The Books: Baseball: A Literary Anthology; from “Head Down”, by Stephen King

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

Stephen King is a famous sports fan, of course, devoted to his regional teams. His books are filled with references to the Red Sox, the Bruins, the Celtics, the Patriots … the Quadruplicate-Franchise that make up our culture ’round these here parts. He throws out the first pitch at Fenway. He sits in the stands at Fenway, dressed in Red Sox garb, reading a book, glancing up at the field. He is obsessive, but his obsession doesn’t need to be watched over, the flame burns all on its own. I suppose that’s true of sports fans everywhere, in every region, but there’s something about New England sports, maybe because we’re all so crowded together geographically, we can’t get away from one another, and when we gather up at places like Fenway it’s like a family reunion. You participate, but you also withstand it. It’s frenzied, and yet also “over it.” I’m sure other New England sports fans know what I’m talking about.

King and novelist Stewart O’Nan were partners-in-crime during the insanely suspenseful (so suspenseful I was afraid some of my elderly uncles would have heart attacks) 2004 Red Sox season. They emailed back and forth every day, sharing theories, reactions. Of course, those email exchanges were eventually published in a book, the hugely entertaining Faithful: Two Diehard Boston Red Sox Fans Chronicle the Historic 2004 Season. This is not a book for amateurs, or for people who don’t understand baseball. I suppose it could be seen as a curiosity, a relic saying “This is what Red Sox fans discussed during 2004.” But still. It’s a book for experts. It’s a book for people already up to speed. I’ve been meaning to read it again. I like King’s sections better than O’Nan’s sections, King is a bit more plain-spoken (sometimes arc-ing up into the emotional, the transcendent – as every Red Sox fan did in August/September/October of 2004).

While sports sometimes come center stage in King’s novels, more often than not it plays as background noise, hearing the game on the radio, reading the sports page, Little League games as background for horror in Maine, etc. It’s fun to read Faithful because you know King has been wanting to get that in detail for a long long time. Off comes the leash. And suddenly ALL he talks about is sports, and it’s refreshing to hear him.

One of my favorite peripheral “sports” sections in a work by Stephen King is the tangential description in Under the Dome of a high school basketball star, a girl named Hanna Compton. It doesn’t have anything to do with the plot of the book itself. It is there to enrich our understanding of one particular character and his memories of Hanna Compton. It’s one of my favorite passages in all of King’s work (and I’ve read most of it), because he understands it so well. In it is the entire world of small-town life, where the high school sports teams provide entertainment, where everyone goes to the games, even people who don’t have kids in school there. Because what else are you gonna do in a small town? (I grew up in such a small town. Maybe that’s why it rings so true. The IMPORTANCE of local sports teams, even if the players are all only 15 years old.) I also love the passage because I can feel Stephen King almost swept away by his own invention, by his own memories of high school sports (as a kid and as a parent). It’s so much a tangent, it doesn’t have anything to do with anything, but King really develops it. He’s onto something. Here’s the Hanna Compton excerpt.

Moving on: I had never read Stephen King’s lengthy essay called “Head Down” that appeared in The New Yorker in 1990. I read it for the first time when I got this anthology. And there, you can feel the genesis of that Hanna Compton excerpt, something that’s there in a lot of his work, but here he goes autobiographical with it. “Head Down” tells the story of Stephen King following the 1989 season of his son’s Little League team, Bangor West. (King often wears Bangor West sweatshirts.)

In “Head Down,” King follows that season as though he’s a sports-writer working the beat, as though these are Major Leaguers, and not 12-year-olds. The team was scrappy, not considered contenders, but they ended up getting all the way to the State Championships. After that they moved on to the Regional Championships. (My brother was on one of “those” soccer teams when he was 12 years old, and the excitement took over our household for two months straight. Could this team of pipsqueaks … go all the way to the top?? And I’ll tell you what: as described in the excerpt below, my brother and his old teammates who went through that together, share a special bond to this day. Three of them ended up being at my sister’s wedding, including my brother, and they did a drunken toast to that old soccer team they were on when they were kids.) King traveled with the team, wrote about what baseball was like when played by 12-year-olders (some of the funnest sections of the piece: all the errors, stuff that would never happen in the Major Leagues, are just a part of the game. King has to get used to it.) There’s one little guy who’s a pitcher, who seems to have a strategy in his mind and an arm to match. Rare in Little League. King studies him like a hawk. He takes it all so seriously that you forget these players are middle-schoolers, and at one point the coach (who takes on huge status in the essay) says to King, “You gotta remember. They’re 12.”

The coach is a guy named Dave Mansfield (who was nominated amateur coach of the year by the Baseball Federation). He keeps the guys focused, he yells encouragement and correction, and he’s not afraid to get Herb-Brooks-in-the-locker-room-before-the-Olympics by the time they get to the Regionals. He wants these boys to know they did their best and they have to DECIDE to do their best.

The whole thing is extremely touching. Great baseball writing, but great as well in that Stephen King way, of having an ear for how people really talk, a feel for atmosphere, and a great sense of how different communities set themselves up. The world of Little League is of the ultimate importance to everyone who participates in it. It’s great for the kids, the adults are invested, the parents/friends/siblings come to watch the games … it’s a full-spectrum community experience. King captures that.

I played Little League. And this was before they created separate Leagues for girls. I was the only girl on my Little League team. I was 10, 11 years old. And I’m still not sure where I had the guts for that. But I loved baseball, I wanted to play. Okay, no Girls League? I’m joining the Boys. My own team-mates treated me equally, they were my friends from school, but the teams opposite us treated me like shit, cat-calling and not taking me seriously. They made huge shows of swaggering practically into the infield every time I was at bat. Little did they know, I was a slugger. I couldn’t field for shit, that’s for sure, but I could HIT. I never struck out. I always got at least to first base. Hand-eye, baby, hand-eye. My batting average was one of the best on the team. And through the summer, that’s what you’d do. You’d play baseball. Your parents would come watch. You’d horse around afterwards. You’d have baseball practice. You’d work hard on your swing. You’d practice fielding grounders. You were 11 years old. I’m very glad I had that experience.

Most of the essay (over 50 pages long) features long conversations about baseball and how the rules have to be bent a little bit at the Little League level in order for a game to happen at all. And what it’s like to have pitchers dissolve in tears on the mound, etc. It also describes the suspenseful buildup of a baseball season, where a team suddenly finds itself champions, far beyond the level they expected, district, State, Region (maybe? fingers crossed?).

But the excerpt below goes macro.

Stephen King watches the boys practice on a new field, and asks Dave the coach what he thinks the boys will take with them from their Little League experience.

Sentimental? You betcha. Baseball is one of the most openly sentimental of sports. So sentimental it can get downright soggy. But that’s the gig. That’s also why there’s a need for a gigantic Anthology like this one.

Excerpt from Baseball: A Literary Anthology, edited by Nicholas Davidoff. From “Head Down”, by Stephen King

“Look at them,” Dave says, still smiling. Something in that smile suggests he may be reading my mind. “Take a good look.”

I do. There are perhaps half a dozen of them on the bench, still laughing and telling junior high school war stories. One of them breaks out of the discussion long enough to ask Matt Kinney to throw the curve, and Matt does – one with a particularly nasty break. The boys on the bench all laugh and cheer.

“Look at those two guys,” Dave said, pointing. “One of them comes from a good home. The other one, not so good.” He tosses some sunflower seeds into his mouth and then indicates another boy. “Or that one. He was born in one of the worst sections of Boston. Do you think he’d know a kid like Matt Kinney or Kevin Rochefort, if it wasn’t for Little League? They won’t be in the same classes at junior high, wouldn’t talk to each other in the halls, wouldn’t have the slightest idea the other one was alive.”

Matt throws another curve, this one so nasty J.J. can’t handle it. It rolls all the way to the backstop, and as J.J. gets up and trots after it the boys on the bench cheer again.

“But this changes all that,” Dave says. “These boys have played together and won their district together. Some come from families that are well-to-do, and there’s a couple from families as poor as used dishwater, but when they put on the uniform and cross the chalk they leave all that on the other side. Your school grades can’t help you between the chalk, or what your parents do, or what they don’t do. Between the chalk, what happens is the kids’ business. They tend it, too, as well as they can. All the rest -” Dave makes a shooing gesture with one hand. “All left behind. And they know it, too. Just look at them if you don’t believe me, because the proof is right there.”

I look across the field and see my own kid and one of the boys Dave has mentioned sitting side by side, heads together, talking something over seriously. They look at each other in amazement, then break out laughing.

“They played together,” Dave repeats. “They practiced together, day after day, and that’s probably even more important than the games. Now they’re going into the State Tournament. They’ve even got a chance to win it. I don’t think they will, but that doesn’t matter. They’re going to be there, and that’s enough. Even if Lewiston knocks them out in the first round, that’s enough. Because it’s something they did together between those chalk lines. They’re going to remember that. They’re going to remember how that felt.”

“Between the chalk,” I say, and all at once I get it – the penny drops. Dave Mansfield believes this old chestnut. Not only that, but he can afford to believe it. Such cliches may be hollow in the big leagues, where some player or other tests positive for drugs every week or two and the free agent is God, but this is not the big leagues. This is where Anita Byrant sings the national anthem over battered PA speakers that have been wired to the chain-link behind the dugouts. This is where, instead of paying admission to watch the game, you put something in the hat when it comes around. If you want to, of course. None of these kids are going to spend the off-season playing fantasy baseball in Florida with overweight businessmen, or signing expensive baseball cards at memorabilia shows, or touring the chicken circuit at two thousand bucks a night. When it’s all free, Dave’s smile suggests, they have to give the cliches back and let you own them again, fair and square. You are once more allowed to believe in Red Barber, John Tunis, and the Kid from Tomkinsville. Dave Mansfield believes what he is saying about how the boys are equal between the chalk, and he has a right to believe, because he and Neil and Saint have patiently led these kids to a point where they believe it. They do believe it; I can see it on their faces as they sit in the dugout on the far side of the diamond. It could be why Dave Mansfield and all the other Dave Mansfields across the country keep on doing this, year after year. It’s a free pass. Not back into childhood – it doesn’t work that way – but back into the dream.

Dave falls silent for a moment, bouncing a few sunflower seeds up and down in the palm of his hand.

“It’s not about winning or losing,” he says finally. “That comes later. It’s about how they’ll pass each other in the corridor this year, or even down the road in high school, and look at each other, and remember. In a way, they’re going to be on the team that won the district in 1989 for a long time.” Dave glances across into the shadowy first-base dugout, where Fred Moore is now laughing about something with Mike Arnold. Owen King glances from one to the other, grinning. “It’s about knowing who your teammates are. The people you had to depend on, whether you wanted to or not.”

He watches the boys as they laugh and joke four days before their tournament is scheduled to begin, then raises his voice and tells Matt to throw four or five more and knock off.