Red Sox opening day inspires athletes and authors alike

The Boston Red Sox kicked off their 2007 season on Monday, April 2, with a 7-1 loss to the Kansas City Royals at Kauffman Stadium. It was the first game of a six-month, 162-game season that will not end until yet-to-be-unfurled leaves adopt shades of burnt sienna and crimson.

At home in Fenway Park, perched in rigid chairs that have secured the careers of countless New England chiropractors, Red Sox aficionados will absorb another long season, agonizing over every pitch, immersing themselves in the game’s subtle intricacies, breathing its grassy, backyard fumes. No matter how the players fare, the crumpling leaves of fall will signal high emotion—either a return of autumn desperation or dreams of playoff glory in October. 

Not everyone understands the appeal of sports in general, least of all baseball, arguably the slowest and most calculating sport in the United States. But the game captivates millions of Americans, and its charm has inspired some of the nation’s finest writers. There is poetry in the slap of cowhide against a leather mitt. From Walt Whitman to Jack Kerouac to John Updike to Stephen King, the great American pastime has produced libraries of literature.

But why? What is it about men in stockings hitting twine-filled balls with sticks that revs the artistic engine? 

For poet and author Kevin King, who lives in Brentwood and teaches at Phillips Exeter Academy, the answer is multi-faceted. King’s latest novel, “All the Stars Came Out That Night,” hit bookshelves last year. The book winds a fictional tale about a secret 1934 game between all-stars from the major leagues and the Negro league. Although many of the characters are real, such as Babe Ruth, Shoeless Joe Jackson, Satchel Paige and Dizzy Dean, the story blossomed from King’s imagination.

The book is dedicated to King’s father, Jack King, who fostered many of the story’s ideas with his anecdotal accounts of baseball’s golden days in the 1930s.

“My father was one of those guys who in the early part of the 20th century would watch games through knotholes in the fence and would climb over stadium walls to get into a game, which is what kids did back in those times,” King said.
The elder King regaled his young son with stories of players like Yogi Berra, Casey Stingle and Ty Cobb. The stories expanded in King’s imagination and ultimately congealed into the premise of his novel. Looking back, he believes the generational connection between fathers and sons—often shared through baseball—is part of what motivates authors to write about the sport.

“Because there is that tradition of father-son contact bonding through baseball, I think that a lot of authors feel the strength of that bond and want to write in order to recapture it for themselves, and perhaps even to pass it on to other people,” he said.

A former baseball star at Dartmouth College, Jim Collins has a unique perspective on the sport’s magnetism for writers. Collins wrote “The Last Best League,” a nonfiction book about the Cape Cod Baseball League, published in 2004. The amateur summer league attracts some of the biggest college prospects in the game as they pursue their dreams of going pro.

Collins, who lives in Orange, agrees with King that the “unbroken continuity” of baseball as a generational adhesive between fathers, sons and grandfathers has spurred a great deal of literature. While society has changed, he said, the essential components of the game have stayed the same.

“The game has changed so little that the appeal of a leather ball and a wooden bat and hitting .300 or 40 homeruns has meant the same thing to every generation along the way,” Collins said.

The sport has an additional appeal in New England, where dramatic seasonal shifts seem to mirror the course of the games.

“Baseball so easily lends itself to mythic storylines and kind of archetypal stories, especially in New England where the game begins in the spring and it flourishes in the summer during the hot months and then it dwindles and dies with the first cold days of autumn,” Collins said. “I love how that mirrors the seasons in New England. That wouldn’t be true in Florida and Southern California.”

Another New Hampshire writer who has written extensively about baseball is U.S. Poet Laureate Donald Hall, who lives on a farm in Wilmot. A graduate of Phillips Exeter Academy, Hall has written poems, essays and whole books on the sport.In an essay called “O Fenway Park,” published in 1985 in a book called “Fathers Playing Catch with Sons,” Hall offers insights that echo King’s sentiments about baseball’s enduring appeal through the generations.

“We love baseball because it seizes and retains the past, like the snowy village inside a glass paperweight,” Hall writes.

In another essay, “The Poet’s Game,” Hall claims that the first baseball poem ever published appeared in 1744. He goes on to note that Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Walt Whitman and Robert Frost were all fans of the game.

A book of Hall’s selected poems that was published last year, “White Apples and the Taste of Stone,” includes a series of nine baseball poems, titled “The First Inning,” “The Second Inning,” etc. Each “inning” consists of nine verses composed of nine lines. Although the poems dive into a variety of thoughts and topics, many of which are irrelevant to baseball, their structure remains true to the sport.

Hall also credits baseball with inspiring some of the country’s finest journalism and prose. In an essay titled “Proseball,” he describes the art of writing baseball prose.

“Proseball’s lineup is deep, the players innumerable, and the success …? Well, in proseball as in baseball we undergo the splendor of triumph and the agony of defeat,” Hall writes. “But even when the style is ghastly, full of booted grounders and bases on balls, often the stories are magnificent.”

Other popular sports, such as football and basketball, have birthed a comparatively small amount of literature. The reason, in King’s opinion, is that the connection between American culture, history and baseball has bestowed the sport with a mythical quality. He cited the success of movies like “Field of Dreams” and “The Natural,” which endowed baseball with paranormal attributes.

“I think that of all sports that one could write about, baseball seems to have the most mythical dimension to it,” King said. “I think we see that a lot in literature.”

Collins said the game’s mystic qualities are especially prevalent in New England, where Red Sox fans have long obsessed over superstitions like the “Curse of the Bambino” and the team’s vicious rivalry with the dreaded New York Yankees. 

Both Collins and King suggested that Americans are able to connect with baseball because it reflects the nation’s history. Although the book is fictional, “All the Stars Came Out That Night” illuminates prewar culture and race relations in the United States in the 1930s. As filmmaker Ken Burns demonstrated with his 1994 documentary, “Baseball,” the sport can be used as a tool to illustrate American history, as it’s threaded through with issues such as war, segregation and the economy. 

“I think it’s a marvelous introduction to that. Every college should have courses on that because the literature is there, the history is there and baseball itself is exciting to a whole lot of people,” King said. “Bringing that element of sport into the study of history is a marvelous way to do it.”

But if baseball can be seen as a reflection of the state of American society, we have reason to be concerned about the current state of affairs. King believes greed and commercialism have dissipated much of the sport’s integrity. He pointed to the example of Manny Ramirez, the Red Sox’s highly paid and much beloved left fielder, who has garnered a reputation as much for his lack of hustle as for his batting prowess. Such shoddy work ethic would not have flown in the old days.

“Anybody who didn’t run out a ground ball would be chastised by the manager and actually they’d end up getting fired,” King said. “The players themselves internalized that kind of spirit and played harder.”

Collins, too, worries about how the grip of money has affected the game. But his research for “The Last Best League” reminded him that the sport’s essence lives on in the hearts of young and ambitious players. “The summer college leagues are so devoid of all of the commercialism, and it’s so pure,” he said.

The author noted that the demographic of collegiate baseball leagues has changed drastically since the early part of the century. Today, most of the players are white kids hailing from suburbia. “It’s no longer the country hayseed coming in and throwing rocks and knocking milk bottles off the fence line,” he said.

Despite the innocence of this image, there was an ugly side to the early days of baseball. Until Jackie Robinson shattered the race barrier in 1947, black players were not allowed to compete on the same field as whites. And even after the leagues were integrated, some vicious practices remained common. Pitchers regularly threw at batters (even more often than in today’s game), and base runners slid into bases with their cleats aimed at the defensive players’ kneecaps.

“Ty Cobb did sharpen his spikes, and Ty Cobb was not the only guy who did that. In the Negro leagues it was even more fierce, and guys had scars,” King said. “It was a really hard game in those days, and that all has changed.” 

At its core, the spirit of baseball remains unchanged, Collins said. The challenge is in looking past the mass advertisements and commercial hubbub that surrounds the stadium. “If you just watch the game, it still really does retain that pure essence, and it’s so unchanged once the first pitch is thrown,” he said. “I still think that pro baseball is a wonderful sport to watch if you can ignore all the rest of it.”

A book released earlier this year, “Baseball Haiku,” consists of more than 200 baseball haikus written by Japanese and American poets, including beat writer Jack Kerouac, who is said to have penned the first American baseball haiku. Cor van den Heuvel, an accomplished poet, edited the collection. One of Heuvel’s own baseball haikus reads as follows: “summer afternoon / the long fly ball to center field / takes its time.”

Heuvel’s simple haiku paints a fitting picture of the languorous beauty of baseball. In an interview on National Public Radio on March 31, Heuvel said there is a natural connection between baseball and haiku.

“Haiku is a poem about nature, and baseball is very closely related to nature. It started out on a field, played under the open sky, there’s dirt, there’s grass. It goes through the seasons,” Heuvel said. “All this is captured in haiku.”

The game’s pervasive appeal spreads beyond the major leagues and into backyards and ball fields across the country, even here on the Seacoast. Portsmouth became gripped in baseball fever last summer when the Portsmouth Little League All Stars made it to the national semifinals of the Little League World Series in Williamsport, Penn. The community rallied behind the team as they competed in nationally televised games, sweating through every inning. 

When the Little Leaguers returned home to Portsmouth, they received a lavish welcome fit for national heroes. A swarm of fans, including Mayor Steve Marchand, greeted the bus in Portsmouth. A parade was held in Market Square, and the team later visited the State House in Concord and played catch with Gov. John Lynch. Players even got to chat with baseball legend Pete Rose by phone during a celebration at Paddy’s American Grill.

On Sept. 29, the team was honored at Fenway Park prior to a Sox game against the Baltimore Orioles.

By virtue of their baseball skills, 13-year-old boys had become local celebrities. Parents, siblings, friends and community members seemed to enjoy the experience just as much as the players. Rarely have Portsmouth teenagers been vaulted to such a heroic stature, a testament to the power of baseball.

Jeff Bettis and Jeff Pierce, both of Dover, have been diehard Sox fans since they were old enough to talk. The two cheered on their team at Trophy’s Sports Bar on opening day. Although they follow other sports, they consider baseball the most interesting contest.

“Everything about the sport has to be so precise,” Bettis said. “Delivery, arm positoin for a pitcher, things you don’t even think about. It’s very slow, so you can analyze everything.”

“Plus, it’s always an individual match-up,” Pierce added. “It’s a one-on-one battle between this guy and this guy.”

Collins believes that baseball captivates audiences because the storylines of each season, the personalities of each player and the excitement of each game allow people to escape the banality of their daily lives. He noted that baseball is one of the few sports that do not have a time limit. A nine-inning game could conceivably go on forever, and the structure breaks up the frantic pace of American life.

“Baseball gives you the leisure to really start to understand who the players are and what the storylines are,” Collins said.

“In a way, it’s a refuge from the daily rhythms of our busy lives. It’s a way to breathe out and just let the game dictate how fast or how slow the action happens.”

While Collins believes baseball offers a sharp contrast to daily life, King said the sport largely reflects the values of society.

“I think baseball more than any other sport has permeated American culture,” King said. “The same sort of energy, the spirit, the fairness, the competition, all of which are very much part of our culture, were also part of baseball. There’s a marvelous fit there, and it’s pretty hard for a writer to escape that, to escape mentioning it.”