Misty About Baseball

By John Skow

TITLE: SOMETIMES YOU SEE IT COMING

AUTHOR: KEVIN BAKER

PUBLISHER: CROWN; 326 PAGES; $20

TITLE: THE MUSEUM OF CLEAR IDEAS

AUTHOR: DONALD HALL

PUBLISHER: TICKNOR & FIELDS; 120 PAGES; $18.95

THE BOTTOM LINE: The batted ball and the printed word ride together into the sunset.

Year by year, baseball's sunlit magic withers (good field, no dreams), done in by domes, fake-o-turf, salary stats and the fact that TV's three-man, pitcher-batter-catcher game misses most of the point. Tube ball ignores what beguiles the wide-angled human eye at a real ball park: the splendid grass and the huge, contained space; the centerfielder's arrogant slouch as he taunts the batter by playing in too far; the way the shortstop leans forward when he knows the next guy is dangerous; the cocky way (unseen by the camera, because TV slicksters are peddling razor blades) the teams jog on and off the field, each full-grown millionaire taking care not to step on the foul lines, which is bad luck.

Yet if the sport these days has diminished itself to a snore, the perplexing truth is that marvelous writing about baseball seems to turn up every three weeks. Is it just that the skinny, unathletic kids who grow up to be writers can fantasize comfortably about a game that involves a lot of standing around and occasional light exertion? Or that two dying art forms, the batted ball and the printed word, have decided to keep each other company?

Since Bernard Malamud (The Natural) and Mark Harris (Bang the Drum Slowly) made it O.K. to get all misty about guys in funny-looking knickers, the first- base box seats have been full of writers. To cite a few, W.P. Kinsella wrote Shoeless Joe (Field of Dreams, in its film version), and George Plimpton came up with the sly and flaky The Curious Case of Sidd Finch. New Yorker sage Roger Angell wrote about spring training over and over, decade after decade, in words so fine that people who would rather have their teeth fixed than go to an actual game can quote paragraphs of Angell to each other. Even George Will, the frowning dominie of conservative political columnists, wrote Men at Work, a baseball book the prudent reader avoids because he is afraid it will prove what he suspects, that ballplayers are Republicans.

This green new season, the winner so far is Kevin Baker's first novel, Sometimes You See It Coming. This one ends the way a baseball story should: three and two, two out in the ninth, legend at bat. It starts with a young phenom, a rangy, unsmiling white kid named John Barr, who turns up in the shabby locker room of a Class A team in the West Virginia coalfields. He hasn't played organized ball. He doesn't even own a set of spikes.

Of course, since this is a fable, he turns out to be a marvel, a natural, who hits .444 that first season. A couple of years later, as Barr leads the New York Mets to a championship, sportswriters tell themselves that he isn't a better ballplayer than Gehrig, or Mays, or Williams. He couldn't be, could he? Better than DiMaggio? But his teammates know he is. They just don't know why. More than most athletic wonders, baseball skill is hidden, supernatural; just flick your wrists and it's a triple to left.

Barr is a closed-in, silent man whose quotes run to "I had it all the way," or "It was just a question of timing." Ask a hawk how it flies. But because Barr is unexplainable, there's a lot of time for lazy, raunchy, cow- flopping baseball talk. Ricky Falls, a black outfielder who plays alongside Barr and is as much of a friend as the phenom can accept, tells most of it. Falls and the rest of his teammates, except for Barr, lead their league in dalliance with the baseball annies who show up in the team hotel after away games. The players are prodigious sexists, though so are the annies, and nobody knows it better than Ellie Jay, the gorgeous sportswriter who follows Barr's team. Her first day covering another club was legendary. The entire team greeted her in the locker room, stark naked except for Halloween masks. Ellie made her rep forever by asking "O.K., which one of you little pricks struck out in the seventh with the bases loaded?"

Cal, the wise old manager, quits to concentrate on drinking and fishing, and is replaced by the Little Maniac, a pugnacious, team-wrecking Billy Martin caricature. Moses Yellowhorse, the lunatic fireballer, haunts the ball park, and so does Eileen the Bullpen Queen, an annie so astonishingly trashy that the players remember her name. The novel flows with lovely nonsense, summer after summer, until it is necessary to give Barr a slump so that he can recover and win the Series one more time. Author Baker slumps here, just a bit, then finds his groove again.

Put this one on the shelf with The Natural. But leave room for poet Donald Hall, who has written a book-length poem, called The Museum of Clear Ideas, strung on the nine-inning frame of a baseball game. Nine syllable lines, nine lines to a half inning, and so on. Extra innings as the poet reaches the end and finds himself still breathing easily despite intimations of mortality.

Hall is a distinguished, three-quarter-aged fellow who has earned his high reputation, mostly by writing deep, lyrical stuff that he woodcuts from the old family farm where he lives in New Hampshire. He is besotted by baseball and, like all the other writers who crowd the box seats, assumes dreamily that everyone will accept this.

At the Wilmot town hall, a couple of miles from his farm, Hall recently read from his gigantic baseball poem. "I would like to linger with Schwitters in the Fenway bleachers, explaining baseball . . . Well, there are nine players . . ." That's Kurt Schwitters, the defunct German Dadaist, Hall explained somewhat obscurely. Fenway needs no explanation; it is the ball park of tragedy where the Red Sox writhe.

Hall's listeners were his neighbors, a retired Navy officer, an antiques dealer, several social workers and perhaps a farmer, though farmers are rarer than poets in New Hampshire these days. They were on hand to honor Hall and English words, and even baseball, if that is what was asked. Though some of them probably imagine that Carl Yastrzemski and Ted Williams too still play for the Red Sox, and most of the rest never heard of these heroes.

But Hall was good. He is a pro, and he put the reading across, to openhearted applause. They all left, colder than hell outside, snow in the air. A woman listener, no baseball fan, vigilant in detecting masculine cow flop, said she liked Hall's poetry and she wanted to get the book and read it. And the baseball part? "It was O.K.," she said. "I didn't mind it."

< Once again, winter dies, the green new season begins. Hope stirs. Annies primp.

Cursor up! Write ball!