Book Review: Pinch Hitting
PINCH HITTING BY MORRIS HOFFMAN
“Baseball is like life, but is life like baseball?”
Summary: Two great baseball writers come together in one and don’t write about baseball.
Synopsis: Harold Fungo is not, particularly, a name that will stick with you unless you already know something about baseball. Which is fine, because Harold Fungo, the person, is not, at first, the sort of person who is going to stick out in a crowd. He’s a janitor at a minor league baseball park somewhere in the mid-west. It’s not a particularly good park nor is it home to a particularly good team, but all that is about to change because Harold Fungo can hit a baseball. Every time. A fact which is just waiting for the team to discover and launch Harold’s baseball career.
Partly this is due to the hours and hours he spent hitting a ball up against the side of his home as a kid, occasionally interrupted by his deaf mother telling him not to hit it out of the yard. The only other activity Harold engages in as a child, is reading, or being read to from, the extensive library of books his mother has collected. Harold’s background is complicated and he has no aspirations to play baseball. He only invests so much time in ping-ponging the ball off the house because there is little else he is allowed to, or wants to, do. He’s never been to school, he doesn’t know who his father is, what his last name is, or even how old he is. When his house burns down with his mother in it, Harold falls in with the firefighters who come to extinguish the blaze and his life opens up a bit more. He discovers a dog and a boy and takes up residence in the firehouse for a time. But he still isn’t much of anything. Just a really nice guy with a huge base of knowledge thanks to his eidetic memory and not much actual experience of life.
Which is okay, because he doesn’t actually exist. He is a figment of the brain of Joe Skelton and Joe is dying of brain cancer. Something about the progress of the disease is triggering sleep talk that illuminates the story of Harold Fungo which Joe’s dutiful wife Katherine writes down and records every night. What the source is, how Joe knows these things, and why Joe is stringing it all together into a story is a complete unknown, but, as Joe slowly begins dying, the story of Harold unfolds. As does the story of the kind of life Joe has lead. Quiet, unassuming, reserved, and filled with not much more than his love of Katherine and the desire to avoid as much other human contact as he can. Joe is, in many ways, the polar opposite of Harold. Half the fun of the novel is finding out how these two have come to be so entangled in one another.
Review: When it comes to writing about baseball there were, generally speaking, two acknowledged masters of two different types of baseball writing.
The first was Roger Angell who wrote about the game as it was played for much of his sportswriting career. His perspective was often that of an eager and interested fan seated somewhere in the stands watching the game play out in front of him. The gift of his writing was being able to put the reader in the seat right next to him so that not only could you read the real facts about the game as it was played, you could feel the game being played around you and what it was really like to be there watching it. Angell’s personal insights on the game and it’s players became your personal insights. He made lovers of baseball out of people who had never even seen the game played just with his writing alone. He spanned the modern era of baseball, from 1962 to his passing in 2022 during which time he took interest in every aspect of the game and brought them to the reader. There were few others who wrote about the real game the way it was really played so well and so eloquently.
The second luminary in the field wrote about baseball a different way. W. P. Kinsella didn’t write about the actual game as it was so much as the game as it existed in the imaginations of its millions of fans. If you’ve seen the film Field of Dreams or read the book it was based on, Shoeless Joe you will immediately grasp what I mean. Kinsella wrote the book and had a hand in writing the movie. There isn’t a bit of real baseball in either of them, but they feel exactly like the sort of baseball things that could and should happen. They are what baseball was like in your head, the ideal mix of magic and skill and represented what it felt like to play without actually being what baseball is, if you see what I mean.
And so we come to Morris Hoffman and Pinch Hitting. A book which, much to my surprise and delight, manages to combine both Angell and Kinsella into one story. And then gives us something which is more than the sum of its parts.
I presume it was done with a great deal of study of the works of both writers. Chapters often close with quotes from Angell’s writing that don’t actually exist because he never wrote them, yet they are pitch perfect replicas, containing all the tone, style, and heart of Angell’s real works. And the story itself is so quintessentially Kinsella that you could be forgiven for thinking it was some lost manuscript of his which Hoffman was asked to complete.
Yet, the story is entirely Hoffman’s. A masterfully handled tale, not of baseball, but of a man dying of cancer told through the lens of baseball. Joe doesn’t know why he has this story, doesn’t know what it means or where it all comes from, has never had a huge interest in baseball, nor been privy to the inner workings of minor league teams, firehouses, or anything else that comes up in this tale about the run to the end of his own life. His wife Katherine keeps pressing him for answers, but he has none. He just has the story which slips from between his lips every night while he sleeps.
In many ways it reminds me of Kinsella’s The Iowa Baseball Confederacy, Joe’s strange knowledge of Fungo’s career echoing Gideon’s unexplained knowledge of an entire minor league and all its players which no one else will acknowledge exists as told in that novel. But Hoffman and Pinch Hitting, whose ending you will not see coming, has drawn a life that is more important than the imaginings of the man telling us about it. This is not really a baseball book. It’s an examination of Joe Skelton’s life right to the very end of it.
It’s low-key and rhythmic, pacing out Joe’s life and the beauty of it that has, to a large extent, been hidden from Joe himself. It draws characters to fill that life with color and a style all their own so that each one contributes their part to the whole big picture of who Joe is and what he means. But it never becomes maudlin and never feels as if Hoffman is trying to force a particular feeling on to you. Pinch Hitting just tells its story the best way it knows how and lets you feel what you feel naturally as would anyone who lived a life with or near Joe.
Oh, and just in case you have Joe-like levels of baseball knowledge, pinch hitting is when another player comes to the plate to hit for the scheduled batter, either because the scheduled batter isn’t very good, or because the pinch hitter offers some particular advantage against a particular pitcher. And, as the story of Harold and Joe comes to what can only be an inevitable end, you’re forced to consider: If baseball is a metaphor for life, what is life a metaphor for?