The Great American Novel

by Philip Roth

  Now, every ballplayer has his weakness, and that was Big John’s, If he didn’t drink, if he didn’t gamble, if he didn’t whore and cheat and curse, if he wasn’t a roughneck, a glutton and a brawler, why he just wasn’t himself, and his whole damn game went to pot, hitting and fielding. But when he had fifteen drinks under his belt, there was nobody like him on first base. Giant that he was, he could still bounce around that infield like a kangaroo when he was good and drunk. And could he hit! “Why, one time in that jail up there,” Big John told Smitty upon his release from the prison, “I had me a lunch of a case of beer and a bottle of bourbon and got nine for nine in a doubleheader. Yep, everytime I come up, I just poked her into the outside world. But this rule they got out here—why it’s disgustin’! It ain’t for men, it’s for lollipops and cupcakes! It’s a damn joke what they done to this game—and that there Hall of Fame they got, why, that’s a bigger joke! Why, if they ever asked me to come up there and gave me one of them poems or whatever it is they give, why I’d just laugh in their face! I’d say take your poem and wipe your assholes with it, you bunch a’ powder puffs!”

  Big John’s contempt for the Hall of Fame (and his antisocial conduct generally) seemed to stem from grievances against Organized Baseball that had been implanted in him by his notorious father, who, in turn, had inherited from his notorious father a downright Neanderthal attitude toward the game. John’s grandfather was, as everyone knows, the Baal, the legendary “Base,” who is still mistakenly credited with the idea of substituting sand-filled bags, or bases, for the posts used to mark off the infield in baseball’s infancy; in actuality he earned the nickname early in his career because of his behavior on the playing field. If we are to believe the stories, Base Baal played on just about every cornfield and meadow in America before the first leagues were organized, before stadiums were built and men earned a living as players. Like many American boys, he learned the fundamentals in the Army camps of the Civil War. The game in that era consisted of several variants, all of which would be as foreign to the American baseball fan of today as jai alai or lacrosse. This was long before pitchers began to throw overhand, back when the bat was a stick that was narrow at both ends, if it was not a fence post or a barrel stave, back when there would be as many as twenty or thirty players on a team, and when the umpire, chosen from the crowd of spectators, might well be punched in the nose and run off the field if his judgment did not accord with everyone else’s. The ball was a bit larger, something like today’s softball, and “plugging” or “soaking” was the order of the day—to get the runner out, you had only to “plug” him (that is, hit him with the ball while he was between two bases), for him to be retired (as often as not, howling in pain). Frequently a fielder, or “scout” as he was called in some parts of the country, would wait for the runner to come right up to him, before “plugging” him in the ribs, much to the pleasure of the onlookers. And that was Base’s stock in trade. In fact, when the old fellow finally broke into the newly formed four-club Patriot League in the eighties—by which time the game had taken on many of its modern, more civilized characteristics—he apparently “forgot” himself one day and “plugged” a runner heading home from third right in that vulnerable part of a man’s anatomy for which he always aimed. He was instantly mobbed and nearly beaten to death by the other team—a bearded giant of a man, close to sixty now—all the while crying out, “But that’s out where I come from!”

  Base’s son, and Big John’s father, was the infamous pitcher, Spit, who in the years before wetting down the ball was declared illegal, would serve up a pitch so juicy that by the end of an inning the catcher had to shake himself off like a dog come in from romping in the rain. The trouble with Spit’s spitball was, simply, that nobody could hit it out of the infield, if they could even follow the erratic path of that dripping sphere so as to get any wood on it at all. Once it left Spit’s hand, carrying its cargo of liquid, not even he was sure exactly what turns and twists it would take before it landed with a wet thud in the catcher’s glove, or up against his padded body. As opposition mounted to this spitter that Baal had perfected—it was unnatural, unsanitary, uncouth, it was ruining the competitive element in the game—he only shrugged and said, “How am I supposed to do, let ’em hit it out theirselves?” On hot afternoons, when his salivary glands and his strong right arm were really working, Spit used to like to taunt the opposition a little by motioning for his outfielders to sit back on their haunches and take a chew, while he struck out—or, as he put it, “drownded”—the other side. Angry batsmen would snarl at the ump, “Game called on accounta rain!” after the first of Spit’s spitters did a somersault out in front of the plate and then sort of curled in for a strike at the knees. But Spit himself would pooh-pooh the whole thing, calling down to them, “Come on now, a little wet ain’t gonna hurt you.” “It ain’t the wet, Baal, it’s the stringy stuff. It turns a white man’s stomach.” “Ah, ain’t nothin’—just got me a little head cold. Get in there now, and if you cain’t swim, float.”

  In the beginning, various conservative proposals were offered to transform the spitter back into what it had been before Spit came on the scene. The citrus fruit growers of America suggested that a spitball pitcher should have to suck on half a lemon in order to inhibit his flow of saliva—fulfilling his daily nutritional requirement of vitamin C in the process. They tried to work up public interest in a pitch they called “the sourball,” but when the pitchers themselves balked, as it were, complaining there was not any room for a lemon what with teeth, tongue, and chewing tobacco in there already, the proposal, mercifully, was dropped. A more serious suggestion had to do with allowing a pitcher to use all the saliva he wanted, but outlawing mucus and phlegm. The theory was that what the ballplayers euphemistically called “the stringy stuff” was precisely what made Baal’s pitch dance the way it did. A committee of managers assigned to study his motion maintained that Spit was very much like a puppeteer yanking on a web of strings, and that the rules had only to be rewritten to forbid a pitcher blowing his nose on the ball, or bringing anything up from back of the last molar for the problem to be solved, not only for the batsman, but for those fans who happened to be sitting in its path when it was fouled into the stands. It might even bring more of the ladies out to see a game, for as it stood now, you could not even get a suffragette into the bleachers on a day Baal was pitching, so repugnant was his technique to the fair sex. Even the heartiest of male fans showed signs of squeamishness pocketing a foul tip to bring home as a souvenir to the kiddies. But Spit himself only chuckled (he was a mild, mild man, until they destroyed him). “When I go to a tea party, I will be all good manners and curtsy goodbye at the door, I can assure you of that. But as I am facin’ two hundred pounds of gristle wavin’ a stick what wants to drive the ball back down my gullet, why then, I will use the wax out of my ears, if I has to.”

  It was not a remark designed to placate his enemies. In fact, the discovery that he had used earwax on a ball in the 1902 World Series caused the controversy to spread beyond the baseball world; owners who had come to consider wetting the ball a part of the game—and Spit a gifted eccentric who would have his day and pass into obscurity soon enough—became alarmed by the outrage of a public that had seemed on the brink of accepting baseball as the American sport, now that it had grown away from the brutish game, marked by maiming and fisticuffs, played by Spit’s Daddy. The editorialists warned, “If baseball cannot cleanse itself at once of odious and distasteful ways that reek of the barnyard and the back alley, the American people may well look elsewhere—perhaps to the game of tennis, long favored by the French—for a national pastime.” From all sides the pressure mounted, until at the winter meeting of the Patriot League owners in Tri-City, following the World Series of 1902 in which Baal, by his own admission, had waxed a few pitches with some stuff he’d hooked out of his head, the following resolution was passed: “No player shall anoint the ball with any bodily secretions for any purpose whatsoe
ver. Inevitable as it is that droplets of perspiration will adhere to a ball in the course of a game, every effort shall be made by the players and the umpire, to keep the ball dry and free of foreign substances at all times.” And with these words baseball entered its maturity, and became the game to which an entire people would give its heart and soul.

  Spit’s career ended abruptly on the opening day of the 1903 season, when he scandalized the country by an act in such flagrant violation of the laws of human decency, let alone the new resolution passed in Tri-City the previous winter, that he became the first player ever to be banished from baseball—the first deplorable exception to the Patriot League’s honorable record. What happened was this: throwing nothing but bone dry pitches, Spit was tagged for eight hits and five runs by a jeering, caustic Independence team even before he had anyone out in the first inning. The crowd was booing, his own teammates were moaning, and Spit was in a rage. They had ruined him, those dryball bastards! They had passed a law whose purpose was the destruction of no one in the world but himself! A law against him!

  And so before twenty thousand shocked customers—including innocent children—and his own wide-eyed teammates, the once great pitcher, who was washed up anyway, did the unthinkable, the unpardonable, the inexpiable: he dropped the flannel trousers of his uniform to his knees, and proceeded to urinate on the ball, turning it slowly in his hands so as to dampen the entire surface. Then he hitched his trousers back up, and in the way of pitchers, kicked at the ground around the mound with his spikes, churning up, then smoothing down the dirt where he had inadvertently dribbled upon it. To the batter, as frozen in his position as anyone in that ball park, he called, “Here comes the pissball, shithead—get ready!”

  For years afterward they talked about the route that ball took before it passed over the plate. Not only did it make the hairpin turns and somersaults expected of a Baal spitter, but legend has it that it shifted gears four times, halving, then doubling its velocity each fifteen feet it traveled. And in the end, the catcher, in his squat, did not even have to move his glove from where it too was frozen as a target. Gagging, he caught the ball with a squish, right in the center of the strike zone.

  “Stree-ike!” Baal called down to the voiceless umpire, and then he turned and walked off the mound and through the dugout and right on out of the park. They banished him only minutes afterward, but (not unlike the great Gamesh thirty years later) he was already on the streetcar by then, still wearing his uniform and spikes, and by nightfall he was asleep in a boxcar headed for the Rio Grande, his old stinking glove his pillow and his only pal. When he finally jumped from the train he was in Central America.

  There he founded that aboriginal ancestor of Latin American baseball, the hapless Mosquito Coast League of Nicaragua—if you could call it a league, where the players drifted from one club to another for no reason other than whim, and entire teams were known to disappear from a town between games of a doubleheader, never to be seen again. The Nicaraguan youths that Spit Baal recruited for his league had no local games of their own comparable in complexity and duration, and few were ever really able to maintain concentration through an afternoon of play in that heat. But they accepted without question that you could rub anything you wanted on a ball before pitching it, and in fact took to the spitball much the way American children take to the garden hose in summertime. Down in the Mosquito Coast League, Spit’s native boys played just the sort of disgusting, slimy, unhygienic game that his own countrymen had so wholeheartedly rejected by passing the resolution against a wet or a waxed baseball. The few Americans who drifted to Nicaragua to play were sailors who had jumped ship, and assorted nuts and desperadoes in flight from a sane and decent society; occasionally an unemployed spitballer would come crawling out of the jungle swamp and onto the playing field, in search of a home. Carried from village to village on mules, sleeping in filth with the hogs and the chickens, or in hovels with toothless Indians, these men quickly lost whatever dignity they may once have had as ballplayers and human beings; and then, to further compromise themselves and the great game of baseball, they took to drinking a wretched sort of raisin wine between innings, which altered the pace of the game immeasurably. But the water tasted of rats and algae, and center field in the dry season in Guatemala is as hot as center field must be in Hell—catch nine innings in Nicaragua in the summer, and you’ll drink anything that isn’t out-and-out poison. Which is just what the water was. They used it only to bathe their burning feet. Indian women hung around the foul lines, and for a penny in the local currency could be hired for an afternoon to wash a player’s toes and pour a bucketful of the fetid stuff over his head when he stepped up to bat. Eventually these waterwomen came to share the benches with the players, who fondled and squeezed them practically at will, and it was not unusual for such a woman to attach herself to a team, and travel with them for a whole season.

  Because the pitchers—whose life was no bed of roses down there—rinsed their mouths with raisin wine even while out on the mound, going to the jug as often as a civilized pitcher goes to the resin bag, in a matter of innings the ball came to look as though it had been dipped in blood; the bat too would turn a deep scarlet from contact with the discolored ball and the sticky, sopping uniforms—numeraled serapes, really—of the players. The clean white stitched ball that is the very emblem of the game as played in our major leagues, was replaced in the Mosquito Coast League with a ball so darkly stained that if you were on the sidelines peering through the shimmering waves of the heat, you might have thought the two teams were playing with a wad of tar or a turd.

  Into this life Big John Baal was born, the bastard offspring of the only pitcher ever to dare to throw a pissball in a major league ball park, and a half-breed who earned a few coins from the players in the on-deck circle by pouring Central American water over their ears and their ankles. By the time Juanito was two or three seasons old, his father no longer even remembered which of the dozens of waterwomen around the league had mothered his little son—to him they all looked the same, dirty, dark, and dumb, but at least they were a step up from the livestock with whom his battery-mate found happiness. A major leaguer had to draw the line somewhere, and Spit drew it at goats. When the child asked him “Mamma? Madre?” Spit wouldn’t even bother to wrack his brain (in that heat wracking your brain could bring on the vertigo) but pointed to whichever one happened to be rolling in the dust with the reliever down in the bullpen (where, on some days, there was even a young snarling bull). By the age of eighteen months, John was already big and strong enough to hold a green banana in his ten fat fingers and swing at the pebbles that the native-born players liked to throw at the manager’s little boy when his father happened not to be around; and when a few years later he was able to swing a regulation bat, the child was taught by his father the secret to hitting the spitter. John shortly became so adept at connecting with the scarlet spitball (or spicball, as the disillusioned and drunken expatriates sneeringly called it among themselves) that by the time he was old enough to leave Nicaragua to go out and take his vengeance on the world, it was like nothing for him to lay into a ball that was both white and dry. Oh, what an immortal he might have been, if only he did not have the morals of someone raised in the primordial slime! Oh, if only he had not come North with a heartful of contempt for the league that had banished his dad, and the republic for which it stood!

  * * *

  “Batting fourth for the Mundys, the catcher, No. 37, HOT PTAH. PTAH.”

  Hothead, or Hot (for short) Ptah (TR, BR, 5′10″, 180 lbs.), far and away the most irritating player in baseball, and the Mundy most despised by the other teams, despite the physical handicap which might otherwise have enlisted their sympathies. Probably his disposition had to do with his not having one of his legs, though his mother back in Kansas maintained that he had always been crabby, even when he’d had both. To the wartime fans, Hot was more a source of amusement than anything else, and they probably got more of a kick out
of his angry outbursts than from the foibles and eccentricities of any other Mundy. However, those who had to stand at the plate and listen to that one-legged chatterbox curse and insult them, didn’t take to it too well, try as they might. “Okay, Hot, so you ain’t got all your legs, that ain’t my fault.” But he would just keep buzzing like a fly on a windowpane—until all at once the batter would whirl around to the umpire, his eyes welling with tears. “Do you hear that! Did you hear what he just said! Why don’t you do something about it!” “O-kay, what’d he say now?” the ump would ask, for Hot had a way of pouring the venom directly into the hitter’s ear, leaving the umpire out of it entirely. “What’d he sag? A lot of unkind words about my mother bein’ intimate with niggers down in the south, that’s what!” “Now you listen here, Ptah—” But by this time Hot would have ripped off his mask and started in pounding it on the plate, till you expected one or the other to be smashed to smithereens—or else he would just hammer with his hand and his glove on his chest protector, like a gorilla in a baseball suit, howling all the while about his “freedom of speech.” Hot could go into the craziest song and dance ever seen on a ball field (or anywhere, including the Supreme Court of the United States) about the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the Declaration of Independence, the Monroe Doctrine, the Emancipation Proclamation, even the League of Nations, in order to defend his right to say what he did into some poor southern boy’s ear. “I know you,” Hot would whisper to the batter, starting off low and slow, “and your whole damn family and I know your mother…” And then he had the gall to defend himself with the First Amendment. And a hundred more things that most umpires had never even heard of, but that Hot had studied up on in the legal books that he lugged around with him in his suitcase from one hotel to the next. He slept with those damn books … but then what else could he sleep with, poor gimp that he was? “The Wagner Act! The Sherman Antitrust Act! Carter versus Carter Coal! Gompers versus Buck Stove! The Federal Reserve Act, damn it! And what about the Dred Scott decision? Don’t that count for nothing in this country no more? Gosh damn!” And here, having baffled and confused everyone involved, having set the fans to roaring with laughter in the stands (which only burned him up more) he would go hobbling back behind the plate, and the umpire would call for play to be resumed. After all, not being lawyers by profession, the umpires could not be expected to know if what Hot was saying made any sense, and so rather than get into a legal harangue that might end up in the courtroom with a litigious catcher like this son of a bitch, they preferred to respect his so-called freedom of speech, rather than send him to the showers. And besides, if he didn’t catch for the Mundys, who would—a guy with no legs?