Bishop, Michael. Brittle Innings. New York: Bantam 1994. Print.
When I look at it, minor league ball back then was sort of like B movies. Thrills on the cheap, Cheap buses, cheap hotels, cheap stadiums, cheap seats, cheap equipment, cheap talent. Cheap-cheap. Sound like an Easter chick, eh? Or like the mechanical conductor on those subway trains out to Atlanta's airport.
Description:
Sure, it sounds like a silly concept, a comic romp with madcap players and goofy situations. But Brittle Innings is actually a highly-intriguing glimpse into the minds of both a 17-year-old rookie baseball player from a tiny farm town in Oklahoma, and an 8-foot, horribly disfigured, slick fielding, book-reading infielder who both play for the Tennessee Highbridge Hellbenders in the class-C Chattahoochee Valley Baseball League.
The novel's narrator is Danny Boles, currently a grizzled minor league baseball scout, who now recounts his early time with the Hellbenders. Danny is assigned a room with the team's giant first baseman, "Jumbo," (actually Hank Clerval), a quiet, thoughtful man reluctant to speak. But when Hank does converse, it is in a beautifully formal, almost Victorian preciseness and vocabulary, an unusual voice among his scruffy minor league teammates. Visually, though, Hank is something, shall we say, different.
His body parts didn't seem to fit. His stringy-haired block of a noggin didn't belong with he bullish neck and the wide sloping shoulders under it. His proportions were more of less okay, I guess, but the colors and textures of his skin didn't match up the way you'd've expected. It was like some'd kneaded biscuit dough, cake dough, and a mass of Piedmont clay together without blending. Even as he snored, Jumbo reminded me of a body, wounded or dead.
The young rookie Danny is also mute, unable to speak due to a traumatic encounter with his father and later from a fight with a soldier. He is a willing listener and thus able to observe the world and people involved with his minor league team. He and Jumbo strike up a mutually silent friendship as roomies and fellow talented ballplayers.
All progresses well during the season until Danny stumbles onto Hank's diary. In it, Danny reads of Hank's experiences with the world that brought him to the Hellbenders. Of course, Danny finally comprehends who Hank really is. No one else suspects, mainly because Hank, despite his strange ways and appearance, to his teammates, manager, and owner, he is simply an odd, but prodigious home run hitter who might just lead them to the league championship. But from Hank's diary, he reveals his true purpose for becoming a baseball player:
The central business of every human being is to be a real person....What now infused meaning into my days...derived less from tiresome social intercourse than from the galvanizing physical sensations of hitting a ball hard and far, and of throwing it with exactitude....[D]runk with the restored robustness of my borrowed body, I would have only faceless teammates and unending occasions to exercise my intellectual and animal faculties playing baseball.
It's a coming of age story for Danny Boles, a backstory of a famous literary character, and a world of scruffy, quirky baseball players and supporters that held my attention through every page. Author Bishop's strong story-telling skills offer an insightful peak into the world of second tier baseball and the people who help keep it in existence.
Actually, there is not a massive amount of actual baseball games recounted, as the novel focuses more on the off-field interactions between players, racism, management, friends, and family. As the team assistant and wonderful player (who is unable to be on the field due to his race), Darius reflects about a lifestyle choice he made:
I think it's cause me life done crept into its brittlest part, like unto them innings when the whole thing could go either way -- depending on jes when the crucial bonecrack happen, and to whom. I awmost waited past the snappin point. Mebbe I did. But if I beat it now, mebbe I'll git past my brittle innings and play on through to a stretch that'll heal me, that won't jes shake me down to splinters and shards.
OK, maybe I did give away Hank's identity to you, but that revelation is something you would probably have figured out long before Danny did a quarter of the way into the story. But it is that intriguing information that led me to this book in the first place. Who could resist reading about Mary Shelley's creation in a baseball uniform, rooming with a mute teenage teammate in a tiny town during World War II? Certainly, I couldn't pass it up and was not in any way disappointed by this thoughtful, clever, compassionate, and insightful dive into the world of Danny Boles, Hank "Jumbo" Clerval, and the Highbridge Hellbenders. Hope you enjoy it as well.
Happy reading.
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If this book interests you, be sure to check out:
If this book interests you, be sure to check out:
Roth, Philip. The Great American Novel.
Quite a bit more black humor and satiric look at rag-tag baseball during World War II when regular players were unavailable. Here, the Rupert Mundys field a team with players named Baal and Gil Gammesh, a fast-ball pitcher who tries to kill an umpire with a pitch, a fantastically talented player made to ride the bench to teach him humility... all narrated by an excitable, eccentric journalist whose first line of his recollections of the Rupert Mundy's baseball team is, naturally, "Call me Smitty." One of my all-time favorites. Highest recommendation. (previously reviewed here)
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