Read Online The Great American Novel by Philip Roth - Free Book Online
Authors: Philip Roth
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includedâthat the seemingly comical misfortunes of the last-place Mundys constituted the prelude to oblivion for us all. But that, fans, is the tyrannical law of our lives: today euphoria, tomorrow the whirlwind.
Bringing us to our blood brother.
3. Moby Dick, by Herman Melville
Moby Dick is to the old whaling industry (d.) what the Hall of Fame and Museum was supposed to have been to baseball: the ultimate and indisputable authority on the subjectârepository of records, storehouse of statisticians, the Louvre of Leviathans. Who is Moby Dick if not the terrifying Ty Cobb of his species? Who is Captain Ahab if not the unappeasable Dodger manager Durocher, or the steadfast Giant John McGraw? Who are Flask, Starbuck, and Stubb, Ahabâs trio of first mates, if not the Tinker, Evers, and Chance of the Pequod âs crew? Better, call them the d.p. combination of the Ruppert Mundysâd.p. standing here for displaced person as well as double playâsay they are Frenchy Astarte, Nickname Damur, and Big John Baal, for where is the infield (and the outfield, the starters and relievers, the coaches, catchers, pinch-runners and pinch-hitters) of that peripatetic Patriot League team today, but down with the bones and the timbers of the Moby Dick-demolished Pequod, beneath âthe great shroud of the sea.â Their remote Nantucket? Ruppert. Their crazed and vengeful Ahab? Manager Gil Gamesh. And their Ishmael? Yes, one did survive the wreck to tell the taleâan indestructible old truth-teller called me!
Gentle fans, if you were to have bound together into a single volume every number ever published of the baseball weekly known as The Sporting News, as well as every manual, guide, and handbook important to an understanding of the game; if you were to assemble encyclopedic articles describing the size, weight, consistency, color, texture, resiliency, and liveliness of the baseball itself, from the early days when the modern Moby Dick-colored ball was not even mandatory and some teams preferred using balls colored red (yes, Mr. Chairman, not white but red! ), to the days of the âputting-out systemâ of piece labor, wherein baseballs were hand sewn by women in their homes, then through to the 1910âs when A.G. Spalding introduced the first cork-centered baseball (thus ending the âdeadballâ era) and on to 1926, when the three leagues adopted the âcushion cork centerâ and with it the modern slug-away style of play; if you were to describe the cork forests of Spain, the rubber plantations of Malaysia, and the sheep farms of the American West where the Spalding baseball is born, if you were to differentiate between the three kinds of yarn in which the rubber that encases the cork is wrapped, and remark upon the relative hardness of that wrapping over the decades and how it has determined batting vs. slugging averages; if you were to devote a chapter to âThe Tightness of the Stitching,â explaining scientifically the aerodynamics of the curveball, or any such breaking pitch, how it is affected by the relative smoothness of the ballâs seams and the number of seams that meet the wind as it rotates on its axis; and then if from this discussion of the ball, you were to take a turn, as it were, with the bat, noting first the eccentric nineteenth-century variations such as the flattened bat that Wright designed to facilitate bunting, and the curved-barrel bat in the shape of a question mark invented by Emile Kinst to put a deceptive spin upon the struck ball (enterprising Emile! cunning Kinst!), and thence moved on to describe the manufacture out of hickory logs of the classic bat shaped by Hillerich and Bradsby, the first model of which was turned in his shop by Bud Hillerich himself in 1884âthe bat that came to be known to the world of men and boys as âthe Louisville Sluggerâ; if you were by way of a digression to write a chapter on the most famous bats in
Bringing us to our blood brother.
3. Moby Dick, by Herman Melville
Moby Dick is to the old whaling industry (d.) what the Hall of Fame and Museum was supposed to have been to baseball: the ultimate and indisputable authority on the subjectârepository of records, storehouse of statisticians, the Louvre of Leviathans. Who is Moby Dick if not the terrifying Ty Cobb of his species? Who is Captain Ahab if not the unappeasable Dodger manager Durocher, or the steadfast Giant John McGraw? Who are Flask, Starbuck, and Stubb, Ahabâs trio of first mates, if not the Tinker, Evers, and Chance of the Pequod âs crew? Better, call them the d.p. combination of the Ruppert Mundysâd.p. standing here for displaced person as well as double playâsay they are Frenchy Astarte, Nickname Damur, and Big John Baal, for where is the infield (and the outfield, the starters and relievers, the coaches, catchers, pinch-runners and pinch-hitters) of that peripatetic Patriot League team today, but down with the bones and the timbers of the Moby Dick-demolished Pequod, beneath âthe great shroud of the sea.â Their remote Nantucket? Ruppert. Their crazed and vengeful Ahab? Manager Gil Gamesh. And their Ishmael? Yes, one did survive the wreck to tell the taleâan indestructible old truth-teller called me!
Gentle fans, if you were to have bound together into a single volume every number ever published of the baseball weekly known as The Sporting News, as well as every manual, guide, and handbook important to an understanding of the game; if you were to assemble encyclopedic articles describing the size, weight, consistency, color, texture, resiliency, and liveliness of the baseball itself, from the early days when the modern Moby Dick-colored ball was not even mandatory and some teams preferred using balls colored red (yes, Mr. Chairman, not white but red! ), to the days of the âputting-out systemâ of piece labor, wherein baseballs were hand sewn by women in their homes, then through to the 1910âs when A.G. Spalding introduced the first cork-centered baseball (thus ending the âdeadballâ era) and on to 1926, when the three leagues adopted the âcushion cork centerâ and with it the modern slug-away style of play; if you were to describe the cork forests of Spain, the rubber plantations of Malaysia, and the sheep farms of the American West where the Spalding baseball is born, if you were to differentiate between the three kinds of yarn in which the rubber that encases the cork is wrapped, and remark upon the relative hardness of that wrapping over the decades and how it has determined batting vs. slugging averages; if you were to devote a chapter to âThe Tightness of the Stitching,â explaining scientifically the aerodynamics of the curveball, or any such breaking pitch, how it is affected by the relative smoothness of the ballâs seams and the number of seams that meet the wind as it rotates on its axis; and then if from this discussion of the ball, you were to take a turn, as it were, with the bat, noting first the eccentric nineteenth-century variations such as the flattened bat that Wright designed to facilitate bunting, and the curved-barrel bat in the shape of a question mark invented by Emile Kinst to put a deceptive spin upon the struck ball (enterprising Emile! cunning Kinst!), and thence moved on to describe the manufacture out of hickory logs of the classic bat shaped by Hillerich and Bradsby, the first model of which was turned in his shop by Bud Hillerich himself in 1884âthe bat that came to be known to the world of men and boys as âthe Louisville Sluggerâ; if you were by way of a digression to write a chapter on the most famous bats in