The Great American Novel

by Philip Roth

  By ’43, the Tycoons had lost just about every last member of the ’41 and ’42 pennant-winning teams to the Army, but to take their place for the duration, the Tri-City owner, Mrs. Angela Trust, had been able to coax out of retirement the world championship Tycoon team that in the ’31 World Series against Connie Mack’s A’s had beaten Lefty Grove, Waite Hoyt, and Rube Walberg on three successive afternoons. To see those wonderful old-timers back in Tycoon uniforms, wearing the numerals each had made famous during the great baseball era that preceded the Depression, did much to assure baseball fans that the great days they dimly remembered really had been, and would be again, once the enemies of democracy were destroyed; the effect upon the visiting Mundys, however, was not so salutary. After having traveled on that train through a Port Ruppert station aswarm with foreigners of every color and stripe, after having been taken for strangers in the city whose name they bore, it was really more than the Mundys could bear, to hear the loudspeaker announce the names of the players against whom they were supposed to compete that afternoon. “Pinch me, I’m dreamin’ again,” said Kid Heket. “Why not raise up the dead,” cried Hothead, “so we can play a series against the Hall of Fame!” “It must be a joke,” the pitchers agreed. Only it wasn’t. Funny perhaps to others—as so much was that year—but, alas, no joke for the Ruppert team. “For Tri-City, batting first, No. 12, Johnny Leshy, third base. Batting second, No. 11, Lou Polevik, left field. Batting third, No. 1, Tommy Heimdall, right field. Batting fourth, No. 14, Iron Mike Mazda, first base. Batting fifth, No. 6, Vic Bragi, center field. Batting sixth, No. 2, Babe Rustem, shortstop. Batting seventh, No. 19, Tony Izanagi, second base. Batting eighth and catching for Tri-City, No. 4, Al Bongo…”

  By the time the announcer had gotten to the Tycoons’ starting pitcher, the Mundys would have passed from bewilderment through disbelief to giddiness—all on the long hard road to resignation. “Oh yeah, and who’s the pitcher? Who is pitching the series against us—the Four Horsemen, I suppose.”

  They supposed right. They were to face the four Tycoon starters who had performed in rotation with such regularity and such success for over a decade, that eventually the sportswriter Smitty humorously suggested in “An Open Letter to the United States Congress” that they ought to call the days of the week after Sal Tuisto, Smoky Woden, Phil Thor, and Herman Frigg. By ’42, Tuisto owned Tri-City’s most popular seafood house, Woden was the baseball coach at the nearby Ivy League college, Thor was a bowling alley impresario, and Frigg a Ford dealer; nonetheless, despite all those years that had elapsed since the four had been big leaguers, against the Mundys in the first series played between the two clubs in Tycoon Park that year, each threw the second no-hitter of his career—four consecutive hitless games, a record of course for four pitchers on the same team … But then that was only the beginning of the records broken in that series, which itself broke the record for breaking records.*

  * * *

  One sunny Saturday morning early in August, the Ruppert Mundys boarded a bus belonging to the mental institution and journeyed from their hotel in downtown Asylum out into the green Ohio countryside to the world-famous hospital for the insane, there to play yet another “away” game—a three-inning exhibition match against a team composed entirely of patients. The August visit to the hospital by a P. League team in town for a series against the Keepers was an annual event of great moment at the institution, and one that was believed to be of considerable therapeutic value to the inmates, particularly the sports-minded among them. Not only was it their chance to make contact, if only for an hour or so, with the real world they had left behind, but it was believed that even so brief a visit by famous big league ballplayers went a long way to assuage the awful sense such people have that they are odious and contemptible to the rest of humankind. Of course the P. League players (who like all ballplayers despised any exhibition games during the course of the regular season) happened to find playing against the Lunatics, as they called them, a most odious business indeed; but as the General simply would not hear of abandoning a practice that brought public attention to the humane and compassionate side of a league that many still associated with violence and scandal, the tradition was maintained year after year, much to the delight of the insane, and the disgust of the ballplayers themselves.

  The chief psychiatrist at the hospital was a Dr. Traum, a heavyset gentleman with a dark chin beard, and a pronounced European accent. Until his arrival in America in the thirties, he had never even heard of baseball, but in that Asylum was the site of a major league ball park, as well as a psychiatric hospital, it was not long before the doctor became something of a student of the game. After all, one whose professional life involved ruminating upon the extremes of human behavior, had certainly to sit up and take notice when a local fan decided to make his home atop a flagpole until the Keepers snapped a losing streak, or when an Asylum man beat his wife to death with a hammer for calling the Keepers “bums” just like himself. If the doctor did not, strictly speaking, become an ardent Keeper fan, he did make it his business to read thoroughly in the literature of the national pastime, with the result that over the years more than one P. League manager had to compliment the bearded Berliner on his use of the hit-and-run, and the uncanny ability he displayed at stealing signals during their annual exhibition game.

  Despite the managerial skill that Dr. Traum had developed over the years through his studies, his team proved no match for the Mundys that morning. By August of 1943, the Mundys weren’t about to sit back and take it on the chin from a German-born baseball manager and a team of madmen; they had been defeated and disgraced and disgraced and defeated up and down the league since the season had begun back in April, and it was as though on the morning they got out to the insane asylum grounds, all the wrath that had been seething in them for months now burst forth, and nothing, but nothing, could have prevented them from grinding the Lunatics into dust once the possibility for victory presented itself. Suddenly, those ’43 flops started looking and sounding like the scrappy, hustling, undefeatable Ruppert teams of Luke Gofannon’s day—and this despite the fact that it took nearly an hour to complete a single inning, what with numerous delays and interruptions caused by the Lunatics’ style of play. Hardly a moment passed that something did not occur to offend the professional dignity of a big leaguer, and yet, through it all, the Mundys on both offense and defense managed to seize hold of every Lunatic mistake and convert it to their advantage. Admittedly, the big right-hander who started for the institution team was fast and savvy enough to hold the Mundy power in check, but playing just the sort of heads-up, razzle-dazzle baseball that used to characterize the Mundy teams of yore, they were able in their first at bat to put together a scratch hit by Astarte, a bunt by Nickname, a base on balls to Big John, and two Lunatic errors, to score three runs—their biggest inning of the year, and the first Mundy runs to cross the plate in sixty consecutive innings, which was not a record only because they had gone sixty-seven innings without scoring earlier in the season.

  When Roland Agni, of all people, took a called third strike to end their half of the inning, the Mundys rushed off the bench like a team that smelled World Series loot. “We was due!” yelped Nickname, taking the peg from Hothead and sweeping his glove over the bag—“Nobody gonna stop us now, babe! We was due! We was overdue!” Then he winged the ball over to where Deacon Demeter stood on the mound, grinning. “Three big ones for you, Deke!” Old Deacon, the fifty-year-old iron-man starter of the Mundy staff, already a twenty-game loser with two months of the season still to go, shot a string of tobacco juice over his left shoulder to ward off evil spirits, stroked the rabbit’s foot that hung on a chain around his neck, closed his eyes to mumble something ending with “Amen,” and then stepped up on the rubber to face the first patient. Deacon was a preacher back home, as gentle and kindly a man as you would ever want to bring your problems to, but up on the hill he was all competitor, and had been for thirty years now. “When the game begi
ns,” he used to say back in his heyday, “charity ends.” And so it was that when he saw the first Lunatic batter digging in as though he owned the batter’s box, the Deke decided to take Hothead’s advice and stick the first pitch in his ear, just to show the little nut who was boss. The Deacon had taken enough insults that year for a fifty-year-old man of the cloth!

  Not only did the Deke’s pitch cause the batter to go flying back from the plate to save his skin, but next thing everyone knew the lead-off man was running for the big brick building with the iron bars on its windows. Two of his teammates caught him down the right-field line and with the help of the Lunatic bullpen staff managed to drag him back to home plate. But once there they couldn’t get him to take hold of the bat; every time they put it into his hands, he let it fall through to the ground. By the time the game was resumed, with a 1 and 0 count on a new lead-off hitter, one not quite so cocky as the fellow who’d stepped up to bat some ten minutes earlier, there was no doubt in anyone’s mind that the Deke was in charge. As it turned out, twice in the inning Mike Rama had to go sailing up into the wall to haul in a long line drive, but as the wall was padded, Mike came away unscathed, and the Deacon was back on the bench with his three-run lead intact.

  “We’re on our way!” cried Nickname. “We are on our God damn way!”

  Hothead too was dancing with excitement; cupping his hands to his mouth, he shouted across to the opposition, “Just watch you bastards go to pieces now!”

  And so they did. The Deke’s pitching and Mike’s fielding seemed to have shaken the confidence of the big Lunatic right-hander whose fastball had reined in the Mundys in the first. To the chagrin of his teammates, he simply would not begin to pitch in the second until the umpire stopped staring at him.

  “Oh, come on,” said the Lunatic catcher, “he’s not staring at you. Throw the ball.”

  “I tell you, he’s right behind you and he is too staring. Look you, I see you there behind that mask. What is it you want from me? What is it you think you’re looking at, anyway?”

  The male nurse, in white half-sleeve shirt and white trousers, who was acting as the plate umpire, called out to the mound, “Play ball now. Enough of that.”

  “Not until you come out from there.”

  “Oh, pitch, for Christ sake,” said the catcher.

  “Not until that person stops staring.”

  Here Dr. Traum came off the Lunatic bench and started for the field, while down in the Lunatic bullpen a left-hander got up and began to throw. Out on the mound, with his hands clasped behind his back and rocking gently to and fro on his spikes, the doctor conferred with the pitcher. Formal European that he was, he wore, along with his regulation baseball shoes, a dark three-piece business suit, a stiff collar, and a tie.

  “What do you think the ol’ doc’s tellin’ that boy?” Bud Parusha asked Jolly Cholly.

  “Oh, the usual,” the old-timer said. “He’s just calmin’ him down. He’s just askin’ if he got any good duck shootin’ last season.”

  It was five full minutes before the conference between the doctor and the pitcher came to an end with the doctor asking the pitcher to hand over the ball. When the pitcher vehemently refused, it was necessary for the doctor to snatch the ball out of his hand; but when he motioned down to the bullpen for the left-hander, the pitcher suddenly reached out and snatched the ball back. Here the doctor turned back to the bullpen and this time motioned for the left-hander and a right-hander. Out of the bullpen came two men dressed like the plate umpire in white half-sleeve shirts and white trousers. While they took the long walk to the mound, the doctor made several unsuccessful attempts to talk the pitcher into relinquishing the ball. Finally the two men arrived on the mound and before the pitcher knew what had happened, they had unfurled a straitjacket and wrapped it around him.

  “Guess he wanted to stay in,” said Jolly Cholly, as the pitcher kicked out at the doctor with his feet.

  The hundred Lunatic fans who had gathered to watch the game from the benches back of the foul screen behind home plate, and who looked in their street clothes as sane as any baseball crowd, rose to applaud the pitcher as he left the field, but when he opened his mouth to acknowledge the ovation, the two men assisting him in his departure slipped a gag over his mouth.

  Next the shortstop began to act up. In the first inning it was he who had gotten the Lunatics out of trouble with a diving stab of a Bud Parusha liner and a quick underhand toss that had doubled Wayne Heket off third. But now in the top of the second, though he continued to gobble up everything hit to the left of the diamond, as soon as he got his hands on the ball he proceeded to stuff it into his back pocket. Then, assuming a posture of utter nonchalance, he would start whistling between his teeth and scratching himself, as though waiting for the action to begin. In that it was already very much underway, the rest of the Lunatic infield would begin screaming at him to take the ball out of his pocket and make the throw to first. “What?” he responded, with an innocent smile. “The ball!” they cried. “Yes, what about it?” “Throw it!” “But I don’t have it.” “You do!” they would scream, converging upon him from all points of the infield, “You do too!” “Hey, leave me alone,” the shortstop cried, as they grabbed and pulled at his trousers. “Hey, cut that out—get your hands out of there!” And when at last the ball was extracted from where he himself had secreted it, no one could have been more surprised. “Hey, the ball. Now who put that there? Well, what’s everybody looking at me for? Look, this must be some guy’s idea of a joke … Well, Christ, I didn’t do it.”

  Once the Mundys caught on, they were quick to capitalize on this unexpected weakness in the Lunatic defense, pushing two more runs across in the second on two consecutive ground balls to short—both beaten out for hits while the shortstop grappled with the other infielders—a sacrifice by Mike Rama, and a fly to short center that was caught by the fielder who then just stood there holding it in his glove, while Hothead, who was the runner on second, tagged up and hobbled to third, and then, wooden leg and all, broke for home, where he scored with a head-first slide, the only kind he could negotiate. As it turned out, the slide wasn’t even necessary, for the center-fielder was standing in the precise spot where he had made the catch—and the ball was still in his glove.

  With the bases cleared, Dr. Traum asked for time and walked out to center. He put a hand on the shoulder of the mute and motionless fielder and talked to him in a quiet voice. He talked to him steadily for fifteen minutes, their faces only inches apart. Then he stepped aside, and the center-fielder took the ball from the pocket of his glove and threw a perfect strike to the catcher, on his knees at the plate some two hundred feet away.

  “Wow,” said Bud Parusha, with ungrudging admiration, “now, that fella has a arm on him.”

  “Hothead,” said Cholly, mildly chiding the catcher, “he woulda had you by a country mile, you know, if only he’d a throwed it.”

  But Hot, riding high, hollered out, “Woulda don’t count, Charles—it’s dudda what counts, and I dud it!”

  Meanwhile Kid Heket, who before this morning had not been awake for two consecutive innings in over a month, continued to stand with one foot up on the bench, his elbow on his knee and his chin cupped contemplatively in his palm. He had been studying the opposition like this since the game had gotten underway, “You know somethin’,” he said, gesturing toward the field, “those fellas ain’t thinkin’. No sir, they just ain’t usin’ their heads.”

  “We got ’em on the run, Wayne!” cried Nickname. “They don’t know what hit ’em! Damn, ain’t nobody gonna stop us from here on out!”

  Deacon was hit hard in the last of the second, but fortunately for the Mundys, in the first two instances the batsman refused to relinquish the bat and move off home plate, and so each was thrown out on what would have been a base hit, right-fielder Parusha to first-baseman Baal; and the last hitter, who drove a tremendous line drive up the alley in left center, ran directly from home to third and was
tagged out sitting on the bag with what he took to be a triple, and what would have been one too, had he only run around the bases and gotten to third in the prescribed way.

  The quarrel between the Lunatic catcher and the relief pitcher began over what to throw Big John Baal, the lead-off hitter in the top of the third.

  “Uh-uh,” said the Lunatic pitcher, shaking off the first signal given by his catcher, while in the box, Big John took special pleasure in swishing the bat around menacingly.

  “Nope,” said the pitcher to the second signal.

  His response to the third was an emphatic, “N-O!”

  And to the fourth, he said, stamping one foot, “Definitely not!”

  When he shook off a fifth signal as well, with a caustic, “Are you kidding? Throw him that and it’s bye-bye ballgame,” the catcher yanked off his mask and cried:

  “And I suppose that’s what I want, according to you! To lose! To go down in defeat! Oh, sure,” the catcher whined, “what I’m doing, you see, is deliberately telling you to throw him the wrong pitch so I can have the wonderful pleasure of being on the losing team again. Oh brother!” His sarcasm spent, he donned his mask, knelt down behind the plate, and tried yet once more.