"Casey's Real Turn at Bat"

I'm pleased to announce that my short story "Casey's Real Turn at Bat" has been published by Zisk Magazine, a highly enjoyable baseball zine. You can buy a copy (Issue #12) directly from the Zisk site ($2 postage paid) or through Quimby's or Razorcake; the latter two outlets should have copies available later this week. I'll also be having a free giveaway contest sometime this week, so stay tuned. Zisk will eventually put the story up on its website, but that won't be for another few months.

A bit of backstory is in order. It's rather ironic that, despite this first print publication of mine being a baseball story, I have little to no interest in the game any more. I used to be a huge fan, endlessly watching games on TV and in person (I had Cubs season tickets for three years during the late 1980s), memorizing stats, devouring the box scores in the newspaper every day. The fact that the Cubs had chronically underachieved for virtually the entire 20th Century didn't even turn me away; in fact, it endeared them to me even more. But the turning point for me was the 1994 strike, during which I suddenly discovered that I could live without baseball, that there was more to life than raptly watching a bunch of pampered millionaires playing a kid's game. And once the strike was over, the game that emerged--that of steroid-inflated leviathans swinging from the heels on every pitch, of utility infielders hitting opposite-field broken-bat homers, of the complete abandonment of fundamentals, of Sammy Sosa becoming a national hero despite being the embodiment of the selfish, egomanical, me-first and me-last player, of Fox's flash-and-glitz television coverage with its relentless camera cuts, obnoxious screen graphics and overamped crowd noise--completely turned me off. The game was lost to me during those post-strike years, and I doubt I'll ever have much interest in it again.

With one fleeting exception. The Cubs' pennant run in 2003 briefly held my interest, not as a passionate fan but as a curiousity-seeking gawker. Contrary to popular opinion, the NLCS was not lost because of doofus fan Steve Bartman and his interference with a live ball in play, despite the finger pointing of Moises Alou and several million simpleton fans. No, the wheels were already coming off the Cub jalopy long before Bartman's foolish act, and the team still had a chance to recover and pull out the win. Which they failed to do, as most championship pretenders fail to do. Winners recover from such incidents as the Bartman affair and overcome them; losers get demoralized, lose and point fingers at everyone but themselves.

The Cubs' October collapse in 2003 by no means upset me; in fact, in made perfect sense. Our world is in such a constant state of flux and change that there are very few things that one can rely on, year after year. One of those few things is that, no matter how well things might go over the course of a season--Sosa hits a zillion homers, young Mark Prior emerges as the staff ace, the team pulls off a series of improbable comebacks--the Cubs will ultimately come up short, will disappoint and underachieve, will have their relentlessly optimistic fans once again looking ahead to next year. As the team rambled along that season, making the playoffs, winning their first series and pulling ahead of the Marlins in the NLCS, it was all very disorienting. Could it be possible that the Cubs would not only win the pennant, but--dare I say it?--win the World Series? Would the Cubs' futility become one less thing to believe in, year after year after year? In a way, the inglorious end to the 2003 season was personally satisfying. Cubs lose. That's just the way things are. We all take quiet comfort in the familiar.

The team's pennant run revived my interest in the game just long enough to inspire me to write my Casey story. I had long been acquainted with Ernest Lawrence Thayer's "Casey at the Bat", having been able to recite the poem from memory at the tender age of eight. Years later, I recited it to Maddie at bedtime, the familiar rhymes and rythyms never failing to lull her to sleep. Watching the Cubs that year made me think of another group of legendary losers, the Mudville Nine, and its star, mighty Casey. (Who, I've since come to realize, is the 19th Century version of Sammy Sosa.) It made me wonder what else happened in that long-ago Mudville game, beyond the spare words of the poem. I reflected on what might have been going through the minds of the players, before finally inventing the team's owner as my protagonist. What would he be thinking, watching this underachieving club day in and day out? Once that line of inquiry began, the story all but wrote itself. In many ways, the Mudville owner's frustration and disillusionment with his team reflects my own feelings for what baseball has become.

Even if I never care about baseball again, I'll always have "Casey's Real Turn at Bat" as a bittersweet elegy for the game. It was a pleasure to write, and I hope you enjoy it as well.