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Throwing errors

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Jules Tygiel, a history professor at San Francisco State University, is the author of "Past Time: Baseball as History."

NO event in sports history has inspired novelists more than the 1919 Black Sox scandal. The specter of eight Chicago White Sox players conspiring to throw the World Series appears briefly in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby,” when narrator Nick Carraway marvels, upon meeting gambler Meyer Wolfsheim, the alleged mastermind behind the fix, “that one man could start to play with the faith of fifty million people.” Bernard Malamud intertwined the fate of White Sox superstar Joe Jackson with that of his fictional man-child phenom Roy Hobbs in “The Natural.” More recently, writers W.P. Kinsella, Jerome Charyn, Harry Stein and Brendan C. Boyd, among others, have tapped the saga for their fiction.

The late James T. Farrell, author of the Studs Lonigan trilogy, also saw potential in this baseball morality tale. Farrell had grown up in Chicago, played baseball on its sandlots and worshiped the high-flying White Sox. Their fall from grace when he was 15 branded him indelibly. In 1956, Farrell was at work on “A Baseball Diary,” a collection of his writings on the game, when he learned of the death of White Sox infielder Buck Weaver, his childhood hero and one of those banished from baseball for his alleged role in the plot. He began a novel based on the events of 1919.

The publication of “The Natural” in 1952 and Mark Harris’ early Henry Wiggen novels (“The Southpaw,” “Bang the Drum Slowly”) notwithstanding, baseball wasn’t considered a subject for serious adult fiction. His publisher did not respond favorably to the idea, so Farrell abandoned the project. Now, a half-century later -- and nearly three decades after his death -- a trio of editors has reworked Farrell’s three existing drafts into the novel “Dreaming Baseball.”

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The narrator is Mickey Donovan, a 56-year-old former White Sox infielder. Now a scout at a Florida baseball school who evaluates youngsters “dreaming baseball,” Donovan recalls his own youthful reveries playing ball in Chicago and idolizing the White Sox. He dreamed of major league stardom, not so much for the money but for the fame. Becoming a baseball player would make him “one of the most famous and important persons in the country,” he thought. Instead he found that “it’s a different kind of thing, and a different kind of feeling than you expect it to be.”

Donovan recalls being summoned to try out with the White Sox in July 1918. The first words he hears upon entering the clubhouse initiate the naive 18-year-old to the game’s realities. Weaver, sitting naked in front of his locker, snarls that Chicago Cubs players, criticized for worrying about being paid, are “right to think of every ... cent they can get.” White Sox players, Donovan quickly learns, are faction-ridden, with stars rarely speaking to one another. He makes the team and is a seldom-played benchwarmer with a fly-on-the-wall view of the great team’s unraveling in 1919. During the fateful week of the World Series, Donovan senses that things are amiss, but his youth and inexperience prevent him from accepting the obvious. “I knew that bets were being made on the World Series.... It wasn’t hard to put two and two together, but I didn’t do it,” he explains. “It was too much and too shocking and too terrible a thing to believe.”

The best chapters of “Dreaming Baseball” are about the oft-forgotten 1920 season. Although rumors of the fix abounded, the public revelation did not occur until almost a year later, with the team in a three-way pennant race. For Donovan and his teammates, he recalls, the season was a nightmare. “[I]f the players had sold out to the gamblers, they might do it again, and they didn’t care about winning, or at least you couldn’t be sure,” he worries. The suspect players “had us all at their mercy. They had baseball at their mercy.” When the Cook County grand jury begins investigating, the inexperienced Donovan agonizes over what to say and fears being “tripped by the men from the DA’s office.”

In assessing why the players who caused the team to be nicknamed the Black Sox forged their conspiracy, the novel touches on several themes that have become commonplace in historical assessments of the scandal: the low salaries paid by penurious White Sox owner Charles Comiskey, the divisions within the club and the failure of Comiskey and league officials to respond to the growing evidence of the fix. As Donovan sees it, the players “were weak and foolish.... I finally came to think of them as poor fellows who did an awfully dumb thing. I don’t mean that I don’t think it was wrong for them to do it. But it was dumb and stupid.”

“Dreaming Baseball,” however, is as much a reflection on aging and disillusionment as it is on the scandal. At times, Donovan blames the fix for shattering his dreams. But his primary lament about life and fame seems to reflect the author’s artistic trajectory as much as that of Donovan’s athletic career. Having spent 13 years in the major leagues, Donovan observes, “I had had all I dreamed of and wished for as a boy. And it was gone.... I had reached my height and that had been far below my dreams and expectations.” With his 1930s Studs Lonigan trilogy, Farrell, like Donovan, had won celebrity at an early age. By the 1950s, he was struggling to make a living as a writer, scarred by the reaction to his personal odyssey from the political left to the political right. You can hear Farrell’s voice when Donovan finds himself “thinking about a kid who was someone else rather than myself ... dreaming and imagining all that I was going to do and all that I would be.”

Had “Dreaming Baseball” been published at the time, it might have felt fresher and more innovative. Today, it seems to tread familiar ground. Nonetheless, it offers insight into the evolution of a major American writer, and the complexities of the Black Sox story remain compelling for novelist and reader alike. *

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