THIS COLLECTION CELEBRATES the merger of baseball and fantasy in short fiction, reprinting stories that range from classic works of the 1940s and 1950s to stories so new that they have only appeared in digital form before their print appearance in this book.
The stories range from very-short to novelette length, from the ambitiously literary to the ambitiously genre, from humorous to poignantly serious, from deeply ironic to touchingly earnest and honest; and yet they all fit perfectly here, for what brings them together is baseball and fantasy, the national pastime at its strange and supernatural best.
Baseball fiction has been popular since the game was spelled with two words—“base ball”—in the mid nineteenth century. By the post– Civil War years, the emergence of the dime novels of Zane Grey and others told stories of players and games and leagues that didn’t exist anywhere except in the writer’s imagination. But those works of fiction were intended to seem real, aimed at giving the reader the feeling of being immersed in the lives of real ballplayers playing the real game. Most of these stories were aimed at younger readers, too, and were meant to lead those readers toward a proper life, so the heroes were often uncompromisingly moral young men and women.
That began to change with the arrival in the 1940s through 1970s of adult baseball fiction, some of it very ambitious in the literary sense and all of it meant to engage and entertain adult readers—sometimes for dramatic effect, sometimes for political and social commentary, and often for comedic effect. Baseball really was “the national pastime” for much of that era, and so any number of short stories and novels emerged, a good number of them with fantasy elements. Some of these included Valentine Davies’s comedy radio play and film, It Happens Every Spring, Douglass Wallop’s The Year the Yankees Lost the Pennant (which became 1955’s famous musical, Damn Yankees), and Philip Roth’s ambitious The Great American Novel. The highlight of the era, of course, is 1952’s remarkable novel, The Natural, by Bernard Malamud, which can be seen as the first major mainstream success at novel length, blending baseball and fantasy.
During this period a number of excellent blends of science fiction and baseball were published, too, with several of the top authors in the field incorporating their interest in the pastime with their work in science fiction. That’s a trend that continues today, but in this collection I have, for the most part, avoided the overtly science-fictional and focused, instead, on the fantastic, the supernatural, and the strange.
Some of the best of the post-war baseball fantasies were short stories that appeared in the top magazines of the day, including “My Kingdom for Jones,” by Wilbur Schramm, which appeared in the Saturday Evening Post at the height of that magazine’s popularity in 1944, and Jack Kerouac’s 1955 “Ronnie on the Mound,” which appeared in Esquire. Both of these stories are reprinted in this collection.
More baseball fantasies appeared in the 1960s and 1970s. Robert Coover’s much-lauded 1968 novel, The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., was an important precursor to what would become a major trend, as was his terrific 1971 short story, “McDuff on the Mound,” from the Iowa Review, and the very famous “The Mighty Casey,” by Rod Serling. These two stories offered alternate takes on the famous “Casey at the Bat” poem by Ernest Lawrence Thayer, as did Ray Bradbury’s poem, “Ahab at the Helm.” Both stories and the poem are in this anthology.
In that same period, Max Apple’s 1975 story, “Understanding Alvarado,” took on an alternate history of Fidel Castro’s baseball skills, something that would be done very successfully nearly twenty years later by John Kessel in “The Franchise” and Bruce McAllister in “The Southpaw.” All three of these stories are reprinted in this collection.
And then came W. P. Kinsella, surely the most influential of these baseball fantasists, beginning with his 1980 “Shoeless Joe Jackson Comes to Iowa,” and continuing today. From a wealth of Kinsella short stories, I have chosen the very funny and effective “How I Got My Nickname,” from Spitball Magazine, originally published in 1983. For other stories from the 1980s, I have also included the highly praised 1984 story, “The Hector Quesadilla Story,” by T. Coraghessan Boyle, which appeared in the Paris Review; as well as the excellent “Baseball Memories,” by Edo van Belkom, which appeared in Aethlon: The Journal of Sport Literature, in 1989.
With the embrace of baseball fiction—often fantastic in nature—in literary reviews, and the appearance of magazines like Elysian Fields Quarterly, the short-lived 108 magazine, and Aethlon, the number of stories for those interested in baseball rose from 1990 forward. The wealth of excellent stories makes choices difficult and at one point I had a list of eighty-four “must” include stories, which I finally narrowed down to the twenty-two you see here.
During the 1990s and into the new millennium, an increased interest in counterfactual (or “alternate history”) stories brought a new element into baseball fantasy. One of the top magazines in the science-fiction and fantasy field, Asimov’s Science Fiction, printed a number of these stories, and several of them appear in this collection; but other publications, too, published baseball alternate-history stories. Among the very best of these are those by Harry Turtledove, the writer generally said to be the master of the alternate-history form. Known primarily as a prolific novelist, Turtledove’s short stories often appeared on tor.com, the online magazine run by Tor Books. Turtledove’s “The House that George Built,” from that site, is included in this collection.
A number of women writers have published excellent baseball fantasy of one kind or another in the last twenty years. Among the best of these many fine stories are “The Further Adventures of the Invisible Man” by Karen Joy Fowler (whose 1998 novel, The Sweetheart Season, made a significant contribution to the literature), “How to Read a Man” by Valerie Sayers, “Diamond Girls” by Louise Marley, and “Pitchers and Catchers” by Cecilia Tan. All four stories are in this collection.
Other outstanding baseball stories with elements of the strange or supernatural in more recent years include the minimalist “Baseball,” by Ray Gonzalez; “Lost October,” by David Sandner and Jacob Weisman; the very famous “Arthur Sternbach Brings the Curveball to Mars,” by Kim Stanley Robinson; the disarmingly satiric “My Last Season with the Owls,” by Ron Carlson; a wonderful tale of a curveball that really, seriously hangs, “The Hanging Curve,” by award-winning editor and writer Gardner Dozois; and my own “Stephen to Cora to Joe,” which appeared in Asimov’s Science Fiction in 2000. All of these stories are to be found in this anthology.
Finally, the most recently published story to appear in this collection is “A Face in the Crowd” by Stephen King and Stewart O’Nan. Originally published as an e-book in 2012, this is the story’s first appearance in a print edition and it’s in the lead-off spot in the anthology.
In total, these great stories range from the openly strange and fantastic to the more subtly ambiguous. The writers range from the little known to the hugely popular, and from those with famous literary reputations to those best known by the cognoscenti of genre writing. They are a diverse group, with diverse interests and ambitions; but what brings them together in this collection is their appreciation for elements of the fantastic and how they mix with the game of baseball to create a useful tool for storytelling. It is a tool offering a deep cultural history that allows for irony, humor, ghostly apparitions, slick-fielding horses, vampires, the challenges of childhood, the retelling of famous players and poems and tall tales from the pastime, a new way to look at what might have been, and—most of all—a great way to entertain, inform, and prod readers of all kinds.
Rick Wilber April 2014