Imagining Baseball: America’s Pastime and Popular Culture by David McGimpsey

REVIEWS Black’s splendid book reminds us that psychobiography, when it is done well, has a most valuable role to play in lit­ erary studies, for it shines an indispensable light on an author’s work that is not available to us in any other way. WORK CITED Tomkins, Silvan. Affect, Imagery, Consciousness, Volume 3, The Neg­ ative Affects: Anger and Fear. New York: Springer, 1991. JOSEPH ADAMSON / McMaster University David McGimpsey. Imagining Baseball: America’s Pastime and Popular Culture. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000. x, 195. Unique among major sports, baseball occupies a special place in American culture. “Like soda pop and the open road,” as David McGimpsey writes in Imagining Baseball, it “has be­ come a celebrated metaphor for America” (1). When it comes to popular culture, this, as McGimpsey acknowledges, is “old news.” Yet baseball’s uniqueness also lies in the hold that it has on America’s “high” culture. What other major league sport could recruit a Commissioner from the ranks of Ivy League Renaissance literature professors? Then again, when Commis­ sioner Bart Giamatti was given to saying things like baseball is “the Romantic Epic of homecoming America sings to itself” (5), what other sport would want to? It is to McGimpsey’s credit that in this wide-ranging “discussion of the tropes in baseball’s cultural products,” he brings a consistently fair and fresh approach to studying both the best and the worst of those “products.” In five chapters and an epilogue, McGimpsey pursues the various meanings and expectations that makers of American culture have brought to baseball. He ranges back and forth be­ tween history and literature as he evaluates the significance of events such as the Chicago Black Sox Scandal and the Pete Rose suspension as well as assessing the work of writers like the leg­ endary Ring Lardner and “perhaps the most idealistic author of 549 ESC 28, 2002 baseball fiction,” W. P. Kinsella (35). These names and events are just a few among many. From Homer and Bart Giamatti to Homer and Bart Simpson, by way of Walt Whitman and Dr. Quinn Medicine Woman, Bernard Malamud, and Bill Cosby, McGimpsey takes the reader on a witty and thought-provoking journey through the highs and lows of baseball at the movies, baseball on TV, and baseball in literature. McGimspey builds his study around the identification and analysis of the familiar tropes of baseball culture and how they are both constructed and challenged in the intertwined worlds of baseball and baseball literature. Perhaps the most common of these tropes, in McGimpsey’s view, is that baseball is “the very best sport, maybe even possessed of some sublime integrity or mystical quality that makes it, among all sports, most appropri­ ate for serious reflection” (4). As such it has attracted countless creators of culture eager to find ways of viewing baseball as more than a game. For many it is the “perfect game,” where Amer­ ican space and time come to play “inside the lines,” insulated from the demands of commerce or the clock. Baseball thus offers a “pastoral retreat” from the world of commerce, or a national backyard where generations of American fathers play meaning­ ful catch with generations of American sons. McGimpsey ex­ plores these fondly stated and endlessly debated claims through extended readings of such major baseball books (as well as of the movies eventually based on them) as Malamud’s The Nat­ ural (1952) and Mark Harris’s Bang the Drum Slowly (1956). In McGimpsey’s view, these studies engage rather than simply endorse the pastoral ideal as they use its “conventions [...] as a way of testing baseball’s claims to a virtuous setting” (76). In these and other readings McGimpsey is especially adept at drawing out the symbiotic tensions and mutual neediness bind­ ing the ballpark to the market place, the (paying) fan to the “product” (whether on the field or on the shelf), and the ma­ terial to the sentimental. In a chapter entitled “Everybody Can Play (Except You): Baseball Fiction and Difference,” McGimpsey dissects another cherished article of the baseball faith: that “the best game” em­ bodies the inter-related ideals of American assimilationism and meritocracy. The...

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