The Southpaw by Mark Harris

I really enjoyed the close of the baseball season this year. The Dodgers finished the season with several amazing games and a World Series win over the Toronto Blue Jays. I didn’t go to a game all year; the seats near enough the field to see what’s worth seeing have gotten too expensive and Jim and I don’t own a television so it’s not often we can watch live television. But when we were hiking up in Northern California in early October we were able to catch a few of the playoff games at a home where we were staying. Then, back home, having dinner at a friend’s house, we watched the marathon 18 inning game of the World Series, game three. After the Dodgers won a few days later, we watched the victory parade on a streaming local news channel as the team rode buses through downtown Los Angeles.

It was all so exciting that I wanted more, so, with the season over I turned to a novel. I’ve read several baseball novels over the years. It’s a genre to itself. Bernard Malamud’s The Natural is the most literary, and very good, but there’s not much actual baseball in it. I read The Kid from Tomkinsville by John Tunis because it was referenced by Philip Roth in his novels American Pastoral and I Married a Communist. I also read Roth’s own baseball novel titled, The Great American Novel, which is pure fantasy and broad humor and the baseball in it frankly ridiculous as is the rest of the story. Hunting for another baseball novel to read I discovered a series of four novels featuring the same character written by an author named Mark Harris. The second of the series, Bang the Drum Slowly, is often described as the best baseball novel of them all. I knew of the movie, but didn’t know it was based on a novel, and didn’t even realize that it was about baseball. How did I miss that? Wised up, I decided to read Harris’ four novels but starting with the first, The Southpaw.

It’s very good, and very baseball. In fact, baseball is all it is. The main character is a left-handed pitcher, Henry Wiggen, from Perkinsville, New York. His widowed father plays in the minor leagues. He has a romance with Holly, the girl next door, who lives with her uncle. But Henry’s real love is baseball. The novel traces his early days with a local team, getting picked up by the fictional New York Mammoths. He plays one year with their farm team called Queen City and then is called up to the bigs at the very end of the season. And then the novel gives us the entirety of his rookie year where he wins an outstanding 26 games. The Mammoth’s take the pennant against Boston and win the World Series against Philadelphia. In real life, the New York Yankees bested the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1952, the year the novel is set. Our fictional hero, Henry Wiggen, is named Most Valuable Player at age 21.

I kept waiting to find out what the novel was about. Was there a love affair? Was there a cheating scandal? Would someone get murdered, or injured, or learn a life lesson? But it’s really just about baseball. The suspense is just the suspense of any baseball season, following the team as they win and lose, and wondering if this is the year they might go all the way. If you like baseball, you’ll like this book. If you don’t particularly care about the game and want a novel where baseball is the setting but not the subject, read The Natural.

Henry Wiggen is the main character and also the narrator of the novel. The title page reads, “The Southpaw by Henry W. Wiggen punctuation freely inserted and spelling greatly improved by Mark Harris” but the writing retains Wiggen’s uncultured style and the occasional wrong word. Despite that, though, in places, the language is really beautiful. Here’s a passage late in the novel when Henry wins a must-win game against Boston that sets-up the pennant for the Mammoth’s:

“I pitched to Black. I do not know if I could have throwed another. I pitched it in noise and pain that I will never forget, letter-high and hard, the full wind and the full pump and the full motion, and he swang, and the wood on the ball made a thin slim sound like a twig you might break across your knee, and the ball went upwards and upwards, almost straight up, halfway down the line between home and third, and Red called, not that you heard him but that you seen his mouth move, and the ball hung in the air and then fell, down through the lights, Red waving, dancing first 1 way and then the next, his big mitt waiting, and then it hit, soundless, and he clapped his meat hand over the ball and turned and raced for his mask and picked it up and headed for the clubhouse and I followed, and a dozen hands held me–George and Coker and Perry and Canada and Sid and I do not know who all–thumping me and lifting me clear of the ground, and then they set me down quick because the crowd busted loose from the stands and come swarming down on the field until in 5 seconds or less the green field was covered with people, and the boys turned me loose and we raced for the dugout and forced our way down and through the door to the clubhouse. Somebody amongst the crowd stole my hat for a souvenir” (p. 321).

I love the “thin slim sound” and the “green field” and I love that the long rushing run-on sentence is followed by a simple short one.

The premise, as only becomes clear later, is that Henry is writing this memoir during the off-season after his rookie year. There’s one humorous bit of meta-fiction, where there’s a chapter where Henry describes reading to his father, neighbor, and girlfriend in Perkinsville a draft chapter he’s proud of, “Chapter 12” about his year in the minor league. They criticize the chapter as unnecessary. So he cuts it, but because he’s relating their discussion he’s able to tell us briefly what he’s cutting. He calls the replacement chapter “Chapter 11 A”. It’s a neat way for Harris to quickly get through the less important year and into the main story of the novel. And it’s charming.

The novel really is just about the baseball. There is some mention of Henry’s friend and roomie on the team, Perry, who is black, and the complications that causes in the segregated south, but the novel isn’t about racial justice. Henry’s romance with his hometown girl Holly runs through the novel and ends in them getting married, but the novel isn’t a love story. Henry tells us about the attractive woman, Patricia Moors, the team owner, who sleeps with several of the ballplayers, but Henry stays true to his girl, so there’s no drama in that story either. There is a bit of an arc for Henry has he ages from a teen boy, passionate about his one thing and insensitive to the rest, to a young man a little more aware of the competitive demands of the social world, but it’s only the maturity that every boy naturally encounters.

I had one little glitch in my reading. As I got to the end of the book I turned from page 343 and started re-reading page 334: a misprint. I wouldn’t have minded letting it go, but amazingly, Jim was able to find a pdf of the entire text online and I read the missing page 344 there.

It took me a long time to read. It is long, 350 pages total, but that wasn’t the reason I was slow. With our hiking trip in October, a trip to San Francisco, a week in Mexico for Thanksgiving (I was able to read on the plane rides) and a lot of time spent planning and executing a move from downtown LA to Park La Brea over the last month and a half (we moved four days ago) I didn’t have much extra time for reading. I finished the book in the bathtub last night, and then on the couch in my pajamas. I’ll take it back to the library this afternoon.

I’m looking forward to Bang the Drum Slowly and spending a little more time with Henry W. Wiggen.