would be honored forever after—along with Runnymede in England, where the Magna Charta had been signed by King John, and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, where John Hancock had affixed his signature to the Declaration of Independence—as a Birth-Place of Freedom … Then there was the psychological lift that Mundy Park would afford the young draftees departing the ballfield for the battlefront. To spend their last weeks on American soil as “the home team” in the stadium made famous by the incomparable Mundys of '28, '29, and '30, could not but provide “a shot in the arm” to the morale of these American soldiers, most of whom had been hero-worshipping schoolkids back when the Mundys, powered by the immortal Luke Gofannon, had won three hundred and thirty-five games in three seasons, and three consecutive World Series without losing a single game. Yes, what the hallowed playing fields of Eton had been to the British officers of long, long ago, Mundy Park would be to G.I. Joe of World War Two.

As it turned out, bracing sentiments such as these, passionately pronounced from a flag-draped platform in downtown Port Ruppert by notables ranging from Secretary of War Stimson and Governor Edison to the Mayor of Port Ruppert, Boss Stuvwxyz, did work to quash the outcry that the Mundy management and the U.S. government had feared from a citizenry renowned for its devotion to “the Rupe-its” (as the team was called in the local patois). Why, feeling for the Mundys ran so high in that town, that according to Bob Hope, one young fellow called up by the Port Ruppert draft board had written “the Mundys” where the questionnaire had asked his religion; as the comedian told the servicemen at the hundreds of Army bases he toured that year, there was another fellow back there, who when asked his occupation by the recruiting sergeant, replied with a straight face, “A Rupe-it roota and a plumma.” The soldiers roared—as audiences would if a comic said no more than, “There was this baseball fan in Port Ruppert—” but Hope had only to add, “Seriously now, the whole nation is really indebted to those people out there—” for the soldiers and sailors to be up on their feet, whistling through their teeth in tribute to the East Coast metropolis whose fans and public officials had bid farewell to their beloved ball club in order to make the world safe for democracy.