Field of Fantasies Read online

  Baseball Stories of the Strange and Supernatural

  Edited by Rick Wilber

  NIGHT SHADE BOOKS

  NEW YORK

  Copyright © 2014 by Rick Wilber.

  This edition of Field of Fantasies © 2014 by Night Shade Books.

  All Rights Reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the express written consent of the publisher, except in the case of brief excerpts in critical reviews or articles. All inquiries should be addressed to Start Publishing, 609 Greenwich Street, 6th Floor, New York, NY 10014.

  Night Shade Books is an imprint of

  Start Publishing LLC

  New York, New York

  Visit our website at

  www.start-publishing.com.

  Cover design by Rain Saukas

  Cover photos from Thinkstock and iStock

  ISBN: 978-1-59780-565-0

  Printed in the United States of America

  For my wife, Robin, my daughter, Samantha, and my very special son Richard Wilber Jr.,

  who's my regular companion at Tropicana Field where we cheer on the Tampa Bay Rays.

  Contents

  Introduction

  A Face in the Crowd

  Stephen King and Stewart O'Nan

  The Further Adventures of the Invisible Man

  Karen Joy Fowler

  The Hector Quesadilla Story

  T. Coraghessan Boyle

  Arthur Sternbach Brings the Curveball to Mars

  Kim Stanley Robinson

  Ronnie on the Mound

  Jack Kerouac

  My Kingdom for Jones

  Wilbur Schramm

  Diamond Girls

  Louise Marley

  How to Read a Man

  Valerie Sayers

  The Hanging Curve

  Gardner Dozois

  The Franchise

  John Kessel

  Understanding Alvarado

  Max Apple

  The Southpaw

  Bruce McAllister

  Ahab at the Helm

  Ray Bradbury

  McDuff on the Mound

  Robert Coover

  The Mighty Casey

  Rod Serling

  The House that George Built

  Harry Turtledove

  Baseball

  Ray Gonzalez

  My Last Season with the Owls

  Ron Carlson

  Pitchers and Catchers

  Cecilia Tan

  Baseball Memories

  Edo van Belkom

  Lost October

  David Sandner and Jacob Weisman

  Stephen to Cora to Joe

  Rick Wilber

  How I Got My Nickname

  W P. Kinsella

  Acknowledgments

  Permissions

  Introduction

  THIS COLLECTION CELEBRATES the merger of baseball and fantasy in short fiction, reprinting stories that range from classic works of the 1940s and 1950s to stories so new that they have only appeared in digital form before their print appearance in this book.

  The stories range from very-short to novelette length, from the ambitiously literary to the ambitiously genre, from humorous to poignantly serious, from deeply ironic to touchingly earnest and honest; and yet they all fit perfectly here, for what brings them together is baseball and fantasy, the national pastime at its strange and supernatural best.

  Baseball fiction has been popular since the game was spelled with two words—“base ball”—in the mid nineteenth century. By the post— Civil War years, the emergence of the dime novels of Zane Grey and others told stories of players and games and leagues that didn’t exist anywhere except in the writer’s imagination. But those works of fiction were intended to seem real, aimed at giving the reader the feeling of being immersed in the lives of real ballplayers playing the real game. Most of these stories were aimed at younger readers, too, and were meant to lead those readers toward a proper life, so the heroes were often uncompromisingly moral young men and women.

  That began to change with the arrival in the 1940s through 1970s of adult baseball fiction, some of it very ambitious in the literary sense and all of it meant to engage and entertain adult readers—sometimes for dramatic effect, sometimes for political and social commentary, and often for comedic effect. Baseball really was “the national pastime” for much of that era, and so any number of short stories and novels emerged, a good number of them with fantasy elements. Some of these included Valentine Davies’s comedy radio play and film, It Happens Every Spring. Douglass Wallop’s The Year the Yankees Tost the Pennant (which became 1955’s famous musical, Damn Yankees), and Philip Roth’s ambitious The Great American Novel. The highlight of the era, of course, is 1952’s remarkable novel, The Natural by Bernard Malamud, which can be seen as the first major mainstream success at novel length, blending baseball and fantasy.

  During this period a number of excellent blends of science fiction and baseball were published, too, with several of the top authors in the field incorporating their interest in the pastime with their work in science fiction. That’s a trend that continues today, but in this collection I have, for the most part, avoided the overtly science-fictional and focused, instead, on the fantastic, the supernatural, and the strange.

  Some of the best of the post-war baseball fantasies were short stories that appeared in the top magazines of the day, including “My Kingdom for Jones,” by Wilbur Schramm, which appeared in the Saturday EveningPostat the height of that magazine’s popularity in 1944, and Jack Kerouac’s 1955 “Ronnie on the Mound,” which appeared in Esquire. Both of these stories are reprinted in this collection.

  More baseball fantasies appeared in the 1960s and 1970s. Robert Coover’s much-lauded 1968 novel, The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., was an important precursor to what would become a major trend, as was his terrific 1971 short story, “McDuff on the Mound,” from the Iowa Keview, and the very famous “The Mighty Casey,” by Rod Serling. These two stories offered alternate takes on the famous “Casey at the Bat” poem by Ernest Lawrence Thayer, as did Ray Bradbury’s poem, “Ahab at the Helm.” Both stories and the poem are in this anthology.

  In that same period, Max Apple’s 1975 story, “Understanding Alvarado,” took on an alternate history of Fidel Castro’s baseball skills, something that would be done very successfully nearly twenty years later by John Kessel in “The Franchise” and Bruce McAllister in “The Southpaw.” All three of these stories are reprinted in this collection.

  And then came W P. Kinsella, surely the most influential of these baseball fantasists, beginning with his 1980 “Shoeless Joe Jackson Comes to Iowa,” and continuing today. From a wealth of Kinsella short stories, I have chosen the very funny and effective “How I Got My Nickname,” from Spitball Magazine, originally published in 1983. For other stories from the 1980s, I have also included the highly praised 1984 story, “The Hector Quesadilla Story,” by T. Coraghessan Boyle, which appeared in the Paris Review, as well as the excellent “Baseball Memories,” by Edo van Belkom, which appeared in Aethlon: The Journal of Sport literature, in 1989.

  With the embrace of baseball fiction—often fantastic in nature—in literary reviews, and the appearance of magazines like ilysian Fields Quarterly, the short-lived 108 magazine, and Aethlon, the number of stories for those interested in baseball rose from 1990 forward. The wealth of excellent stories makes choices difficult and at one point I had a list of eighty-four “must” include stories, which I finally narrowed down to the twenty-two you see here.

  During the 1990s and into the new millennium, an increased interest in counterfactual (or “alternate history”) stories brought a new element into baseball fantasy. One of the top magazines in the science-fiction and fanta
sy field, Asimov’s Science Fiction, printed a number of these stories, and several of them appear in this collection; but other publications, too, published baseball alternate-history stories. Among the very best of these are those by Harry Turtledove, the writer generally said to be the master of the alternate-history form. Known primarily as a prolific novelist, Turtledove’s short stories often appeared on tor.com, the online magazine run by Tor Books. Turtledove’s “The House that George Built,” from that site, is included in this collection.

  A number of women writers have published excellent baseball fantasy of one kind or another in the last twenty years. Among the best of these many fine stories are “The Further Adventures of the Invisible Man” by Karen Joy Fowler (whose 1998 novel, The Sweetheart Season, made a significant contribution to the literature), “How to Read a Man” by Valerie Sayers, “Diamond Girls” by Louise Marley, and “Pitchers and Catchers” by Cecilia Tan. All four stories are in this collection.

  Other outstanding baseball stories with elements of the strange or supernatural in more recent years include the minimalist “Baseball,” by Ray Gonzalez; “Lost October,” by David Sandner and Jacob Weisman; the very famous “Arthur Sternbach Brings the Curveball to Mars,” by Kim Stanley Robinson; the disarmingly satiric “My Last Season with the Owls,” by Ron Carlson; a wonderful tale of a curveball that really, seriously hangs, “The Hanging Curve,” by award-winning editor and writer Gardner Dozois; and my own “Stephen to Cora to Joe,” which appeared in A.simov’s Science Fiction in 2000. All of these stories are to be found in this anthology.

  Finally, the most recently published story to appear in this collection is “A Face in the Crowd” by Stephen King and Stewart O’Nan. Originally published as an e-book in 2012, this is the story’s first appearance in a print edition and it’s in the lead-off spot in the anthology.

  In total, these great stories range from the openly strange and fantastic to the more subtly ambiguous. The writers range from the little known to the hugely popular, and from those with famous literary reputations to those best known by the cognoscenti of genre writing. They are a diverse group, with diverse interests and ambitions; but what brings them together in this collection is their appreciation for elements of the fantastic and how they mix with the game of baseball to create a useful tool for storytelling. It is a tool offering a deep cultural history that allows for irony, humor, ghostly apparitions, slick-fielding horses, vampires, the challenges of childhood, the retelling of famous players and poems and tall tales from the pastime, a new way to look at what might have been, and—most of all—a great way to entertain, inform, and prod readers of all kinds.

  Rick Wilber

  April 2014

  Stephen King is one of the best-selling and most-honored authors of his generation. His first novel, Carrie, was published in 1974 and some fifty novels later he remains at the top of the best-seller lists. Stewart O'Nan is an award-winning novelist and is, like King, a notable fan of the Boston Red Sox. King and O'Nan followed the Red Sox closely in the remarkable 2004 season and their book, Faithful, was an extraordinary success. In 2012, King and O'Nan collaborated again on "A Face in the Crowd," published first in e-book form. The story is a vintage example of the supernatural in baseball, as a man learns some hard lessons about life and death and the Red Sox. This is the story's first appearance in print.

  A Face in the Crowd

  Stephen King and Stewart O’Nan

  THE SUMMER AFTER HIS wife died, Dean Evers started watching a lot of baseball. Like so many snowbirds from New England, he was a Red Sox fan who’d fled the nor’easters for the Gulf Coast of Florida and magnanimously adopted the Devil Rays, then perennial punching bags, as his second team. While he’d coached Little League, he’d never been a big fan—never obsessed, the way his son Pat was—but, night after night, as the gaudy sunset colored the West, he found himself turning on the Rays game to fill his empty condo.

  He knew it was just a way of passing time. He and Ellie had been married forty-six years, through the good and the bad, and now he had no one who remembered any of it. She was the one who’d lobbied him to move to St. Pete, and then, not five years after they packed up the house, she had her stroke. The terrible thing was that she was in great shape. They’d just played a bracing set of tennis at the club. She’d beat him again, meaning he bought the drinks. They were sitting under an umbrella, sipping chilled gin-and-tonics, when she winced and pressed a hand over one eye.

  “Brain freeze?” he asked.

  She didn’t move, sat there stuck, her other eye fixed, staring far beyond him.

  “El,” he said, reaching to touch her bare shoulder. Later, though the doctor said it was impossible, he would remember her skin being cold.

  She folded face first onto the table, scattering their glasses, bringing the waiters and the manager and the lifeguard from the pool, who gently laid her head on a folded towel and knelt beside her, monitoring her pulse until the EMTs arrived. She lost everything on her right side, but she was alive, that was what mattered, except, quickly, not a month after she finished her PT and came home from the rehab, she had a second, fatal stroke while he was giving her a shower, a scene which replayed in his mind so often that he decided he had to move to a new place, which brought him here, to a bayside high-rise where he knew no one, and anything that helped pass the time was welcome.

  He ate while he watched the game. He made his own dinner now, having tired of eating alone in restaurants and ordering expensive takeout. He was still learning the basics. He could make pasta and grill a steak, cut up a red pepper to crown a bag salad. He had no finesse, and too often was discouraged at the results, taking little pleasure in them. Tonight was a pre seasoned pork chop he’d picked up at the Publix. Just stick it in a hot pan and go, except he could never tell when meat was done. He got the chop crackling, threw a salad together, and set a place at the coffee table, facing the TV. The fat at the bottom of the pan was beginning to char. He poked the meat with a finger, testing for squishiness, but couldn’t be sure. He took a knife and cut into it, revealing a pocket of blood. The pan was going to be hell to clean.

  And then, when he finally sat down and took his first bite, the chop was tough. “Terrible,” he heckled himself. “Chef Ramsay you ain’t.”

  The Rays were playing the Mariners, meaning the stands were empty. When the Sox or Yanks were in town, the Trop was packed, otherwise the place was deserted. In the bad old days it made sense, but now the club was a serious contender. As David Price breezed through the lineup, Evers noted with dismay several fans in the padded captain’s chairs behind the plate talking on their cell phones. Inevitably, one teenager began waving like a castaway, presumably to the person on the other end, watching at home.

  “Look at me,” Evers said. “I’m on TV, therefore I exist.”

  The kid waved for several pitches. He was right over the umpire’s shoulder, and when Price dropped in a backdoor curve, the replay zoomed on the Met Life strike zone, magnifying the kid’s idiotic grin as he waved in slow motion. Two rows behind him, sitting alone in his white sanitary smock with his thin, pomaded hair slicked back, solid and stoic as a tiki god, was Evers’s old dentist from Shrewsbury, Dr. Young.

  Young Dr. Young, his mother had called him, because even when Evers was a child, he’d been old. He’d been a Marine in the Pacific, had come back from Tarawa missing part of a leg and all of his hope. He’d spent the rest of his life exacting his revenge not on the Japanese but on the children of Shrewsbury, finding soft spots in their enamel with the pitiless point of his stainless steel hook and plunging needles into their gums.

  Evers stopped chewing and leaned forward to be sure. The greased-back hair and Mount Rushmore forehead, the Coke-bottle bifocals and thin lips that went white when he bore down with the drill—yes, it was him, and not a day older than when Evers had last seen him, over fifty years ago.

  It couldn’t be. He’d be at least ninety. But the humidor that was Florida was full
of men his age, many of them well preserved, near mummified beneath their guayaberas and tans.

  No, Evers thought, he’d smoked. It was another thing Evers hated about him, the stale reek of his breath and his clothes as he loomed in close over him, trying to get leverage. The red pack fit the pocket of his smock—Lucky Strikes, filterless, the true coffin nails. L.S.M.F.T., that was the old slogan: Lucky Strike Means Fine Tobacco. Perhaps it was a younger brother, or a son, Even Younger Dr. Young.

  Price blew a fastball by the batter to end the inning and a commercial intervened, hauling Evers back to the present. His pork chop was tough as a catcher’s mitt. He tossed it in the trash and grabbed a beer. The first cold gulp sobered him. There was no way that was his Dr. Young, with his shaky morning-after hands and more than a hint of gin under his cigarette breath. Nowadays they’d call his condition PTSD, but to a kid at the mercy of his instruments, it didn’t matter. Evers had despised him, had surely at some point wished him, if not dead, then gone.

  When the Rays came to bat, the teenager was waving again, but the rows behind him were vacant. Evers kept an eye out, expecting Dr. Young to come back with a beer and a hot dog, yet as the innings passed and Price’s strikeouts mounted, the seat remained empty. Nearby, a woman in a sparkly top was now waving to the folks at home.

  He wished Ellie were there to tell, or that he could call his mother and ask whatever happened to Young Dr. Young, but, as with so much of his daily existence, there was no one to share it with. More likely than not, the man was just another old guy with nothing better to do than waste his leftover evenings watching baseball, only at the park instead of at home.

  Late that night, around three, Evers could easily see why of all the possible punishments prisoners feared solitary confinement the most. At some point a beating had to stop, but a thought could go on and on, feeding and then feeding on insomnia. Why Dr. Young, who he hadn’t thought of in years? Was it a sign? An omen? Or was he—as he feared he might when they told him Ellie had died—gradually losing his grip on this world?