Baseball in Folklore and Fiction, by Tristram Potter Coffin
Rvive Books, 2010
Originally published as The Old Ball Game in 1971, The Mudville Heritage considers the hugely different way in which baseball was portrayed in the early to mid half of the 20th century.
Coffin, emeritus professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania, takes the reader back to the days of Frank Merriwell, when such stories were written for young boys as lessons in morality and good citizenship (and a far cry from more “adult” novels like Long Gone or Brittle Innings). Ring Lardner would be the first to produce stories that portrayed the protagonist (“Alibi Ike,” for example) in less-than-ideal light, as selfish or vain or just plain dumb. This was a hard departure from the Merriwells and Armstrongs, but they stillpaled in comparison to the real thing; can you see Lardner penning a Golenbock-like 7 in “honor” of Babe Ruth?
Written by an eminent folklore scholar such as Coffin, it is, by nature, scholarly and academic, which the iPod/iPad generation might find daunting as he discusses the development of baseball characters based on historic examples of country rubes and slick-talking Yankees (geographic, not athletic ). He further divides his dramatus personae into the three principals — the prowess hero, the trickster, and the ethical hero — and notes how such fictional baseball figures might fall into those categories.
Ball Four had just come out in 1971, smashing the perception of the athlete/hero. And while Coffin does mention it in passing, it was impossible at the time to foresee the effect Bouton’s book would have both in fiction and non-fiction genres. The fact that Coffin’s original release is almost 40 years old indicates the need not just for a re-issue, but for a fully updated project, taking into consideration all the novels that have been published in the interim.
Kudos to Rvive Books, a small publishing house dedicated to “bringing the past and present together.” Their catalgo includes a re-release of The Sun Field, a novel by Heywood C. Broun.
is available on Amazon.com,
{ 2 comments }
From John Thorn, via Facebook:
“This is a very good book, and must have influenced me back in the day, I think in retrospect.”
Approve.
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