Contemplating the Numbers

My reading has frustrated me over the past few weeks. By the time I’ve finished writing this paragraph, I will have committed some heresies, but that’s nothing new for me. After all, we’re talking about a short story writer who doesn’t like Alice Munro. I’ve been struggling to win back an interest in fiction reading, after a long sabbatical that found me immersed in all forms of creative nonfiction. I started back by cracking Let the Great World Spin, by Colum McCann, a National Book Award winner. But the structure annoyed me, and though the writing was lyrical, that kind of meta-narrative has never been my favorite. So I moved on to The Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver, a book my sister-in-law recommended. I know Kingsolver is a great writer, but this book bored me senseless. Its journal-entry style robbed the characters of any depth, and there didn’t seem to be a story anywhere. I put it down in frustration.

So I wandered over to the public library, hoping the chi, or the karma, or whatever force floats around a building full of books, would guide me to a new discovery. I staggered up and down the aisles like a dowser waiting for my rod to sense a ripple in collective consciousness of a thousand volumes. I paused and picked up a book called Pig Island. The promise of pagan rituals set in Scotland looked interesting. But not quite. I moved on. For a minute I had David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest in my hand, a book I’ve wanted to read for a long time. But its 1,000+ page count demurred me. Finally I settled on The Given Day, by Dennis Lehane. I flipped open to the first page and read this:

“Due to travel restrictions placed on major league baseball by the War Department, the World Series of 1918 was played in September and split into two home stands. The Chicago Cubs hosted the first three games, with the final four to be held in Boston. On September 7, after the Cubs dropped game three, the two teams boarded a Michigan Central train together to embark on the twenty-seven-hour trip, and Babe Ruth got drunk and started stealing hats.”

That’s one of the most engaging openings I’ve read in a long time, and I was immediately drawn in, downing the first hundred pages of the book in just a couple of hours.

It’s an important and relevant book to read right now for many reasons. The first is me. I’m an Irish Catholic kid from the Boston suburbs, and this book is set in Boston in 1918. It’s Irish-American themes are strong, and as I read it I thought of my grandfather, who would have been 18 at the time. It also deals with unions, and the history of the Boston Police strike of 1919, and how that strike was eventually broken: by firing all the officers who went on strike and replacing them with new hires, thus presaging President Reagan’s handling of the Air Traffic Controller’s strike of 1981. Given our current climate, it’s instructive to look back at the circumstances of these events to better find our way to more humane solutions.

But it was baseball that grabbed me first and foremost, specifically Babe Ruth. In the opening pages, Lehane paints a picture of a young Ruth as an emotionally arrested young man already on his way to self-ruin, even as he is just beginning to understand the talent he has been granted. More importantly, Lehane creates a moral and ethical dilemma for the Babe, allowing our imaginations into the ballplayer’s, in a poignant scene of racial injustice.

Because I’m a baseball junkie, I went directly to Baseball Reference online to refresh my memory of Ruth’s numbers. In 1918 Ruth was still primarily a pitcher, going 13-7 for the Red Sox with a 2.22 ERA in 166 and one-third innings. But the rumblings of baseball’s greatest slugger were already apparent in Ruth’s 11 home runs, which may seem measly to our steroid-inflated ears, but which led the league that year. In 317 at bats the young Ruth batted .300 and knocked in 66 RBIs to go with his 11 home runs.

As impressive (within that historical context) those numbers were, it was Ruth’s next year--his last with Boston--that began a historic run of statistical achievement that might never be matched. From 1919 to 1934, a span of 16 years, Ruth hit 688 home runs. We all know that in 22 seasons he hit 714, but in that span he averaged 43 home runs per year. He also knocked in 2,085 RBIs (averaging 130 per year), and hit at a .347 clip. In 1923--Ruth’s only MVP season--he hit .396, and didn’t win the batting title. In 1919 he hit 29 home runs and batted in 114 RBIs--both league bests--while hitting .322, and he went 9-5 in 133 innings pitched for the Red Sox, with a 2.97 ERA. There ought to be an award named after that kind of a season.

Of course the numbers never tell the story; that’s why we read the books. For now I’m grateful that Dennis Lehane has shaken me from my fictional funk, reignited my passions through the history of my home, and proved once again the power and relevance of writing in an ever more disconnected world.