Entries associated with the tag "Ring Lardner":

The White Sox' Carlos Quentin just got recognized as an All-Star, in addition to receiving a well-done profile from the Tribune's usually puffy Melissa Isaacson, who delivered a piece with some fine quotes and details from Quentin's mother, Queta. Yet through it all what's been overlooked is his pivotal place in the Cubs-Sox interleague series. (Let's call it the City Serious, in honor of Ring Lardner's Jack Keefe, as opposed to the Crosstown Classic or whatever else.) With both teams entering in first place, when the Sox got swept at Wrigley, making it seem as if they didn’t deserve a postseason date with the Cubs, they came back more determined and more focused when the action shifted to Sox Park. The pivotal moment came early in Friday’s opening game when Cubs starter Ryan Dempster came high and tight with some chin music to Quentin with the Sox rallying in the third inning, knocking him to the ground. As the baseball book requires, Dempster followed that with a low, outside breaking ball, and Quentin lashed it down the right-field line to score a run and make it 3-0 Sox. Jermaine Dye drove him in, the next two batters walked against the rattled Dempster, and Nick Swisher followed with a grand slam, so the rout -- and the Sox comeback -- was on. If Quentin doesn't deliver in that instant, the Cubs have delivered their message of dominance and perhaps everything is different.

“He came up and in,” Quentin said afterward in his typically understated, matter-of-fact manner. “I’m not surprised by that when a pitcher does it. He’s trying to make a pitch. Obviously, I don’t want to get hit. (Dempster’s) got enough control that he might have wanted to put it there. It’s neither here nor there. The job had to get done to get the run in. You dust yourself back off, refocus, and I was happy I got a good swing on the ball and got the run in and got the job done.”

He got the job done the next day too, when he hit the game-winning homer, and Sunday as well, when another Quentin homer broke a scoreless tie and sent the Sox toward a 5-1 victory to complete the reverse sweep. That might not have sealed Quentin's spot on the All-Star team, but it sealed his place in the hearts of Sox fans. 

Mark Harris died last week of complications from Alzheimer's. Don't be too sad: he was 84 and apparently lived a good life. I don't know much more about him, except that he was the second-best writer of baseball fiction ever, so consider him Ted Williams to Ring Lardner's Babe Ruth, a not-too-shabby comparison.

Harris wrote four novels from the persona of Henry Wiggen, a pitcher with the New York Mammoths, a team modeled -- explicitly in the movies -- on the Yankees. To the end, Harris was best known for the 1973 film, Bang the Drum Slowly, for which he also wrote the script, but the reason it made a good and lasting movie (aside from the cast, which included Michael Moriarty, Robert De Niro, and Vincent Gardenia) is also the reason it's not his best book. Bang the Drum Slowly is slightly sentimental as it concerns the dying catcher Bruce Pearson, a simpleton who calls Wiggen "Arthur" when everyone else calls him "Author" in recognition of his having written a book.

His best, in my view, is his first, The Southpaw. Like Lardner's You Know Me Al, it's rooted to an era -- Harris's 1950s to Lardner's teens -- but timeless in the way it captures ballplayers and their unique place in the world. Both understand the cruel humor of baseball, the way players tease and rag one another because baseball is an unforgiving game and a player had best get used to that before setting foot on the field. One of my favorite passages from The Southpaw finds Wiggen as a rookie in spring training, watching players arriving at the train station from his room in a nearby hotel and sneering a bit at the "punks." When a real ballplayer shows he knows right away by his presence, his sense of style. So Wiggen goes down to meet him in the hotel lobby. He greets him, and the player says, "Hello, punk," then walks on by.

Lardner knew players from writing the "In the Wake of the News" sports column in the Tribune. Harris, by contrast, was an academic, with a doctorate in American studies. Still, Harris, like Lardner, got the feel of the clubhouse right. Baseball is an odd game because it's such an individual sport -- it always comes down to pitcher versus hitter -- and yet the players spend day after day in intimate circumstances. In both The Southpaw and Bang the Drum Slowly, Harris nails the intangible sense of chemistry that results as few writers have, perhaps best in the Bang the Drum Slowly line, "Winning makes winning like money makes money." Even today, a reader will see much of Lou Piniella in Harris's Dutch Schnell (perfectly played by Gardenia in the film). When a player insists he is very careful, Schnell replies, "That is what everybody says, yet the hospitals are full of babies."

Harris's books have also turned out to be timeless because they capture the players' attitudes toward their game, independent of money. The Henry Wiggen of The Southpaw is privileged, and he knows it. He's a bit of an ass, and he knows that too. Yet he also knows he does something better than all but a few human beings, and others will pay to see him do it. The salary structure of baseball might have changed, but that essential sense of privilege has not. When I reread it, just last year, The Southpaw seemed more contemporary than any baseball book I could think of, certainly more than Bernard Malamud's myth-mixing The Natural or W.P. Kinsella's bathetic Shoeless Joe.

At one point in the debut novel, Wiggen gets off a good line on the bench and Schultz responds, "Somebody ought to write a book."

"Somebody ought to write a good book about baseball," says pitcher Sam Yale.

"Somebody ought to write a good book," says the well-read catcher Red Traphagen.

That would be The Southpaw, on all three counts.