The Books: Baseball: A Literary Anthology; from Can’t Anybody Here Play This Game?, by Jimmy Breslin

On the essays shelf (yes, there are still more books to excerpt in my vast library. I can’t seem to stop this excerpts-from-my-library project. I started it in 2006!)

NEXT BOOK: Baseball: A Literary Anthology

Everyone knows who Jimmy Breslin is. Even if you aren’t a sports fan, then you probably know he was the guy the “Son of Sam” reached out to, via a series of letters, during the horrible summer of 1977.

In 1986, Breslin won the Pulitzer Prize for “commentary” in journalism, and is still alive, still writing regular columns for Newsday. His voice is unmistakeable, one of those individualistic “voices” so hard to come by today, especially in regular everyday journalism. Even a lot of op-ed columnists now sound somewhat canned. Breslin has had his fair share of controversies, but that’ll always be the case with someone outspoken. One of his most famous columns was the one he wrote about the guy who dug the grave for the slain President, John F. Kennedy. It’s typical of Breslin’s outlook (find the un-told story), as well as his prose style.

Breslin wrote novels, as well as non-fiction (including a biography of Damon Runyon, a writer he admires, emulates). In 1962, he wrote a book with a self-explanatory title: Can’t Anybody Here Play This Game?: The Improbable Saga of the New York Met’s First Year. The Mets’ inaugural season was a debacle, by any standards. They lost 120 games. I haven’t read Breslin’s book although over on Amazon people are still arguing about it: what Breslin got wrong, what he made up, were the Mets really that bad, and etc. It still strikes a nerve. Mets fans are a hearty fanatical bunch. (I suppose you could say that about any baseball fan devoted to one franchise. I say all of that with zero judgment.)

Maybe some of you out there have read Breslin’s book and can weigh in on it. Breslin was never one to let facts get in the way of a good story. This used to be common. Now it’s seen as outrageous and people’s careers are ruined over it. I guess Joseph Mitchell (excerpt here, and here) – one of the great nonfiction writers of the 20th century (and also one of the most famous examples of writer’s block in history) would never survive in today’s oh-so-literal atmosphere, because he made shit up sometimes. The loss would be ours. Who cares if he combined quotes, or made up characters out of fragments of other people? The story he tells is filled with spirit and insight. When did everybody expect everything to be a documentary? Even a documentary is a CREATED object, put together in the editing room, where CHOICES are made about what to show/not show. If you want “reality,” I don’t know … go take a walk. But make sure you turn off your interpretive/metaphorical brain functions, because if you think to yourself, even once, “The sky is as blue as my boyfriend’s eyes …” that may not be LITERALLY true, the blue of the sky may be shades away from your boyfriend’s baby blues, and that discrepancy could be proven in a court of law, and therefore you are a LIAR. (This is not meant to be a defense of the likes of James Frey. I am one of those obnoxious people who remind everyone, in re: Frey, that I CALLED IT. Years before anyone else did. I called that shit. I say it often.) So James Frey is a liar, but – even WORSE – he’s a bad writer. Even mentioning him in the same paragraph as Breslin and Joseph Mitchell is a travesty. But that’s what the literal “is this 100% verifiably true” audience has created.

Jimmy Breslin’s real topic in Can’t Anybody Here Play This Game? is New York City. Breslin’s main topic, at all times, is New York City. He described the Mets’ inaugural season as: “Never has so much misery loved so much company.” However, he also saw the Mets as “vastly important” because “the team put continuity back into life” (at least for New Yorkers, and that community of humans is all that matters to Breslin.)

The figure that connects this all together for Breslin is Gil Hodges.

Briefly: Gil Hodges spent the majority of his career on the Dodgers (in Brooklyn and then in Los Angeles). He was a first basemen, one of the best of his era, and four times led the National League in double plays. He was signed to the Dodgers in 1943, and then went off to serve in WWII as an anti-aircraft-gunner. He fought in the Battle of Okinawa and won a Bronze Star for heroism. After the war, he joined the Dodgers again. It was 1946. A heyday: the Jackie Robinson era. Hodges was a great all-around player, a superb defenseman and a superb offensive player. He was also beloved by the fans at Ebbets Field. He was a fan favorite, which made his return to New York – with the Mets – such a palpably emotional thing, as expressed by Breslin in his book. Fans loved him so much that his slumps generated more support than his triumphs. Hodges went through a terrible slump in the 1952 World Series that then extended into the following season. He went through entire games without hitting anything. Fans can be fickle creatures, and often players who inspire the most adulation feel the FURY when they don’t measure up. But that didn’t happen to Hodges during his slump. He was bombarded with “cheer up, we still love you” letters. Fans sent gifts, tokens, cheered him on. And, perhaps most famously, a priest in Brooklyn told his congregation: “It’s far too hot for a homily. Keep the Commandments and say a prayer for Gil Hodges.” (There’s a 2005 book entitled Praying for Gil Hodges.)

Then the Dodgers re-located to Los Angeles. Fans mourned. New York mourned. It’s still a scar, in some circles. And then along came the Mets, and the Mets came to New York, and with them came Gil Hodges. But a different Gil Hodges now. Not the golden Hodges of the late 40s and 50s. Plagued by injuries (in particularly a caved-in knee), Hodges was practically an old man. It was thought that the Mets would probably use him as a coach (which they did).

Breslin connects Gil Hodges to the moment he knew what he wanted to do for a living. He tells the story: while on a subway, headed to an interview at an ad agency, he read a story about the rookie Gil Hodges. It sparked something in Breslin. Once he arrived at the ad agency, he waited around for a bit, was called into the room, and then (at least as Breslin tells it) told the guy “Thanks, but no thanks, I’m going to be a bricklayer”, walked out and never looked back. It was that article about Gil Hodges that clinched it for him. He wanted to work in a dirty newsroom, not a slick office.

Breslin writes, with some awe and sadness, it’s almost child-like, how he lets us see that part of himself: “Hodges is causing me to match up with time the most. All of a sudden, from nowhere, you find he is old and shot. And you wonder where it all went. They took Hodges out of this town in 1957, and that left only the Yankees around here. Like I say, nobody ever really got close with them. So I never matched up time with baseball players for five whole years. Then the Mets come back and Hodges came with them, and I began to think again. Hodges is too old to be a full-time player? Where the hell did the time go?”

Breslin talks about the changes in New York. How once New York “had everything. The Dodgers were in Brooklyn and the Giants were at the Polo Grounds. Madison Square Garden had fights on Friday night. Not the kind you see on television now. They had real fights.”

This kind of “there once was a Golden Age” kind of writing can be so sentimental that you want to tell the old-fogey to put a sock in it. But Breslin makes it work, because for him it is always personal. It is not abstract and theoretical. He is honestly wrestling with time.

Here’s an excerpt. And remember: that inaugural Mets season was a catastrophe.

Excerpt from Baseball: A Literary Anthology, edited by Nicholas Davidoff. From Can’t Anybody Here Play This Game?, by Jimmy Breslin

The record books say Hodges is the all-time right-handed homerun hitter in the National League. Around the dugouts he was always known as the first baseman with the fastest feet alive. A lot of times Hodges would be well off the bag when he took the throw from an infielder, but the umpire would always blink and call an automatic out. That would do it. Nobody ever called Hodges for not touching the bag, and in the confusion he became known as one of the great fielding first baseman of all time. Hodges had his own ideas about this, however.

“I’m going to do a story about my career when I retire,” he said in the Brooklyn dressing room one day.

“What are you going to call it?” Pee Wee Reese asked him.

“‘I Never Touched First Base.'”

Hodges came and sat down at the counter. He talked about all the trouble he had over his career, trying to hit outside pitches.

“I just never could see too well when they threw an outside curve that broke away from me,” he was saying. “It was a flaw I had. Everybody knew it. But it was up to the pitcher to put the ball out there, and that’s not as easy as it sounds. So I had a fairly successful career.”

Then he got up and walked over to the information desk. He limped a little. He’ll probably be limping for a long time. But that’s all right. As long as he can get back into a uniform and be around, even as a coach, he’ll be familiar. I match him up with the day I made up my mind what kind of a job I wanted. He is the only one in the world I can do it with. Hell, I need the guy.

So the Mets are a bad ball club. All right, they’re the worst ball club you ever saw. So what? The important thing is they are in the National League and they are familiar. The National League, to a lot of people around New York, is something hard to describe, but important. Like the chip in the table in the living room when you were growing up. It was always there. Sometimes you can buy ten new tables over a lifetime. But the one with the chip is the one that would make you feel the best. People are that way about the National League. They are more at home looking at the box score of a game between the St. Louis Cardinals and the Philadelphia Phillies than they ever could be going over one between the Cleveland Indians and the Detroit Tigers. If they came out of Cleveland it would be different. But they are from New York, and this is National League. Now we have the Mets, and that’s the way it should be. We’re with familiar things again.

The Mets lose an awful lot?

Listen, mister. Think a little bit.

When was the last time you won anything out of life?