Day 83: The Entitled

Today marks my fifth day in a row of posting a picture and writing a short review of a book I read. I used a tripod to take today’s picture outside a physician’s office in Linwood NJ while waiting for my daughter to finish her appointment. 

Frank Deford’s The Entitled is a book I read at least a dozen years ago. When I first became a regular NPR listener in 1989, Deford had a weekly opinion piece about some aspect of sports, with his most common topic being his dislike of soccer. He was one of several writers who appeared weekly throughout the 90s; others included the often surreal poet Andrew Codrescu, cowboy poet and large animal veterinarian Baxter Black, children’s author (and surrealist) Daniel Pinkwater, as well as writer Bailey White who had a thanksgiving story every year for many years. Deford and Black are no longer with us.

But, about the novel, The Entitled. It is the story of Howie Traveler, a man in his mid fifties who, after many years in baseball’s minor leagues is given a short contract with the major league team the Cleveland Indians which he hopes to extend by having a winning season. I do have a certain passion for baseball and end up reading three or four novels or nonfiction books on the topic every year. The plot is about Traveler and his superstar player, Jay Alcazar (the entitled one) and their complicated relationship. The novel is short, more of a novella than a novel, but it is filled with details about how much Traveler’s family has suffered because of the time and travel his work demands. I think what I like most about the novel is that it has heart; Deford had been writing about sports for many years before he wrote this book and one can see that he has thought deeply about the issues here. The main plot point involves what may or not be a crime, but what makes the book better than most sports novels is the ambiguity of wondering who’s story you can or cannot trust. 

The book is not without its flaws: the timeline switches, sometimes confusingly, between past and present, and the dialogue is often less than inspired. I can think of baseball novels that are much better such as David James Duncan’s The Brothers K, W P Kinsella’s The Iowa Baseball Confederacy, Chad Harbach’s The Art of Fielding, or Emily Nemen’s The Cactus League. Still, I felt a kinship with Howie Traveler and continue to fondly remember Deford’s book more than a decade after I finished it.

Baseball is a largely American sport that was a complete mystery to my students in Poland. They could never quite understand the idea that the ball is not needed to score. But then again, consider what Mark Leyner once said about baseball:

When you are a child, you often stare too closely at the wrong thing. I remember the first time I was taken to Yankee Stadium. Someone had spilled something sweet earlier in the day and the ground was covered with ants. I spent the whole game staring at the ants, and that was more fascinating than the game.

Do you have a favorite sports book?