20240327 六本关于棒球的好书

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经济学人》读后感
六本关于棒球的好书
这项运动激发了伟大文学的灵感。以下是一些最佳作品



许多体育运动都可以似是而非地宣称自己是世界上最好的消遣。但说到催生伟大的文学作品，棒球却独树一帜。美国图书馆为这项脑力劳动、节奏缓慢的运动专门设立了一个又一个书架。从最早的球员回忆录，如克里斯蒂-马修森（Christy Mathewson）1912 年的《夹缝中的投球》，到著名小说家报道真实比赛的作品（约翰-厄普代克（John Updike）的散文《Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu》）或重新想象比赛的作品（唐-德里罗（Don DeLillo）1997 年的小说《地下世界》），不一而足。棒球也一直是社会变革的先兆。棒球的种族融合预示着民权运动；自由球员数百万美元薪水的兴起预示着 20 世纪 80 年代 "贪婪即好 "的经济。这六本关于棒球的书不仅让人沉浸在这项运动的乐趣中，还揭示了社会的一些更广泛的方面--并不是只有美国为之着迷。

"84 年的五十九岁》。Edward Achorn 著。哈珀柯林斯出版社；400 页；15.99 美元和 14.99 英镑

棒球史爱好者可以列出数百位前球星的成就和数据。但只有极少数人听说过这位创造了棒球史上最伟大赛季的球员： 查尔斯-"老霍斯"-拉德本，1884 年第一名普罗维登斯灰熊队的王牌投手。在球队的 114 场比赛中，拉德本首发并完成了 73 场。官方记分员将灰熊队 84 场胜利中的 59 场归功于他（2019 年他被追授第 60 场胜利）。可以肯定的是，当时的这项运动正处于青春期： 拉德本用手投球，他身后的外野手没有手套，本垒打也很少见，有时还会出现外野手因害怕被踢而拒绝从观众的马下捡球这样的怪事。爱德华-阿科恩对拉德本神奇的一年进行了生动的描述，并进行了详尽的研究，但这本书最吸引人的地方在于它证明了，虽然镀金时代的美国似乎离我们很遥远，但棒球的情节和乐趣在今天仍然大致相同。

八人出局 艾略特-阿西诺夫著。亨利-霍尔特公司；336 页；19.99 美元。Ishi Press；18.95 英镑

美国的爵士乐时代始于黑袜队丑闻，在这起丑闻中，芝加哥白袜队的球员与赌徒合谋，在 1919 年的世界大赛中输给了辛辛那提红袜队。艾略特-阿西诺夫（Eliot Asinof）在 1963 年讲述了这起假球阴谋和随后的审判，该书后来被拍成电影，由约翰-库萨克（John Cusack）主演。它包括虚构的人物、从未发生过的事件、编造的对话和内心独白。它是一部根据真实故事改编的文学作品。它是有史以来最扣人心弦的棒球文学作品之一。

高薪奴隶》。作者：布拉德-斯奈德。企鹅出版社；496 页；17 美元。

自从棒球成为一项职业运动以来，棒球经济就一直围绕着球员和球队老板之间的矛盾展开，球员希望尽可能多地出售自己的服务，而球队老板则希望控制球员的薪水。在 20 世纪的大部分时间里，球员都受到压低工资的 "储备条款 "的约束，球队可以用前一年的工资无限期地与球员续约，也可以不经球员同意将他们交易出去。布拉德-斯奈德（Brad Snyder）在《高薪奴隶》（A Well-Paid Slave）一书中讲述了黑人外野手科特-弗拉德（Curt Flood，上图中的击球手）的悲惨故事，他牺牲了自己的职业生涯，为球员们赢得了自由。1969 年，当圣路易斯红雀队将他交易到费城费城人队时，弗洛德拒绝加入这个城市里有臭名昭著的种族主义球迷的球队。他写信给体育委员，说自己不是 "一块可以被买卖的财产，不管我的意愿如何"。弗拉德将官司一直打到最高法院，而最高法院在 1972 年做出的有利于业主的裁决被公认为是最糟糕的裁决之一。四年后，棒球运动员工会设法通过仲裁推翻了保留条款，但弗拉德再也没有打过比赛。

你必须拥有华。罗伯特-怀特（Robert Whiting）著。诺夫出版社；416 页；19 美元

美国可能将棒球视为 "国民消遣"，但在美国，棒球的受欢迎程度远远落后于橄榄球。相比之下，棒球运动在东亚大部分地区和拉丁美洲部分地区却独占鳌头。日本是世界棒球经典赛五届冠军中的三届，也是大谷翔平的故乡，他现在是洛杉矶道奇队（Los Angeles Dodgers）的一员。他是历史上唯一一位同时担任投手和击球手的球员。(对于只熟悉美国大联盟的读者来说，罗伯特-怀特（Robert Whiting）对日本和西方棒球文化差异的生动解读是一个值得欢迎的修正。棒球主要是击球手和投手之间一对一的对抗，是最个性化的团队运动之一。但日本在培养明星球员和赢得国际冠军方面都取得了成功。



Many sports can make plausible claims to be the world’s best pastime. But when it comes to spawning great literature, baseball stands alone. American libraries dedicate shelves upon shelves to the cerebral, languidly paced sport. The volumes they hold range from the earliest memoirs by players, like Christy Mathewson’s “Pitching in a Pinch” in 1912, to works by renowned novelists reporting on real games (John Updike’s essay “Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu”) or reimagining them (Don DeLillo’s novel of 1997, “Underworld”). Baseball has also been a consistent harbinger of social changes. Its racial integration foreshadowed the civil-rights movement; the rise of multimillion-dollar salaries for free agents anticipated the “greed-is-good” economy of the 1980s. These six books about baseball not only provide an enjoyable immersion in the sport but also illuminate some broader aspects of societies—America is not the only one—enraptured by it.

“Fifty-Nine in ’84”. By Edward Achorn. HarperCollins; 400 pages; $15.99 and £14.99

Baseball-history buffs can reel off the accomplishments and statistics of hundreds of former stars. But only a tiny fraction of them have heard of the player responsible for the greatest season in the sport’s history: Charles “Old Hoss” Radbourn, the ace pitcher on the first-place Providence Grays of 1884. Radbourn started and finished 73 of the team’s 114 games. Official scorers gave him credit for 59 of the Grays’ 84 victories (he was posthumously assigned a 60th win in 2019). To be sure, the sport back then was in its adolescence: Radbourn threw underhand, the fielders behind him had no gloves and home runs were rare, sometimes resulting from oddities like an outfielder refusing to retrieve a ball from under a spectator’s horse for fear of being kicked. But the chief delight of Edward Achorn’s vivid and thoroughly researched account of Radbourn’s magical year is its demonstration that, although Gilded Age America seems unrecognisably distant, baseball’s plotlines and joys remain largely the same today.

Eight Men Out. By Eliot Asinof. Henry Holt & Co; 336 pages; $19.99. Ishi Press; £18.95

The Jazz Age in America began with the Black Sox scandal, in which players from the Chicago White Sox conspired with gamblers to lose the World Series of 1919 to the Cincinnati Reds. Eliot Asinof’s account in 1963 of the match-fixing machinations and ensuing trial, later turned into a film starring John Cusack, is not a scholarly history. It includes fictional characters, events that never occurred and made-up dialogue and interior monologues. It is a work of literature based on a true story. And it ranks among the most gripping examples of baseball writing ever produced.

A Well-Paid Slave. By Brad Snyder. Penguin; 496 pages; $17.

Ever since baseball became a professional sport, its economics have revolved around the tension between players seeking to sell their services for as much money as possible and team owners seeking to keep salaries in check. For most of the 20th century players were bound by a wage-suppressing “reserve clause”, which let teams renew their contracts indefinitely at the previous year’s salary and trade them without their consent. In “A Well-Paid Slave” Brad Snyder recounts the sad saga of Curt Flood (the batter pictured above), a black outfielder who sacrificed his career to win players their freedom. When the St Louis Cardinals traded him to the Philadelphia Phillies in 1969, Flood refused to join a team in a city with notoriously racist fans. He wrote to the sport’s commissioner saying that he was not “a piece of property to be bought and sold irrespective of my wishes”. Flood took his case all the way to the Supreme Court, whose decision in 1972 in favour of the owners is widely regarded as one of its worst rulings. The baseball players’ union managed to overturn through arbitration the reserve clause four years later, but Flood never played again.

You Gotta Have Wa. By Robert Whiting. Knopf; 416 pages; $19

America may regard baseball as its “national pastime”, but in that country it lags far behind gridiron football in popularity. By contrast, the game reigns supreme in much of East Asia and parts of Latin America. Nowhere has it succeeded more than in Japan, which has won the World Baseball Classic three of the five times the tournament has been played and is the home of Ohtani Shohei, now of the Los Angeles Dodgers. He is the only player in history to star as both a pitcher and a hitter at the same time. (Babe Ruth was also great in both roles, but not simultaneously.) For readers familiar only with America’s major leagues, Robert Whiting’s lively journey through the differences between Japanese and Western baseball culture is a welcome corrective. As mainly a sequence of one-on-one confrontations between a hitter and a pitcher, baseball is among the most individualised team sports. But Japan has built its success at both developing star players and winning international titles on the concept of wa, usually translated as “harmony”, achieved through rigorous training. American players who move there to play are more individualistic. They think it’s up to them to decide how much to train. They are bewildered by the idea of wa and its demands for self-denying behaviour both on and off the field. Mr Whiting describes the culture clash with elegance and verve.

Moneyball. By Michael Lewis. W.W. Norton; 336 pages; $17.95 and £12.99

Even before the film version starring Brad Pitt came out in 2011, “Moneyball” had a strong case to be the most influential baseball book ever written. The story of how the small-market Oakland Athletics used statistical analysis to build a winning team with undervalued players has become so well known that its title is now synonymous with out-of-the-box intelligence: there’s “Moneyball for government”, “Moneyball for lawyers”, “Moneyball for AgTech innovation”, even “Moneyball for the wildland fire system” (google it). Knowledgeable fans might dispute how much credit the number-crunchers really deserve for the Athletics’ success, and for that matter how successful the team really was: in the past 30 years it has won a grand total of one series in the post-season tournament that crowns baseball’s champion. But such quibbles are easy to ignore thanks to Michael Lewis’s compelling psychological portrait of Billy Beane, the team’s general manager, whose faith in statisticians stemmed from his own failure to succeed as a player even though he had the physical attributes that scouts crave.

Ball Four. By Jim Bouton. Turner Publishing Company; 508 pages; $39.99 and £28.99

In an era when every star player’s off-field foibles are tabloid fodder, it is hard to imagine a time when unflattering information about celebrities was kept under wraps. But until Jim Bouton (the pitcher pictured above)  wrote this laugh-out-loud, tell-all diary of his 1969 season, the public had no idea that Mickey Mantle, the New York Yankees’ revered centre-fielder, was a heavy drinker who hit many of his home runs hung over, or that players routinely popped amphetamines (“greenies”), devised schemes to look up the skirts of attractive female spectators (“beaver-shooting”) and rampantly engaged in extramarital affairs on road trips. (Asked what was the hardest part of being a ballplayer, Mike Hegan quipped, “Explaining to your wife why she needs to take penicillin for your kidney infection.”) Major League Baseball was outraged. Its commissioner, Bowie Kuhn, tried unsuccessfully to get Bouton to sign a statement that its contents were pure fiction, and Bouton’s revelations made him a pariah among his former teammates. Whenever Pete Rose, a star who was later banned from the sport for gambling, played against Bouton, he yelled “Fuck you, Shakespeare!” from the dugout.

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