Short Story Genre Survey, Part 1

cover art by George Gross

Recently, my Thursday posts have proportionally been concentrating on short stories more than movies or other subjects I normally cover. I didn't plan it that way, but what the hey. It happened.

So I thought "Why not give the short story reviews more structure?" Because if there is one thing that is lacking in the world, it's more structure on obscure blogs in coverage of short stories. It is, I think, the greatest failing of our civilization.

So I decided to make a list of genres, then--over the course of the "Short Story Genre Survey" I am starting today--cover one story from each of these genres.

Here's the Genre List:

Sports

Adventure

Mystery

Horror

Science Fiction

Fantasy

Western

War

Sports is crossed off because we are knocking the sports story out of the park today.

"Ol' Knucklehead," by Paul R. McCully, was published in the Summer 1946 issue of Baseball Stories. According to the FictionMag index, this is his only published work.

But it's a good one. In fact, the baseball stories (and sports stories in general) from this era were always a lot of fun. Written without cynicism, they tell straightforward tales that usually depend on inning-by-inning accounts of key games to generate tension. I love 'em.

The story involves a fictional National League team called the Barons that brings up a new catcher from the minors. The new guy is an extremely confident hotshot who soon gets on everyone's nerves. But he's a good hitter and he has an uncanny ability to signal for just the right pitch.

But he screws up, once with an embarrassing fielding error and, in another game, with an even more embarrassing running error. This gets him benched and earns him the nickname "Knucklehead."

It's only when the Barons play the Cubs in the last game of the series that "Knucklehead" might have a chance to redeem himself when he improvises a brilliant plan during a key at-bat. It's a plan that is perfectly within the rules, but I can't find an example of it being done deliberately. Kudos to the writer for coming up with something both original and plausible. 

As I said, it's a fun story--hitting all the right vibes that make the sports stories from the first half of the 20th-Century so gosh darn entertaining.

It's also fun to think about another aspect of the story. Or at least it's fun if you are a total nerd: Why was the protagonist put on a fictional team rather than a real one?

As far as I can determine (and I'm not an expert, so take this with a grain of salt), it was (and is) okay for writers to use real-life teams in fiction as long as it's for story purposes and not marketing. John Tunis' classic 1943 baseball novel The Keystone Kids, for instance, put its main characters on the roster of the Brooklyn Dodgers. There's no evidence that Tunis had to obtain permission to do this. He just did.

But the pulp magazines often used fictional team names. Part of the reason, I think, was to stay neutral and not alienate any fans. If you put your hero on the Yankees, you might drive Red Sox fans away from buying your magazine in the future. A fictional team avoids this problem and also allows the writer to ignore real-life schedules, pennant results and so on.

Also, I thought I caught the writer of "Ol' Knucklehead" in a slight error, but when I looked it up, I discovered there was no error AND there was actually a factoid from baseball history I actually DIDN'T KNOW!!! I hang my head in shame, of course. The "error" is that the Barons and the Cubs end the season with 1/2 game difference in the standings. This means they didn't play the same number of games, which in turn means someone had a game cancelled (likely a rain delay) that was not made up. With the pennant at stake, I thought, wouldn't the league have made a point of getting that game played?

The answer is NO: Unless the game needed to be played because of a tie for first place, the League would allow the 1/2 game lead to stand. Travel restrictions and other logistical matters made playing the game impractical. In 1908, for instance, the Detroit Tigers had a never-made-up rainout and finished 90-63. This put them one game over the Cleveland Naps, who finished at 90-64. Gee whiz--why didn't I know this? I pride myself on my impeccable knowledge of baseball history, but didn't know this! WHY, UNIVERSE? WHY DO YOU DO THIS TO ME?

Anyway, you can find this story online HERE. If you like baseball, I can pretty much promise you'll enjoy reading it. 

Next week, we will look at a story from another genre. 

Hey, Isn't He Cheating?

It Happens Every Spring (1949) is a great movie to watch at the beginning of the baseball season. It's a funny, charming and completely unpretentious film that mixes a little bit of slapstick with a lot of clever, dialogue-driven comedy.

It stars Ray Milland as a mild-mannered college professor who is in love with the college president's beautiful daughter (Jean Peters). He doesn't make enough money to marry her. But when a foul ball from a nearby baseball diamond crashes into his lab and smashes his latest experiment, he ends up with a solution that repels wood. That means if you rub it on a baseball, the ball would loop around a baseball bat.

Milland is a baseball fan (which proves he's pretty smart), so he comes up with a plan to make money. He'll try out as a pitcher for the St. Louis Cardinals, keep a small piece of felt coated with the solution in his mitt and pitch balls that literally cannot be hit.

Both the owner and the manager think he's just a nut when he shows up at the stadium, but he manages to annoy them both enough to get a tryout just so they can watch him make a fool out of himself. But, to their surprise, he consistently strikes people out.

From there, the movie draws comedy from several situations: his growing friendship with his catcher (Paul Douglas); his desire to keep his new career as a pitcher a secret (he's working on the assumption that it would bring shame to the science department at the college); and his girlfriend's growing conviction--drawn from several misunderstandings--that he's become a gangster.  It's great comedy.

But the movie also shows how a work of fiction can--on occassion--blissfully ignore some problems with the logic of its plot. For instance, Milland has a pitch that can't be hit. He's shown to be winning consistently and becoming a national star, which is fine. But shouldn't his fame be even greater? Shouldn't the solution on the ball mean he's pitching no-hit shutouts with 27 strike outs every single time?  He probably walked a few guys, but all he really had to do was lob the ball into the strike zone three times for every batter. No one mentions his stats, but this is something that should have been impossible to ignore.

Perhaps more importantly, Milland is cheating by coating the ball with a foreign substance. He's throwing the world's most effective spitball. Even if he's never caught in-universe, shouldn't our attitude about him be tarnished by this?

But we like him just fine. It Happens Every Spring is a perfect example of how ambiance, humor and the likability of the characters allows us to overlook logical holes in the plot. The problems I detail in the above two paragraphs really aren't problems at all. Even if we think about them while watching the movie, it really won't bother us. The movie exists in a world where coating a baseball with a secret scientific formula doesn't constitute cheating. And that's just fine. It's too funny and just too darn pleasant to allow us to worry about such things.

When Baseball Gets Rough

Read/Watch 'em In Order #97

So far, the February 1949 issue of New Sports Magazine has given us stories about boxing, football and golf. Next, we get to a story about the only sport that really matters--baseball.

"Double or Nothing Guy," by Bob Reed is about Horace Brady, who has just signed on to play second base for the Hawks.

(Side note: I have no idea what the legal concerns are, but I really wish baseball fiction could have gotten away with using real team names more often, even if the players were all fictional.)

Horace has been hitting and fielding well, but the manager tells him he's being sent to the minors after the upcoming series with their arch rivals--the Blues. Why? Because Horace is a well-spoken, educated man who simply doesn't gel with his rough "gashouse guys" who make up the rest of the team. It seems on the Hawks, nobody likes a nice guy.

Horace is disappointed, but he still loves the game. That evening, he overhears a conversation between a gambler and the team's ace pitcher Showboat Blane. Blane owes the gambler three grand and won't have the money to pay off for a week. When the gambler suggests there's a way to get the debt forgiven--something that would involve "just one game," Horace realizes the pitcher is being pressured into throwing the big game. So he steps in and offers to loan Blane the needed cash.

That decision starts to earn him some respect on the team. But what eventually wins the others over is his play on the field the next day. The rival team seems to be made up of nothing but jerks, who spike infielders when sliding and use brush-back pitches quite often. Horace is pretty even-tempered, but he's soon had enough. He scores a run by barreling through a catcher who tried to block the plate, knocking the catcher out.


via GIPHY


He also tags out a runner who kept trying to spike him--knocking out a few teeth with the tag as well.

The Hawks win the game, Horace will stay with the team, and the story ends on a hilarious twist when Horace learns what the gambler actually meant when he talked about "just one game." I won't spoil that. The story is available online HERE.

It's a fun and well-written story, though the moral that you have to play rough to retaliate against rough opponents isn't one I care for. But, to be fair, the umps weren't calling anyone out for the rough stuff, so maybe that's just the way the Hawks had to play. Accept the story for what it is and you'll have a good time reading it.

Friday's Favorite OTR

Archie Andrews: "Big Ball Game" 5/20/51

Mr. Andrews just wants to spend a quiet afternoon listening to the Dodgers game on the radio. That doesn't sound like a difficult task, so what can possibly go wrong?

Aside from being a very funny episode, I appreciate that the snippets of the game we hear on the radio use the names of real-life Cardinals and Dodgers players from 1951.

Click HERE to listen or download.

Friday's Favorite OTR

Cavalcade of America: "The Great McGraw" 4/15/46

Pat O'Brien stars in a highly fictionalized but still enormously entertaining biography of John McGraw, the ill-tempered but brilliant manager of the New York Giants (1902-1932).

Click HERE to listen or download.

Someone Really Wants the Cardinals to Lose the Pennant.

In real life, 1934 was a great year for the St. Louis Cardinals. The Gashouse Gang--as the team was nicknamed--had five .300 hitters, while Dizzy Dean was a 30-game winner on a regular basis. They won 98 games in '34. They were matched against the Detroit Tigers (who had 101 regular season wins) in the World Series and won it in seven games.

In the B-movie universe, though, the Cardinals were struggling to take the Pennant. A job made harder, by the way, when someone starts knocking off their best players.

This is the premise of the 1934 film Death on the Diamond (based on a novel by Cortland

Fitzsimmons). It's a fun, fast-paced movie that reminds us the three most American things in the world are baseball, apple pie and... murder.

As the movie opens, the prospects for the Cardinals look good, especially with rookie pitcher Larry Kelly (Robert Young) racking up wins. But there are some gamblers who have a vested influence in seeing the Cardinals lose. A guy who wants to buy out the Cardinals would rather see them lose as well--that would lower the value of the team and force the current owner-manager to sell out.

But, when bribery and minor mayhem don't work, are either the gamblers or the wannabe owner willing to commit murder to make sure the team loses? Because someone is pegging off key players during key games. It's really hard to win a game when you find one of your best players stuffed in a clubhouse locker during the 7th Inning Stretch.

The mystery is a good one, well-written and and full of red herrings. The dialogue is witty, with Robert Young and Marge Evans (as the manager's daughter) playing nicely off one another.

For me, though, it's the supporting the cast that sells the film. Paul Kelly, one of my favorite tough-guy actors, plays a sports reporter with a nose for sniffing out bad guys. Nat Pendleton and Ted Healy respectively play a catcher and an umpire who bicker like an old married couple throughout most of the film--leading to a surprisingly emotional scene when the murders begin.

The real-life Gashouse Gang might have been one of the best teams in baseball history, but by golly, they never had to solve a murder mystery while simultaneously winning the pennant.


Then again, a murder mystery in which Dizzy Dean and the rest of the gang solve the crime would be too cool for words.

A Crazy Roommate

If I could time-travel, one of the first items on my "things-to-do" list would be to barnstorm through the late 19th and early 20th Century and attend a lot of baseball games.

I'd love to see a few 19th Century games, with Hoss Radbourn pitching for the Providence Grays. It would be wonderful to jump ahead a few decades later and watch teams led by Connie Mack or John McGraw or Miller Huggins in action; to see Rogers Hornsby slap a single or Babe Ruth hit one into the bleachers or Tinkers, Evers and Chance turn a double play. Watching Satchel Page and Josh Gibson face off in a Negro League game would be another highlight.

Of course, my view of early baseball is dangerously close to being romanticized. The racial segregation would be there and I'd probably get beaten up if I suggested it was a bad idea. The stands would be full of rowdy, drunken fans spitting out so much tobacco juice that my gag reflex would be activating several times an inning. The players wouldn't be much better.  But I think I'd be willing to put up with that for the sake of seeing a few games from the days before designated hitters, wild card teams and other Abominations Against Nature.

But at least we still have the excellent baseball fiction from that era. I wrote about Zane Grey's baseball fiction a few years ago. Probably the most respected writer of baseball fiction from the early 20th Century is Ring Lardner. Lardner had a conversational prose style that vividly brought his stories to life.

"My Roomy" is a combination of slapstick humor and an examination of an obsessive personality who can't handle being in the Majors. The unnamed narrator is explaining why he slumped at the end of one season--it was a lack of sleep caused by his roommate.

That roommate is a rookie named Elliot, who can hit just about any pitch thrown at him, but is an utterly hopeless fielder. So he ends up serving as a pinch hitter--smashing out homers and triples. Well, smashing out hits if he doesn't strike out because he was laughing at something he saw at the nickelodeon the night before. He's also stubborn--tell him not to steal home after a triple and he'll try it just out of spite, getting thrown out easily. The manager wants to release him, but he whacks game-winning RBIs just often enough to keep him around.

On road trips, no one can stand Elliot as a roommate for more than a couple of nights. He runs the water in the bathtub all night because he likes the sound; or he turns on all the lights at 2 am so that he can shave, waving the razor around just enough to keep his roommates from complaining. On several occasions, he breaks into song loudly enough to nearly get the entire club ejected from the hotel.

The narrator uses some reverse psychology to keep Elliot quiet at night, but that doesn't stop him from being nuts in other ways. This all comes to a head when the team plays in New York, Elliot gets a promise from Giants manager John McGraw that he can sign with the Giants (and be more likely to get World Series money) if he strikes out. Of course, John McGraw would lie to his own mother on her deathbed if it would get him an extra run, so that doesn't lead to anything other than Elliot finally getting released. Elliot heads back to his home town, where he'll discover that never bothering to read his girlfriend's letters can have rather tragic consequences.

The story starts out funny and it never loses its sense of humor, but things do turn just a little creepy by the end. It's a fascinating tale--taking a look at a man who was frankly nuts in circumstances where no one quite knew what to do about him.

Besides, how can you worry about a crazy man when you're in a pennant race?

Sidenote: Here's an article I wrote about baseball on old-time radio.

One Hit and One Strike Out

The anthology book Strange Sports Stories (published by DC Comics) ran for just six issues in 1973 & 74.

It's easy to see why it had a short run. It's a fun idea (sports-oriented stories given a supernatural or science fiction twist), but I suspect that the theme was limiting enough to give a lot of the stories a very contrived feel.

The very first issue (October 1973) is a good example of this. There's two stories in this one, both written by Frank Robbins and illustrated by Curt Swan. In the first, a pro baseball team plays against the devil for their souls, while in the second a group of supernatural creatures teach a teenager to.. um, well, to bowl. Because that's what supernatural creatures spend their time doing.

The first story--"To Beat the Devil"--is pretty good. A team called the Meteors is flying to the World Series when their plane is essentially hijacked by Satan. Satan will play them in a game. If they win, they go free. If he wins, he gets their souls.

The set-up is a little sloppy. The devil is pretty much just forcing them to play, possibly dooming them to Hell whether they were destined to eventually go there or not. There needed to be more of a hook. For instance, in the Charlie Daniels song "The Devil Goes Down to Georgia," the fiddle player was given a choice about whether to compete with the devil and would get a golden fiddle if he won. That's the sort of thing that needed to be happening here. I suspect there just wasn't time for anything more complex in a story that only runs 12 pages total.




Also, the Meteors manager and players accept the situation with remarkable aplomb, but I kind of like that despite it's lack of reality. Heck, professional baseball players have to deal with the unexpected, whether it be a grounder taking a bad hop or being kidnapped by the universe's Source of all Evil.

Once the game itself starts, the story does get interesting. The devil plays all nine positions on his team, teleporting from one spot to another as needed. He hits one home run in the first inning, all while keeping the Meteors scoreless.

When the manager realizes that Satan can't be in two places at once, he comes up with a plan for forcing his opponent into a forfeit. But a little bit of improvisation from the first baseman will be needed to make sure the plan works.

So despite a sloppy set-up, the overall story is reasonably well-executed. I remember reading this when it first came out and deciding that this was a fictional retelling of something that really happened to the 1969 Mets when they were flying to Baltimore for the first game of the World Series. There's nothing in the story that suggests this, but it was an idea that simply made the tale all that much more fun for me.

The second story, though, doesn't really work at all. Swan's art work looks great, but the concept and execution are just weak.

A teenager named Rip Van Wynne is a lousy bowler, tossing gutter ball after gutter ball as he embarrasses himself in front of his friends. He goes for a walk in the nearby woods and stumbles across the same guys who had put Rip Van Winkle to sleep a few centuries earlier.

They don't put Rip down for a 20-year nap. Instead, they give him a few bowling tips--enough to turn him into an instant expert. Returning to the bowling alley, Rip proceeds to bowl strike after strike.

But he'd been warned never to bowl a perfect game, because then he'd be guilty of the sin of vanity. So when he ignores this warning and tries to throw his last strike, one of the little people supernaturally kicks the ball into the gutter.

It's a silly ending to a silly story, because Rip wasn't acting like an arrogant jerk. The worst you can say about him was that he was hoping to impress one of the girls in his group of friends, but that doesn't sound all that horrible. Heck, it's not as if he were burning an entire civilization to the ground for the sake of the girl! 

The story makes it sound as if an athlete is guilty of vanity if he simply performs at his best level. Which is, of course, just plain dumb. An athlete might let vanity get the best of him when he wins--but he might also stay a humble and decent person. Bowling a perfect game is not inherently prideful.

If the story had simply depended on charm or humor to carry through with the idea, it might have worked. But the characters are too flat to generate either charm or humor.

"A Tall Tale of Tenpins" is a good example of why Strange Sports Stories didn't catch on. It was simply too limiting a theme for a monthly anthology comic. Weak and contrived plots, with the writer desperately trying to force a sports story into a fantasy or science fiction setting, were pretty much inevitable.

But the idea of the '69 Mets beating Satan in a game of baseball is wonderful. Heck, if the worst team in baseball can take the whole world by surprise when they suddenly win 100 games and take the Major League powerhouse Orioles in five games, then they likely could out-play the devil.  There's a part of me that still believes it really happened. I still don't care that the story doesn't hint at all that the Meteors secretly represent the Mets.

So--despite its flaws--I'm glad Strange Sports Stories was around.

"Base hits, they knew, were a matter of feet. Double Plays were a matter of inches."

The first time I tried to read John Tunis' 1943 novel Keystone Kids, I was maybe seven-years-old. The book is about two brothers who play shortstop and second base for a minor league team in Nashville. Second base was sometimes called the "keystone" base. The boys, Spike and Bob Russell, work in perfect tandem while turning double plays and become known as the Keystone Kids.

Anyway, I didn't finish it at that time. Not that it was too difficult for me. I was as brilliant then as I am now and often read above my grade level. But early in the book, the Kids are called up to play with the Brooklyn Dodgers. There's a scene in a train dining car where its explained to them that they can just sign the check for their meals and don't have to themselves pay.  To my seven-year-old mind, that made adult life seem frighteningly complicated, so I gave up on the book.

At least, that's the way I remember it. It's a pretty good story, so I'm just going to run with it.

But, whatever my reason for leaving Keystone Kids unfinished, I did not choose wisely. Like all of Tunis' sports books, it's a wonderfully exciting story.

Kids is actually the third of eight books Tunis wrote about a fictionalized version of the Dodgers, with many of the same characters appearing throughout the series. This one introduces us to Spike and Bob for the first time. The Dodgers are having a rotten year when they first come up, though the two of them field and hit well. They get a better contract when they return for the next year, but the team is divided into cliques and factions that keep them from playing effectively.

When the Dodgers hit last place, Spike is surprised to find he's been made manager. Despite his youth, the team owner appreciates Spike's intelligence and determination to win.

At first, he brings the team together and they win a couple of games. But then the rookie catcher gets on the bad side of a veteran outfielder. And that's bad--because the young catcher is Jewish. Soon, he's the target of antisemitic taunts from both his teammates and from the players on other teams. His play begins to suffer and the team once again loses cohesiveness and begins to drop games. Spike wants the players to lay off, but even his brother Bob takes sides against the catcher.

It's here that the book goes from being fun to being downright fascinating. Throughout the book, Tunis give us solid characterizations and play-by-play description of games that builds up a remarkable level of tension. But now, all of a sudden, the story is dealing with prejudice and its effect on a young, scared rookie. All of a sudden, baseball is a backdrop for deeper issues. Four years before Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier in baseball, John Tunis was already showing us that the game could be an important part of making the United States a true melting pot.

And this is all done without making the descriptions of the games themselves any less engrossing:

"The ball was to Spike's right, the hardest ball the shortstop has to handle, the test of a great infielder. It all had to be done fast, too, the stop, the recovery, the throw. He got down to it and stayed down the way older men never could; he went down and nailed the ball. Picking it up from the ground and throwing it was one continuous motion, a quick underhanded snap which Bob from years of experience timed perfectly."

Baseball is the greatest sport of all time. As Earl Weaver once said: You can't sit on a lead and run a few plays into the line and just kill the clock. You've got to throw the ball over the plate and give the other man his chance. That's why baseball is the greatest game of them all.

For that matter, let's quote Leo Durocher: I'd trip my mother. I'll help her up, brush her off, tell her I'm sorry. But mother don't make it to third.

Actually, let's not quote Leo after all.

New article by me

Check out my new article on Baseball in Old Time Radio, available at OTRCAT.com

Friday's Favorite OTR

Damon Runyon Theater: “Baseball Hattie” 6/26/46


Damon Runyon’s wonderful short stories were a perfect match for radio—his fun, highly readable prose translated to the airwaves without any loss of humor or emotional impact.


Most of Runyon’s stories were comedies about gamblers and low-level criminals who hung around Prohibition-era New York City, but there were a few tragedies tossed into the mix. “Baseball Hattie” is one of those tragedies, a very human drama about a woman who marries an up-and-coming New York Giants pitcher. At first, it seems like the two are hopelessly in love and destined to live happily ever after. But when the pitcher becomes involved with gamblers, things go downhill fast.


It’s a soap opera-y story, but it’s an effective one, with both the dialogue and the acting bringing a real humanity to the proceedings. That it manages to pull an uplifting ending out of its inherent tragedy serves to make it that much better.

Click HERE to listen or download.

Friday's Favorite OTR

This is another rerun of an older post--but this time with a link to the actual episode.

Gunsmoke: "Ball Nine--Take Your Base" 8/2/59


We don't normally connect baseball with the Old West, but it was during the post Civil War years that baseball really boomed in popularity and became our national pass-time. So, though we might not hear anyone shout "Play Ball!" very often in Westerns, it did happen fairly frequently in real life.


So it's always fun to run across a Western that acknowledges this. And this really fun episode of Gunsmoke does a nice job of capturing the flavor of the game in the 1870s--a time during which the rules were evolving and the game was becoming more popular every year.


A touring pro team arrives in Dodge City. Doc Adams agrees to be umpire in a game between the pros and a team of locals. But Doc's memories of the game go back to his Antebellum living in the East, when he watched gentleman clubs like the Knickerbockers and the Mutuals play friendly games.


Marshal Dillon tries to set Doc straight--explaining that the modern day professional players played hard and often brawled hard. And the fanatics--those watching the game who were sometimes called "fans"--were often just as bad.


Doc soon finds out Dillon is right, but plans for the game continue regardless. There's a wonderful scene in which Doc facilitates a meeting between the managers to agree on the rules. (Can you catch a fly on one bounce and still get an out? Can the pitcher chew liquorice and smear it on the ball before he pitches?) Doc and the local manager learn of a new rule involving the concept of the walk, which happened if a total nine balls are thrown outside the area to which the batter had asked it to be thrown (high, middle, or low). "That makes it hard on the pitcher," complains the local team leader.


Of course, there's something for Dillon to do as well as he looks into a scheme a couple of gamblers dream up to rig the game. And that part is cool as well. But it is the accurate and entertaining look back at the early years of baseball that make this episode stand out.

Click HERE to listen or download

Friday's Favorite OTR

Favorite Story: “Casey at the Bat” 4/17/48


“Casey at the Bat” is a great poem, but it’s not really that long. So how do you turn it into a half-hour radio show?


You give Casey a back-story, of course. It turns out the star of the Mudville team has a wife. He loves her, but she’s unhappy living in an unsophisticated small town. She’s equally displeased that their son keeps skipping school to see his dad play ball.


All things considered, she’d rather live in a big city, so she arranges for a scout from the Philadelphia Athletics to come see Casey. But Casey doesn’t want to move to Philly, especially after his “helpful” manager explains that in the big city you always have to wear a tie and can only talk in whispers while out in public.



It all makes for a witty and pleasant half-hour, with events leading up to the manager (who serves as narrator) reading the original poem once that point in the story is reached.


I noticed one little historical glitch in the episode. Ernest Thayer wrote “Casey at the Bat” in 1888. In the context of the Favorite Story adaptation, it’s mentioned that Thayer wrote the poem after seeing Casey play in Mudville, making the events of that game famous because of his poem.


But when the Philadelphia scout is coming to see Casey play, it’s mentioned that the Athletics are a new team, partly owned by manager Connie Mack. This is true, but (as I’m sure you all know without having to look it up) it sets the story firmly in 1901—13 years after Thayer wrote the poem.


Interestingly, the Disney animated short based on the poem (produced two years before this radio show) also jumped the story forward in time, setting it in 1902.


But what the hey. No matter when the story takes place, there never is any joy in Mudville.


Click HERE to listen or download.

Zane Grey's Baseball Tales

That's Zane Grey up there. We remember him best today as a prolific and still popular writer of Westerns, with his best-known and arguably finest novel being Riders of the Purple Sage. (1912)


But Grey also knew baseball. He actually played minor league ball for a short time around the turn of the century and his brother briefly played for the Pittsburg Pirates in 1902.


And, by golly, he wrote about baseball as well. I recently stumbled across the book The Redheaded Outfield & Other Baseball Stories (1920), a collection of delightful and sometimes extremely exciting tales about minor league and small town baseball--set in an era when baseball really was America's Sport and nearly every town had its own team. (I'm sure many Zane Grey fans know about this book already--but it was a fun new discovery for me.)


I've always been a fairly minor Zane Grey fan--I enjoy his work but always thought of Max Brand as the best Western writer of the early 20th Century. But I couldn't put The Redheaded Outfield down. Everything about it--from the conversational prose to the likeable characters to the understanding of baseball's hold on the culture of the day--grabbed my attention and held it. It's one of the most purely enjoyable books I've read in a long time.


About half the stories are narrated by a minor league manager who is mentoring a new and talented pitcher-- a job that at one point includes straightening out the pitcher's love life so that he can get back to concentrating on his pitching. Another yarn is about the 11-year-old crippled "manager" of a sandlot squad who discovers he has a talent for organizing a winning team. Still another is about a star college pitcher who is paid to be a "ringer" for a small-town team--until the pretty sister of an opposing player convinces him to change sides. Each story includes a play-by-play account of at least one tense game that really draws you into the story.


Zane Grey definitely knew his baseball. And he was pretty darn good at writing about it as well. Dig up a copy of this--there's a fair chance your local library will have it--and give it a read.