Issue 34 / 2008
34 / Anatomy of Baseball
An all-star collection of essays about the great American pastime
This all-star collection of essays about the great American pastime dissects the game one element at a time to try to get at why we find ourselves in the stands or on the field, season after season. Matt Wood recalls his career at first base; The boundaries of J.D. Scrimgeour’s outfield are “inexact, and infinite–a state of mind;” Susan Perabo contemplates retiring from her imaginary career at second base and assesses the chances for a female major-leaguer; and John Thorn explains how “baseball in America is a sort of faith for the faithless, and its seven virtues are the same as those of religion.”
Plus, in “Keeping It Real,” we learn about the moment that made Elizabeth Bobrick become a writer; talk with Michelle Wildgen, senior editor of Tin House, about food writing, developing story ideas, and working with editors; and take a quick tour of the lyric essay with Dinty W. Moore.
Already a subscriber?
Read this issue nowTable of Contents
FROM THE EDITOR: Baseball: The Universal Connection
Last spring, I taught a graduate-level writing workshop in creative nonfiction to a group of students, mostly fiction workshop writers, enrolled in the MFA program at Arizona State University, where I was serving as writer-in-residence.Foreword
We’re sorry; we’re currently unable to make this work available online.At the Park
It always was a city game, baseball.Oriole Magic
We’re sorry; we’re currently unable to make this work available online.My Outfield
The outfield stretches from the flat, dried brown grass of Fairview Park in Normal, Illinois, to the thick green behind the high school tennis courts in New Milford, Connecticut, to Furlong Field in Salem, Massachusetts, booby-trapped with gooseshit, hemmed in on three sides by an auto junkyard, a playground, and a street, but on its fourth side—is that fair territory?—slopingFirst Base of Last Resort
In the still-sweltering heat of an early July evening, before the sun went down and the hard brown June beetles started pelting the infield dust around my feet, I crouched into my position at first base as the pitcher made his move toward home plate.My Glove
My oldest personal possession is my baseball glove, which I bought for eight dollars at Woolworth’s in St. Cloud, Minnesota, in 1960, when I was almost thirteen.The Southworths
There are a lot of stories about baseball during World War II, and the more they are told the more they almost succeed in making those years sound like a foolish time, when a man with one arm played outfield for the St. Louis Browns and a fifteen year-old pitched for the Reds.The Bat
For perhaps ten years now the golden summer evenings I remember from growing up have been gone. Did they slip by and I didn’t notice? And is it innocence or the light I’m missing?An Ode to Baseball Caps
We’re sorry; we’re currently unable to make this work available online.Pesäpallo: Playing at the Edge of the World
We’re leading by one, but with two outs, when I come up to bat. The staff-student baseball game is a yearly tradition at Päämajakoulu, and part of the tradition is that the game isn’t played for any set number of innings.Ya Gotta Believe
I have written about baseball for more than three decades now. At first I sat in the stands, looking down at the field and writing about what I saw. Then I began to wonder about what might really be going on, hidden from sight yet discernible from the game’s statistical residue.Freddy the Fan
One-eyed Freddy the Fan seems to attend every game at Yankee Stadium. He’s certainly there every time I am. No matter the weather, Freddy wears his team cap and satin team jacket.Nostalgia: The 1950s and My Mitts
Going My Way, one of my favorite films, preserves an America when baseball mattered. That world of the 1940s was carried over, with all its views and values, into the ’50s and my childhood—a world for better and worse now long gone.Spring Training Lights
It’s the bottom of the seventh inning, none on, no one out, and the Oakland Athletics’ Mark Ellis hits a broken-bat bloop into shallow left-center off Arizona Diamondbacks reliever Jorge Julio.The Baseball Pastoral
There’s a scene in City Slickers where Billy Crystal, in the midst of the midlife crisis that has taken him out West, recalls with near-reverence his first visit to Yankee Stadium: his first glimpse of the field as he and his father emerge from the tunnel, the brilliant blue sky, the blinding white of the uniforms, the rich green grass.