The Universal Baseball Association is the kind of awesome book that makes you feel really, really squeamish about playing OOTP.

A defensible list by Carlson. I might have replaced Hoopla with The Celebrant and Bang the Drum Slowly with The Southpaw, but they're all good novels.

The Universal Baseball Association is so great. I have melodies in my head for all the songs, like when I read Pynchon.

While I was being born, it wasn't yet time when they'd regularly let fathers be there for the delivery, so my dad hung out in the waiting room reading that book (it must have just come out in paperback). So I always have felt a bit of a special connection to it.

The other baseball novel that comes to mind is Philip Roth's The Great American Novel. I don't know if it's a classic or anything, but it is a hell of a lot of fun.

Roth's novel seemed too insistently cute and self-consciously cute. Too bad John Barth is into sailing and not baseball.

The Universal Baseball Association is the best, and it's eerie in its prescience about stats and the meaning it gives to the game and to the game's mythology. Coover should get a special citation from somebody.

EDIT: btw, I tried to post that article two days ago, and could never get it on--no matter what I did I got a primary tag deficiency reject. I finally gave up.

I just went to the site, and the powers that be have changed the stuff about the tags. I guess I hit it when it was in a limbo state.

Finally a mention of Hoopla. I just love that book. Of course Coover's UBA is fantastic.

I don't know if it's the best, but my favorite baseball novel continues to be The Iowa Baseball Confederacy by WP Kinsella.

But UBA would probably be second, unless you can take the first part of Underworld and call it a stand-alone book (I know it was printed in part as a stand-alone piece, but it's probably not long enough to call a novel).

Also, an often overlooked book - The Kid from Tomkinsville by John R. Tunis.

Do you think there are better baseball novels out there than the ones about American football?

I think about other novels about sports, and I can't come up with anything (not just football), unless you count something like the bullfighting in Hemingway.

A writing blog misspelled "Wiggen" eleven times?

Oh yeah Kinsella's "Iowa.." was also great read.

Exley's A Fan's Notes has its fans. But, then, although football plays an important role, it isn't per se about a player playing football. It isn't a football story in that sense. But, then, neither is Coover's masterpiece. He's no John Tunis or Zane Grey or Mark Harris, and Exley isn't the football equivalent of them either.

P. G. Wodehouse wrote some nice stories early in his career about cricket. I like them, but they aren't typical of Wodehouse's mature comic style, nor are they really great and memorable works of fiction. His love for cricket comes across, however. But, they're just nice novels about Mike at Wrykyn, although things perk up when Psmith is introduced toward the end.

Now, this is a very good book about bodybuilding

I don't know how much is fact, how much is fiction, but it is an excellent read. Samuel Fussell is the son of Paul Fussell, noted intellectual historian and scholar, who died a few days ago. Samuel's book is both affecting and hilarious.

Stephen Sondheim, of all people, tried to make a musical out of Fussell's bodybuilding book in the 1990s -- the conceit was to have an evening of two one-act musicals, and "Muscle" was the first one. The second one was what eventually became "Passion." Sondheim's recent lyrics collection "Look, I Made a Hat" includes the "Muscle" lyrics.

Hah, I don't think I ever knew that.

Boxing has a couple good books about it, the one that was turned into Million Dollar Baby for one, and also Joyce Carol Oates' On Boxing, if that counts. I think that overall boxing is probably #2 to baseball in literary-dom, at least among American sports. If you want to tie in soccer, there is of course Nick Hornby's Fever Pitch.

the sweet science is nonfiction but its just about the best sportswriting ever, as is the followup collection a neutral corner.

George Plimpton famously wrote that the smaller the ball used in a sport, the better quality of writing about it. Golf, tennis and baseball produced better writing than football or basketball and, he concluded, there had never been a great book about beach balls.

Harry Stein's Hoopla is a good novel, though I'm not certain Buck Weaver was that much of a hayseed in reality. Stein also gave the married Weaver a long-time mistress... that's always risky to do when you put real-life people in a work of fiction.

All five that Carlson picks are good novels, though I'd take The Celebrant over any of them. Morty makes a good point that there's no actual baseball in The Universal Baseball Association. The imagined baseball in the novel is made up of scraps of old annuals and newspaper columns and songs and kids' books. Much the same applies to The Natural, which is more influenced by pulp stories than by watching real baseball.

The best boxing novel IMO is Budd Schulberg's The Harder They Fall – made into an interesting film with Humphrey Bogart and Rod Steiger.

Obligatory self-plug for the Guide to Baseball Fiction, for those who like these threads …

Boxing has a couple good books about it, the one that was turned into Million Dollar Baby for one, and also Joyce Carol Oates' On Boxing, if that counts. I think that overall boxing is probably #2 to baseball in literary-dom, at least among American sports. If you want to tie in soccer, there is of course Nick Hornby's Fever Pitch.

And when it comes to film, boxing has no peer. Raging Bull, Rocky, Million Dollar Baby, The Set-Up, Killer's Kiss, Fat City...Wiki even lists Luchino Visconti's Rocco and His Brothers as a boxing film, though I only vaguely recall that element, and was disappointed in the film overall, which is purported to be one of Visconti's best but which I found pretty dull. I'll have to revisit it, I generally love Visconti (not to mention Alain Delon).

Anyway!

I was gonna bring up Pafko at the Wall but I see Carlson mentions it towards the end of his article. I love love love that story (and Underworld, and White Noise, which is to say, I love everything of DeLillo's that I've read so far). The opening with Cotter Martin jumping the turnstiles at the Polo Grounds, evading security and swaggering off into the crowd is beautiful. I'm gonna need to read more DeLillo soon, Americana is probably next on the list. Any recommendations? (Another film aside: I can't wait for Cronenberg's adaptation of Cosmopolis. Haven't read it, but it seems like a perfect marriage of director and author; White Noise strongly reminded me of Videodrome in its themes if not its tone).

I'm gonna need to read more DeLillo soon, Americana is probably next on the list. Any recommendations?

Since you like sport fiction, read End Zone. I also think Libra is very good, if you have a tolerance for JFK conspiracy theories. (I have no tolerance for them, but I like Libra a lot anyway, because it is unapologetically fictional.)

Americana is probably next on the list. Any recommendations?

End Zone

Libra

Well, that's a consensus if I've ever seen one...:-)

I think Oliver Stone's JFK is one of the best of the 90s so I'd say I have a tolerance for the conspiracy theories. More to the point, I love (I'm not sure what the proper name for this is) "speculative" historical fiction, which would probably explain why I'm tear-assing through Against the Day at the moment.

There are a number of interesting speculative fictions about the Negro Leagues (playing on "what if" the color line had been broken earlier): Peter Schilling's End of Baseball, Peter Rutkoff's Shadow Ball, and Kevin King's All the Stars Came Out That Night.

At this point I almost feel obligated to mention The Natural, which in truth is a far, far better novel than the movie makes it out to be.

Since we're talking DeLillo and baseball, I highly recommend the movie Game 6, staring Michael Keaton, for which DD wrote the screenplay. Not a great film visually, but a lovely-paced story that will appeal to anyone who is both socially anxious and a baseball fan (actually, those things really aren't mutually exclusive).

Came on too to mention End Zone as possibly the one great football novel. Mao II would be recommendation for Delillo, or The Names, or any of the ones mentioned above. Also, Carlson's comments on football are so spot-on they merit repeating for those who didn't make it all the way to page three. This is pretty much exactly what DD lays out in End Zone and Pafko at the Wall.

Why do you think that the National Football League has become more popular than baseball?

As I said at the beginning, I think baseball reflects an American ideal which is now an American fantasy. Football reflects what America really is.

Namely?

Mechanised, militaristic, violent, obsessive, not pastoral and not relaxed. This has been exacerbated by television and media.

And I also like Douglass Wallop's The Year the Yankees Lost the Pennant, which led to Damn Yankees. Very much like Stephen King did in Carrie (among other novels), Wallop immediately established a bland, predictable, 'normal' milieu -- in this case, a warm night in a suburban neighborhood -- for his main characters, and then subtly introduced a supernatural element.

No love for Ratner's Star?

No love for Ratner's Star?

I thought the first half of the book was very good, but it lost its way after that

I like Running Dog, also

Came on too to mention End Zone as possibly the one great football novel.

I liked Joiner a lot, but that's only kind of a "football novel."

Ratner's Star is, indeed, all over the place. Not my type of novel at all – it's like Melville's Mardi, to make a classic analogy, picaresque and lavish. Americana is good, though, especially its first half, and Great Jones Street is weird and provocative.

It's far more conventional than End Zone or A Fan's Notes, but North Dallas Forty is very readable and thought-provoking. It's a good film, too.

It's a good film, too.

In one movie you got GD Spradlin, Charles Durning, Dabney Coleman, and John Matuszak. Very entertaining secondary.

I'm gonna need to read more DeLillo soon, Americana is probably next on the list. Any recommendations?

I'll agree that Libra is very very good. I think it might be his finest novel.


At this point I almost feel obligated to mention The Natural, which in truth is a far, far better novel than the movie makes it out to be.

I don't care what anyone says, I enjoyed the movie more than the book.

Carlson is such a cool guy. He's a fantastic football analyst as well, which is ironic considering his distaste for the NFL circus.