“FRIEND AL: Coming out of Amarillo last night I and Lord and Weaver was sitting at a table in the dining car with a old lady. None of us were talking to her but she looked me over pretty careful and seemed to kind of like my looks. Finally she says Are you boys with some football club? Lord nor Weaver didn't say nothing so I thought it was up to me and I says No mam this is the Chicago White Sox Ball Club. She says I knew you were athaletes. I says Yes I guess you could spot us for athaletes. She says Yes indeed and specially you. You certainly look healthy. I says You ought to see me stripped. I didn't see nothing funny about that but I thought Lord and Weaver would die laughing. Lord had to get up and leave the table and he told everybody what I said.”—American short-story writer, sportswriter, and playwright Ring Lardner (1885-1933), You Know Me Al: A Busher’s Letters (1916)
Anyone interested in the continuing relevance of the national pastime—heck, anyone interested in 20th-century American literature—will want to read the first successful book by Ring Lardner, the epistolary novel You Know Me Al.
More than 70 years before Ron Shelton envisioned Ebby Calvin "Nuke" LaLoosh for his classic film Bull Durham, Lardner had set the prototype for the callow rookie pitcher with his protagonist, Jack Keefe.
Once you’re done guffawing at the “busher” hoping to make it with the Chicago White Sox, you’ll want to turn to a fine article in the Spring 2011 issue of The American Scholar, “Baseball’s Loss of Innocence,” by Douglas Goetsch, which looks at Lardner’s savage disillusionment with the game he once approached with a sportswriter’s skill but a fan’s heart.
I’m not saying the piece is perfect, mind you—for my money, I wish Goetsch had discussed how the light irony of the Keefe pieces (originally published in the Saturday Evening Post) shaded into Lardner’s increasingly bitter (non-baseball) short stories of the 1920s (e.g., "Champion," "Haircut").
But it spotlights a part of this great original writer’s career that I, for one, knew little about: his views of the game in the 1910s. (Inexplicably, this sharp-eyed man noticed Ty Cobb’s hustle and drive on the diamond, but not his near-psychopathic tendencies.)
From the article, it appears that writer-director-actor John Sayles’ depiction of Lardner in his film about the Chicago “Black Sox” gambling scandal, Eight Men Out, was on target.
Goetsch also speaks with shrewd insight into why contemporary baseball writers, like Lardner eyeing corruption in the game, have reacted with such bitterness to the steroids scandal:
“They like to keep reminding their audience that ‘baseball is a business,’ yet their job is about the love of sport, and the good ones can’t help sniffing the same glue as the fans.”
No matter what the verdicts will be in the Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens trials, keep that quote in mind when the two former bulked-up baseball bruisers come up for election to Cooperstown at the hands of these successors to Lardner.
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