Bat Men of Yesteryear

By John Skow

IF I NEVER GET BACK by Darryl Brock; Crown; 424 pages; $18.95

Baseball these days, as all agree, is the national pursetime: overpaid and oversold, merchandising brief bursts of tedium between flurries of beer commercials. Ah, but when the world was young, thinks the old child, the former boy, it was all wonderful. I remember . . .

And so we have another misty, nostalgic baseball book to wedge onto a crowded and highly literary shelf. Didn't any skinny kids with library cards go bowling, years ago? But never mind. This genial and shaggily told first novel is not only one of the most artful fictions of the past couple of seasons but also one of the most beguiling stories, which are not always the same thing.

Author Darryl Brock starts off with an oboe passage. His hero, Sam Fowler, a San Francisco newspaperman in his early 30s, is gloomy from a bad divorce and muzzy from a slight drinking problem. He has flown to Cleveland to bury his father, who died there alone, and has decided to meander back home on an Amtrak train. Somewhere in northern Ohio, the train rolls to an unscheduled stop on a siding, and Fowler steps off into the summer heat to clear his head. When he turns, the 20th century Amtrak diesel has vanished, and a woodburning steam train -- what's this? -- is puffing to a stop. He boards, confused, and finds himself on a car with the rowdy, outgoing members of the Cincinnati Red Stockings baseball team. The year, he is dumbfounded to learn, is 1869.

Fowler is dazed and perhaps injured (he has cut his head somehow), and his accent is funny. When he pulls out a couple of Federal Reserve notes to pay for his ticket, his money looks dodgy. Is such stuff legal tender in San Francisco? Doubtful. But the friendly "base ballists," as they call themselves, accept him without a lot of awkward questions and give him a berth to sleep in. When he wakes up, he stays on the train, not knowing what else to do. He learns that they are headed for New York, where the Red Stockings plan to play a series of games.

Why the time travel? Why not simply write a novel about the 1869 Red Stockings? (Yes, they were a real, nearly unbeatable team who were the first baseball professionals to be paid openly, by contract, and who campaigned to both the East and West coasts that year.) The reader does not really ask these questions, because the narrative moves with such cheerful confidence that doubt does not arise. But a couple of advantages work powerfully in favor of the author's device. Fowler, having a thin time of it in the 20th century, is plunked into a situation in which his only problems are day-to-day adventures. His lifting of mood coincides with that of the reader, whose cynicism about sports drops away as these 19th century men delightedly play their boys' game. Fowler, moreover, is a superb observer, a narrator alternately sophisticated because of his 20th century knowledge, and raw and naive in his new predicament.

Soon enough, Fowler becomes a factotum for the Red Stockings, guarding the gate receipts, working out moneymaking ideas (Brock has him introduce small sausages on buns to ball-park crowds) and now and then filling in for an injured player. Fowler, it turns out, was a so-so college player, but he has a hard time catching line drives without a glove, as all the others do. Underhand pitching, with no legal curve balls, seems strange to him, as does the rule that lets batters demand high or low pitches as they fancy. Fowler resorts to a new and baffling maneuver, the bunt, to win a game. But the author plays fair: he has Dickey Pearce of the Brooklyn Atlantics (generally credited with inventing the bunt) question Fowler closely about the "baby hit" tactic.

By now the reader is asking "And then? And then?" like a child listening to a storyteller. When Fowler meets Mark Twain on the way to New York, disbelief is not an issue. The two become involved in a get-rich-quick scheme, and Fowler is further entangled with Irish nationalists who are trying to invade Canada. A baseball trip west on the transcontinental railway, just completed a few months before, is a rawhide odyssey and, like everything else in the book, meticulously historical.

And then it all ends, too soon for Fowler and his wide-eyed listeners. Does the hero ever get back? To the 20th century, yes. But to the 19th again, to see his old baseball friends and a ghost-ridden sweetheart? Brock leaves us with a definite maybe, and the uncertainty haunts the mind.