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THOMAS R. EDWARDS
its grinning exposure of the boozing, pill-popping and sexual silliness
of baseball players, the stupidity and greed of coaches and front-office
people. Bouton is the Thersites of our epic sport, but like Thersites
he counts on our prior veneration of the epic values, and he himself
figures as the debunker who is both partly right and, because of his
own incapacity, somehow not to be trusted. Scandalous revelations
about demigods like Mantle, Yastrzemski, Crosetti, Maglie and Berra,
even if true, mean less than they otherwise might in the mouth of a
sore-armed knuckleballer, struggling through what turned out to be his
last full season in the game.
Bouton himself, for all his incidental sympathy for hippies, protest
and racial justice, is no radical but a screwball, a comic, a show-off.
If
he'd been a little less smart and sophisticated and his arm had
held up, he might even have entered the pantheon himself, as the
latest in the great line of Rube Waddell, Bugs Raymond, Babe
Herman, Dizzy Dean and Bobo Newsom. Those nicknames of course
cry out for an Empson to come and read them - the "country" eccentric
with irrepressible natural gifts is a prime type in baseball legend, the
sign, I suppose, of its rural, folk ish origins and its proletarian appeal
once urbanized. (Our other major sports were developed mainly by
college boys or rich men in private clubs.) In our version of pastoral,
the baseball player may properly be as much clown as hero. But they
only called Bouton "Jim" - his ironies are too knowing to seem Empson–
ianly clownish, and his satire stumbles over our (and his) sense of his
failing prowess, the essentially defensive malice that's overt in the
title of his feeble, synthetic second book,
I'm Glad You Didn't Take
It
Personally.
Bouton's indifference to what baseball "expresses" so long as it's
amusing and pays well preserves him from sociopolitical pomposities,
but he avoids hyperseriousness only by accepting- so as
to
invert - the
gossipy "personalization" most American sportswriting substitutes for
the analysis of performance it's too ignorant to attempt. (Compare
soccer reporting
in
many European newspapers or bullfight criticism
in Spain.) What Mickey Mantle is Really Like has little to do with
what one saw in his great years. While fantasy is deeply involved
in
looking at sports, even the most simpleminded fan doesn't merely
idealize the players so as to "identify" with their virtuous skill. As with
movie stars or politicians, their glamor is partly in our sense that they
are privileged, that some naughtiness may even be necessary if their
privacy is to be as rich and luxurious as we hope it is. We don't,
after all, give them fame and money just to live like
we
do.
