The Books: Baseball: A Literary Anthology; from The Wrong Season, by Joel Oppenheimer

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

Joel Oppenheimer was a Village Voice columnist and a poet. He was born in Yonkers, and except for his time at Black Mountain college, he was a New Yorker through and through. Immersed in the New York literary scene in the 1960s, and a vigorous and hearty scene it was! Experimental theatre, literary magazines, St. Marks Poetry Project (of which he was the first director), and heavy-drinking experimental poets/writers/playwrights hanging out at these legendary literary bars, talking the night away. Oppenheimer was a huge part of all of that. He was also a devoted Mets fan. So he would spend his nights at the famous Lion’s Head tavern in Greenwich Village,. (Sadly, the The Lion’s Head is no more, it closed in 1998, but the stories live on. Frank McCourt tells stories about hanging out there while he was a substitute teacher. The writers who frequented the Lion’s Head had their book covers tacked up on the walls, a display of the literary power that came to drink there every night. McCourt describes, movingly, how he felt when he looked up on the wall and saw that Angela’s Ashes had been added to the gallery. He had been drinking there for 30 years.)

Joel Oppenheimer was not a prolific poet (there are only two published collections), but his Village Voice columns were widely read and is how he is remembered. However, he did write a book about The Mets, in particular the 1972 season. The book is called The Wrong Season. The 1972 baseball season almost didn’t happen. In April the players went on strike due to disputes over salary/pension. The strike only lasted 13 days but the season lost 86 games because of it. When the season started up again, post-strike, there would be no makeup games, so the whole season had an uneven fractured quality to it. 1972 wasn’t the kind of strike that baseball saw in 1981 or 1994, totally decimating to the sport, but it was prophetic of the havoc a strike could cause.

Oppenheimer spent the time of that strike, wondering whether or not the 1972 season would happen at all, arguing about it at the Lion’s Head with his writer-poet-baseball-fan friends.

The Wrong Season is told in a chatty and intimate style, with a poet’s verve for language. It is not hi-falutin’, but neither is it prosaic. At some points, you feel that you are sitting at the Lion’s Head bar with the guys talking like this. It’s overlapping, it’s chatty and learned (in the way true baseball fans are learned), it’s all over the place, it’s argumentative. There are no capital letters. At times, he sounds desperate. He considers consulting an astrologer. No baseball? How on earth would anyone survive a summer with no baseball? What do the stars say about this prospect?

The best thing to do is just leap right in. This sounds like the O’Malleys sitting around the table during the off-season, going over hypotheticals like sabermetrical maniacs.

Excerpt from Baseball: A Literary Anthology, edited by Nicholas Davidoff. From The Wrong Season, by Joel Oppenheimer

the other thing that had been in my head before the strike was still rattling around there too and that was the season itself, because the last week of the exhibition schedule is when you start that kind of figuring, and i couldn’t drop it now, just because there might not be a season.

i mean, that’s the week you go to bed secure in all sorts of beliefs: like the exhibitions don’t count, except the ones you’ve won, and that batters who aren’t hitting now will start to, while the batters who are hitting are obviously raring to go already, and the pitchers are ahead of the batters anyway and your pitchers are going to stay that way. will seaver ever lose? i doubt it, or at least not before the all-star break. then too, the schedule is favorable, because a preliminary check shows that the mets can’t lose a game until, possibly, the sag of jetlag in l.a. at the end of april, and that’ll only be the first one of the three-game set that they drop, and since it’s clear that the mets will run away with the season, you settle down quiet nights with the macmillan encyclopedia and the baseball register, and you update records to see who has a shot at what.

clemente needed nine triples to make the top twenty-five triples hitters of all time. he didn’t make it – he got only seven in 1972 and won’t hit any more. it ain’t funny – because musial is the only modern on the list, and he’s got a lot more at-bats, so that’s nice select company for one of our boys to be in. i mean, hardly no one hits triples these days.

despite the fact that henry aaron is becoming everybody’s darling, and fickle fame has turned her glance away from willie, because of the damned homers, henry is still worthy of attention, because he’s moving up on a lot more than that. like, this season, he should move to second in all-time hits, runs batted in, and total bases, as well as making the homerun run.

hoyt wilhelm can’t really gain anything, since he leads in practically all the categories he can lead in anyhow, but ain’t it a groove that he’s still going at forty-eight, turning forty-nine?

tom seaver needs thirty-five wins to pass christy mathewson’s total for his first six years, and he and nancy need one more commercial to give me spasmodic nausea.

cleon jones needs to bat .375 with five hundred at-bats to have a lifetime .300 average. his middle name is joseph.

and understand that this is what baseball’s about, too – this and the kids. so when you laugh at me, hunched over my transistor at the dark end of the bar, laugh quietly. remember that i don’t laugh at you as you stare at the greater greensboro open, whatever that may be. i know that ken solo, alone in front of his stromberg-calson on memorial day, dazed by all the radio-borne static of all those growling offenhausens, understands. i know that tommy sugar in the rain at aqueduct understands. and i know that the reasonable world does not.

the hope is eternally there – always some specific hopes; this year, before the strike, it was to see vida sign, to see that fast ball rip through. it was even to wish that bouton’s knuckle kept floating through the jersey night, just like his fast ball once cut through october days, and to hope that nathaniel learned once and for all the right way to hold a bat – he’s five and a half, and give me a child ’til he is six, i ain’t got much time – and then, the constant hope, the thing the game is about, the moments of perfection in the long, slow drag of the game, the long, slow drag of the season. i wanted to see those.

now i have to worry, instead, if willie, poor willie, can keep his legs for one more season if i don’t see him in this one.