For me, it's not hard to decide what sport has produced the greatest books. It's the national pastime, of course, the game that has defined our nation. Not to go all Ken Burns on you, but this game says so much about our national character.
Boxing has inspired some of the greatest films — Raging Bull, of course, as a prime example — but I'm not sure whether that celebration of brutality, or the other, football, has produced stories that get to the core of the American being.
So here we are, with our Major League Baseball season just under way, and it's time to take a look at a few baseball classics.
No game is more immersed in history than baseball. Every time a batter comes to the plate, he's not just batting against the team out in the field — he's also taking on everyone else who's ever stood in those cleats and tapped that bat against the rubber.
Same thing with writing about baseball. If you don't believe this game has a deep bench of literature, then get hold of Baseball's Best Short Stories (Chicago Review Press, $18.95), edited by Paul D. Staudohar. This is the classic collection for the 21st century. For years, Charles Einstein produced the Fireside Books of Baseball series and his greatest hits collection, The Baseball Reader. That book was a model anthology, a collection that brought together short stories, poems, news accounts, song lyrics and, in one memorable instance, the transcript of a Vin Scully call of the end of a ballgame.
As the title indicates, this new collection focuses on short fiction. It starts with Ernest Thayer's celebrated "Casey at the Bat," but follows it with the mock news account by the great sportswriter, Frank DeFord. It counters the classic short stories of early minor league ball by Ring Lardner — the man who practically invented the genre of the baseball story — with more recent work from W.P. Kinsella, who gave the world the great baseball fantasy, Shoeless Joe (filmed as Field of Dreams).
