“Don’t try to cream the ball. Just make contact.”

A wonderful and moving roundtable discussion over at Quiet Bubble about baseball, and, primarily, books about baseball (who does baseball lend itself to literature?) – but of course everyone basically ends up talking about themselves, and their fathers, and their childhood memories. (Or, to quote Walter at one point: “That was some deep-dish memoir, summertime love, fervent and reverent detail, and mental food to relish and savor.”) Indeed.

Glad to see Underworld get a shoutout (obviously I was not a fan of that book but the opening 50 pages is as good as it gets, in terms of baseball writing – and I’ve read a lot of baseball writing) … as well as the references to Howards End, James Earl Jones, Damn Yankees, and George Carlin.

A long leisurely read, wonderful.

I got the quote in the title of this post from one of the participants in the discussion (Wally Holland), whose high school varsity baseball coach said that to him at practice one day, and reading it this morning, it zinged through me. It feels like truth. Or, whatever, it feels like what I need to hear right now.

“Don’t try to cream the ball. Just make contact.”

Again, that echo of Howards End.

She need trouble him with no gift of her own. She would only point out the salvation that was latent in his own soul, and in the soul of every man. Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer. Only connect, and the beast and the monk, robbed of the isolation that is life to either, will die.

Baseball fans, fans of reading, fans of good talk: definitely go read the whole thing.