Quote of the Day (Bernard Malamud, on the Awesome Power of ‘The Natural’)

“Wonderboy flashed in the sun. It caught the sphere where it was biggest. A noise like a twenty-one gun salute cracked the sky. There was a straining, ripping sound and a few drops of rain spattered to the ground. The ball screamed toward the pitcher and seemed suddenly to dive down at his feet. He grabbed it to throw to first and realized to his horror that he held only the cover. The rest of it, unraveling cotton thread as it rode, was headed into the outfield.”— Bernard Malamud, The Natural (1952)

This past summer marked the 65^th anniversary of the first novel by Bernard Malamud. When it was turned into a vehicle for Robert Redford in 1984, The Natural was given a happy ending.

I’m normally a stickler for staying as close to original source material as possible, but I didn’t mind in this case. At the time, baseball had been hit with a series of drug scandals. No, not performance-enhancing drugs, but a performance-detracting one: cocaine, which afflicted several members of the Kansas City Royals in the early 1980s and, in 1985, burst out, in even more spectacular fashion, at the Pittsburgh Drug Trials, which ensnared such stars as Keith Hernandez, Tim Raines, and Dale Berra.

So, I was in an acquiescent mood in the 1980s when Malamud’s dark warning of the corruption of innocence was turned into the kind of optimistic, life-affirming film that Frank Capra once made. Since then, it has become not only one of my two favorite baseball films (vying with Bull Durham), but also one of my favorite movies, period.

I was surprised, then, as I began to write this post, to discover that, in nearly an entire decade of blogging, I had written only glancingly about The Natural before. One day, perhaps on the 35^th anniversary of its release, I may well write about the movie at the length it deserves.

But the book itself weaves its own magic, and one of the ways it does so, as seen in the quote I used here, is in evoking the mythological aspects of baseball. 

“Wonderboy”— the bat of Roy Hobbs, desperate to make the most of perhaps his only shot at the big leagues—endows the improbable 35-year-old rookie with the same kind of astonishing power that Excalibur afforded King Arthur.  He has, to his team’s amazement, obeyed the offhand command of his manager Pop to “rip the cover off the ball.” Through one swing of the bat, he has changed the entire climate of the game—even the New York “Knights” miserable season to date—with his Thor-like presence.

I thought of Hobbs’ amazing highs and lows in the ensuing season as I followed the fortunes of Aaron Judge (pictured) this year. It’s appropriate that the New York Yankee rookie occupies right field, once the domain of Babe Ruth—perhaps as close to a mythological figure as baseball has ever produced. 

As of this writing, Judge has not only surpassed the major league rookie record for home runs, but also The Bambino’s mark for the most HRs in franchise history at home for a single season. Judge has even been heavily associated with a phrase evocative of the Thor-like Hobbs: “exit velocity.”

Slumping is another way that Judge resembles Hobbs. Malamud is very shrewd on the utter helplessness that the best baseball minds feel in the wake of a slugger’s doldrums, which can consume a contender as much as a power surge can lift them. Judge had his own epic meltdown after the All-Star Game, when Yankee fans such as myself worried that pitchers had discovered and exploited a fatal flaw at the plate.

More recently, Judge has righted himself, resuming something like his home run pace of the first half. It’s going to be interesting to see if he can keep carrying the team (like Hollywood’s Hobbs) or if he will falter in the end (like Malamud’s). Baseball prodigies, like Greek deities, sometimes prove all too humanly fallible in the end.

(Photo of Aaron Judge in a Yankee game against the Baltimore Orioles, taken Sept. 7, 2017, by Keith Allison from Hanover, Md.)