The most elegant and colorful sport
Lance Mannion, in the midst of discussing David Halberstam:
One of baseball’s great beauties is that it is played at the speed of a human voice’s ability to keep up. It’s the only team sport that can be described in detail as the game’s going on. Not only that, there’s room for storytelling, time to remember, space to fill up with asides, bits of trivia, old jokes, and tangents that will if followed long enough take you right back to the field, punctuating themselves with the sound of a bat hitting a ball, a ball thumping into a mitt, an umpire shouting, “Yeeeer OUT!” as if that was the whole point of going so wildly off topic. The best baseball writing has the feel of someone talking to you in the stands or on the bench while a game is being played.
Mannion starts out by saying that, of Halberstam’s writing, he likes the writing on baseball the best, but it’s not that Halberstam wrote well about baseball, because strictly speaking he didn’t write well about anything — he reported, and that style, which may have served him well for other subjects, led to “some inelegant and rather colorless writing about the most elegant and colorful sport.”
The only Halberstam I’ve read is The Teammates — my father has the collected tomes, and someday I’d like to read The Best and the Brightest…ah, that magical “someday” where I have time to read books and don’t have to keep starting over at the beginning because I’ve put them down for so long, I’ve forgotten what went before — but Mannion is right about the aridity of the prose. What’s interesting about it is that, when baseball writing isn’t very good, it usually goes the other way, piling on the moist, overly grand metaphors and imbuing even the journeyman likes of a Tim Teufel with a supernatural glow.
Anyway, Mannion’s worth checking out.Thanks to Skyrockets for the link.
Tags: books sites
Yay, a crosslink to the Tomato Nation Baseball Library! I’m a new fan (living in Chicago– it was inevitable) and I’d been looking for that list. Thanks!
I don’t know Baseball, but I diasagree with the guy when he says
“It’s the only team sport that can be described in detail as the game’s going on. Not only that, there’s room for storytelling, time to remember, space to fill up with asides, bits of trivia, old jokes, and tangents that will if followed long enough take you right back to the field, punctuating themselves with the sound of a bat hitting a ball,”
For that you can’t beat Cricket. No less than a day and up to five days long. I’m not sure where I heard it or who its by but I recall hearing a quote once along the lines of
“It was very foresighted of the Victorians to invent a game so perfect for listening to on the radio while doing the gardening”
Cricket commentary is full of stories in between comments on the game itself. The game is sol long that the commentators take shifts, so theres a rich tapestry of stories to be told.
Hi! Long-time reader, first-time commenter. :)
Reading this, I thought you might be interested in Richard Dansky’s new essay exploring why baseball inspires writers and storytellers (link goes to Storytellers Unplugged, a communal authors/editors/booksellers blog).
As a Red Sox fan transplanted to Australia, I have to say that Mannion is wrong to say that baseball is the only team sport that allows detailed description while the game is played. Cricket has the same attraction; in fact, after years of making snarky comments about it (who the hell plays a game that can run for five days and still end in a tie?), I discovered cricket on the radio and fell immediately in love. Cricket and baseball are the only sports I follow that I would rather listen to than watch – and let me tell you, when it comes to “trivia, old jokes, and tangents,” baseball commentators could learn a thing or two from their cricket counterparts. The game has tea breaks, for crying out loud. These guys know from padding.
Incidentally, if anyone’s interested, the final of the cricket World Cup (Australia v. Sri Lanka) can be streamed here http://abc.net.au/sydney/listenlive.htm from 11:30 p.m. Saturday Sydney time (9:30 a.m. Saturday Boston/New York time).
“It’s the only team sport that can be described in detail as the game’s going on.”
Well, clearly he needs to see some cricket!
Halberstam’s journalistic style is exactly what I liked about his books. They aren’t your typical social histories–and that’s the best definition for what they are, because he tries to put the stories into the context of the times–as most tend to focus on personalities rather than facts. (That certainly can work well, of course; witness “Triangle” and “And the Band Played On.”) As Mannion says, though, Halberstam was all about getting down the facts as clearly as he could, not about speculation, emotion, or putting words into people’s mouths. That does lend itself to a fairly dry style, especially for an emotional game like baseball, but for pure, detailed historical record, he’s hard to beat. (Sometimes hard to read, too; I still haven’t made it through “The Reckoning.” It’s incredibly dense!)