It’s been a long time between baseball themes, but Kevin Baker, author of the 1993 novel Sometimes You See It Coming, is back on track with a non-fiction volume about the national pastime in the Empire State.
With the working title of The New York Game, Baker’s project is tentatively scheduled for a 2010 release by Pantheon.
I found the author in a roundabout way. The New York Times Sunday book section featured his double review of Kadir Nelson’s We Are the Ship: The Story of the Negro Leagues and Satchel Paige: Striking Out Jim Crow, by James Sturm, a couple of kid’s titles. The writer’s squib identified Baker as “currently working on a history of baseball in New York City.”
I found his Web site and discovered that not only had he written Sometimes, the tale of a star player for the New York Mets back in the late 1980s, but some wonderful historical fiction as well, including Paradise Alley and Dreamland, two books that couldn’t be more distant from baseball.
In a telephone conversation, Baker, who lives on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, discussed his work, past and present.
Several of the characters in Sometimes will be instantly recognizable to the hard-core fan. The manager is a Billy Martin clone, a manipulator who loves to build his own reputation at the expense of his players (there’s even a scene where he nearly comes to blows in the dugout with a star outfielder he has embarrassed be subbing for him in the field in mid-inning). One of the main narrators (the book juggles several voices in that role) is a very erudite Mickey Rivers. The owner was based on M. Donald Grant, who ran the Mets with an iron jaw back in the day. One of the sportswriters was the embodiment of the late Dick Young, a conservative sports columnist with the New York Daily News who helped run Tom Seaver out of town in the 1970s. And a pitcher who has a schizophrenic episode in the club house was inspired by Boston Red Sox hurler Roger Moret.
The protagonist, John Barr, was an amalgam of superstars, Baker said. The perception, or identity, of the ersatz future Hall of Famer changes throughout the book. Baker modeled him after Ty Cobb (but without the manic racism) for his single-minded drive (not to mention an incident that was shared by both the actual and fictional ballplayer). At other points, Barr is Ted Williams and Roberto Clemente.
“The Ol’ Swizzlehead” was based on Rivers, who, Baker said, “was not a great leadoff man, [and] had a pretty bad arm as a centerfielder. But somehow he would just make things happen. He gets the key hit, he hands the bat to Bucky Dent in ’78 [playoff game against the Red Sox].
Baker offered another example of the way in which Rivers always seemed to luck out.
“I was at a game that same year…when he hit a ball to right field. [The Detroit Tigers’] Mickey Stanley went back to get it and he couldn’t make the catch; he claimed a fan interfered with it and stood there on the field — this veteran outfielder — arguing with the umpire. Rivers went all the way around the bases….There was always something like that.”
Given that he chose a real team but unreal ballplayers, I asked how he decided on the names he used. “It varies a lot. In some cases I was picking actual figures [such as Moses ‘Chief” Yellow Horse, who pitched for the Pittsburgh Pirates in the early 1920s]. Sometimes things you want to sound like the actual person [Barr = Cobb, consonant, vowel, double-consonant]. With Barr I wanted a name that was solid, that didn’t reveal too much.”
He decided to have the Mets as his team simply because “It was much less cheesy than all the endless baseball fiction books written about the New York Mammoths or the New York Gothams. I picked them in part because they were the hot team in New York when I was writing the book. They qualify as public figures.” (For a list of famous fictional teams, click here.)
As much as he was satisfied with the finished product, Baker said, “I think if I had to do it again, I would have done it as a historical novel from that period…. I just wanted to do a novel based all these stories. In a way it’s a compilation of baseball myths and stories drawn from all over the place.”
So just how does “straight” differ from “historical” fiction? “Paradise Alley was more difficult to do because you’re striving for more historical accuracy. It took a lot more research to do that. On the other hand, each book has its own difficulties. Imagining myself into the minds of baseball players wasn’t exactly easy either. Sometimes it doesn’t matter about history; it’s a gray area. His most recent novel, Strivers Row, is set in Harlem in the 1930s and 40s. “It would be easier for me to write about Harlem in that period than to write about Harlem today,” he said.
“Paradise Alley was tremendous fun to do. The thing about writing historical novels is you have to question every single thing. You can’t just have someone walk into a room and turn on a light. It’s a continuous process of discovery about how people used to live.” On the other hand, “I’m not [overly] concerned about whether it rained on a certain day or what time the ferry boat left.”
Despite all his efforts, persnickety readers have “called him out” on occasion over various inaccuracies. “I try to get as much right as possible. But some things I care less about than others. There’s apparently some problem with the use of (rifle) cartridges. I was off on that by about a year. Someone else wrote in to say, ‘You have a Buffalo nickel in here [several years before the coin was actually minted]. Were you just trying to see if we were paying attention, or are you really just stupid?’”
Baker enjoys researching and writing about “the little things that tell you the nature of the society. In Paradise Alley, for instance, something that really struck me was about how the sewers were in such terrible condition at that point. The butchers were all so free about pushing their offal into the sewers that whenever there was the slightest rain, the gutters would run with blood. It was very common to see young boys sailing paper boats in these gutters of blood.”
He’s still working hard on the new book. “There’s such a wealth of information, fascinating stuff about New York life and the game. For instance, how inundated it was with gambling even before 1919. I was amazed to find that John McGraw owned a pool hall with Arnold Rothstein.”
Speaking of “getting it right,” I mentioned a long-standing concern I have with authors and publishers who continue to allow grievous errors to fine their way to the final page. Where does the fault lie?
“It’s very true and it’s one of things that happen because they don’t really fact check books,” Baker said. “They don’t have the resources to do so and have no intention in trying to do it, so there is that problem.”
Not to say that this is a new problem. In fact, as research methods and sources improve, volumes that were once held in near biblical reverence are under suspicion. “When I was researching Eight Men Out recently — the chronology of the Black Sox scandal — [Eliot Asinof] has all kinds of things wrong. He has the White Sox plotting the fix in the Ansonia Hotel [in New York] on a day they were in Boston. It would be very hard for publishers to get everything right.”
He put the onus on the authors’ agents to do their homework in finding an editor who has both an interest and knowledge in the subject matter.
Baker still does his own research the old-fashioned way: via books. “I find the sources on the Internet to still be too scattered to be worth my while for the most part, though it’s something I’m starting to do a little more,” he said.
“For the most part, for Dreamland and Paradise Alley, I relied on books. I find 19th century newspapers a real pain to look through. For every kernel of something interesting you find, there’s an awful lot of hacking through people’s wild digressions and opinions and their own disinformation.”
For a more modern project like Strivers Row, which took place mostly in the 1940s, “there were terrific books but also I found a lot of good newspapers sources, such as the Amsterdam News.” He finds books much more reliable. “The information is sourced [and] you don’t run into [some of the] crazy things that you might find on Wikipedia.”
In addition, “The way one goes about it now is just so time consuming, much more than a library. You type in a word or two into Google and you get 5,000 entries, which you then have to go through one by one to find the best source.”
He does use the Web, but primarily “for quick things that aren’t that important to the main narrative. For instance for the baseball book, I wanted to find a little bit of information about the Newark Peppers, who were the Federal League team that lasted for a year. This wasn’t something I was going to devote more than a paragraph to, but I was able to look it up fairly quickly on the Internet and find a wonderful source.”
At 50, Baker says he’s old enough to remember slapping out his manuscripts on a typewriter. Using a computer has changed the way he creates. “It’s probably made me more likely to re-write and to edit deeper…. I’d like to think I was such a devoted artist I was dong it before, but it probably has, which is a tremendously good thing.”
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