Bottom of the ninth

John McNally’s baseball anthology profiles a dreamer’s game.

John McNally’s anthology contains atypical stories.

n the dusky hues of late afternoons in the parks where the summer rite is celebrated, time itself seems suspended. As boys frolic on fields of emerald, light, and shadow, bystanders wander and drift into meditation.

Such is the magic of baseball. It is the only team sport played without a clock, and any game that theoretically could go on forever appeals to dreamers. As its drama plays out, a ballgame can become a metaphor of life’s moments building to a conclusive ending—the sum of subtle and spectacular accomplishments and failures; of chances made the best of or mishandled; of choices, wise and poor; of gestures, grand or indecent; of hope, despair, courage, cowardice, and the eternal promise of redemption.

Small wonder, then, that of all sports, baseball appeals most to fiction writers, regardless of their own interest in the game. John McNally, an assistant professor of English who is in his second year at Wake Forest, has collected some of the best baseball stories of recent vintage in an anthology published this year by Southern Illinois University Press.

Titled Bottom of the Ninth: Great Contemporary Baseball Short Stories, the collection features nineteen works by esteemed and emerging writers alike, including Andre Dubus, Patricia Highsmith, Ron Carlson, Cris Mazza, Ray Gonzalez, Leslie Pietrzyk, and Owen King. Drawing upon the same dramatic elements that attract people to the sport itself, the stories focus on characters that face calls to action when the game is on the line, literally and figuratively.

“[B]aseball is a dreamer’s game,” writes McNally in the book’s introduction, “and in the hands of a talented dreamer-writer [who] understands the nature of cause and effect and the difference between genuine sentiment and sentimentality, baseball’s themes transcend the obvious and force us … to see the world anew.”

A native of Burbank, Illinois, McNally, 37, received a B.A. degree from Southern Illinois, an M.F.A. degree from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa, and a Ph.D. in English from the University of Nebraska. Wake Forest is his first tenure-track appointment, having served as a visiting writer, professor, and lecturer at a host of institutions since launching his academic career in 1989.

The author of more than thirty published short stories of his own--eleven of them contained in a collection titled Troublemakers--McNally has edited three other short-story anthologies: Humor Me: An Anthology of Humor by Writers of Color; The Student Body: Short Stories about College Students and Professors; and High Infidelity: 24 Great Short Stories about Adultery. He took time from a busy summer to respond to an e-mail interview:

Q: Talk a bit, please, about your first anthology, Troublemakers--what it’s about, and how it evolved and developed.

A: I’ve been writing short stories consistently since 1984 and publishing them in magazines since 1989. By the time I had compiled Troublemakers, I’d written nearly fifty stories and had published about twenty. So Troublemakers was a compilation of what I thought was my strongest work up to that point. Most of the stories are about working class men, or boys from working class backgrounds, who are either troublemakers themselves or friends of troublemakers. Despite the overarching darkness of a lot of the stories, I hope that there’s humor in them as well.

Q: How did you develop the first three anthologies of other writers’ work that you edited?

A: The first one, High Infidelity, came about because I was writing a novel and found myself stuck. I’d taken the semester off and didn’t want to waste it, so I called my agent and asked how one goes about putting together a proposal for an anthology. I collect books and love old anthologies, so it was a genre of book that I wanted to contribute something to. I put together a proposal of stories about adultery, and my agent sold it a month later to William Morrow. It all happened very fast. I was under the delusion that every anthology idea would get snapped up, but I soon found out that I was wrong. My ext proposal didn’t sell. The third one--The Student Body--took two years to place, but once I showed it to a university press, it got snapped up. My fourth idea didn’t sell. The fifth idea--Humor Me--I pitched verbally to the publisher at University of Iowa Press. They had done a fabulous job with Troublemakers, and I really wanted to work with them again. Bottom of the Ninth was offered to me by the baseball series editor at SIU Press. He knew I had done several anthologies, and the person who was going to edit it baled. As such, the experience of editing this book was different since it wasn’t a subject I had proposed.

Q: Why compile anthologies with overarching themes? Is one of the goals to provide greater depth and breadth of insight into a subject area through the reading of several different approaches to it?

A: Yes, I would agree with that. And for most of the anthologies, my goal was to reach a general audience with what I hoped was an entertaining, interesting theme. But part of the anthologist’s agendas is to find subjects, themes, whatever that haven’t been collected together before. Now, you can take this to an extreme and say, ‘Well, there hasn’t been an anthology of stories that feature the telephone, so I’m going to compile an anthology of stories about the telephone.’ I’m sure there’s a market of a hundred or so people who might buy such a book, and you might be able to find ten of those people. My first anthology was about adultery. I wanted to compile a book that didn’t judge the act. I wanted the stories, as a whole, to show the complexity of human behavior (which is what I believe most good stories do). I wanted to illuminate ambiguity. More so that any of my subsequent anthologies, High Infidelity tapped a wide audience with feature reviews in People, the New York Post, the New York Observer, and other places. Of course, part of that was timing: a lot of celebrities were in the news for their affairs, and the paperback release coincided with the Monica Lewinsky-Bill Clinton scandal. What began, for me, as a collection of stories that, as you put it, provided greater depth and breadth of insight in a subject became something larger--and more superficial--when places like Entertainment Weekly began calling me to ask what I thought about Bill and Monica. And so in my attempt to illuminate the ambiguity of adultery, I became, very briefly, a media spokesman on the subject, reduced to unambiguous sound bites. So much for art.

Q: In Humor Me, did the writers of color all write about issues of direct relevance to the African-American experience, or do their subjects transcend skin color?

A: I edited Humor Me after I had taught a course on the history of humor in American literature, and I couldn’t find anthologies of humor by writers of color. In fact, I found maybe one anthology that included minority voices at all. Unlike my other anthologies, I wanted to help plug a huge gap in the documentation of American lit. It’s a tiny book, and I may have tackled more than I could handle, but I had hoped it would be a start. While I was compiling this book, Norton released a huge anthology of humor by African-American women titled Honey, Hush. And I was pleased to see that a young writer has sold a proposal to edit another anthology of humor by writers of color. So it’s a start.

Q: You talk about baseball as a dreamer’s game. What, in you mind, is a dreamer. Are you a dreamer?

A: As [Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist and screenwriter] Richard Russo mentions in his preface to the book, baseball is a leisurely paced game. It’s hard to imagine football, with its short, intense plays, as being a game for dreamers. Ultimately there’s something very magical about baseball that you don’t see in other sports. W.P. Kinsella probably captured it best in his stories and novels about baseball games that might possibly never end (a game goes into at least 1,700 innings in “The Iowa Baseball Confederacy”) or in his books in which baseball and history intersect (“Shoeless Joe” [basis of the film Field of Dreams--ed.] being the best example, in which a farmer, who’s also a dreamer, conjures Shoeless Joe Jackson). A dreamer is, I suppose, someone who believes that anything is possible. Can a baseball game never end? Sure; it’s possible. Can a farmer conjure Shoeless Joe Jackson after turning his cornfield into a baseball diamond? Sure. Can an ordinary person play baseball with one of the all-time greats? Sure; if you have enough money. Are there fantasy camps for any sport other than baseball? I don’t know too many people willing to go head-to-head with even a geriatric Mean Joe Green or Dick Butkus. Am I a dreamer? I think all fiction writers are dreamers. Given the overwhelming odds against writers in getting published or, if published, getting read, it would be hard not to be a dreamer.

Q: Describe, please, your process of selecting stories for Bottom of the Ninth.

A: I ran calls for submissions in two publications: Poets & Writers and AWP Chronicle. I made lists of stories I knew, searched collections by writers who don’t primarily write baseball stories (Ron Carlson, Andre Dubus, etc.), asked friends for suggestions, and consulted lists of stories in bibliographies. From this, I began reading and compiling. I also consulted other baseball fiction anthologies so that I didn’t overlap with those books. T.C. Boyle has a great story, but it’s in nearly every baseball fiction anthology. Once I put together my ‘wish list,’ I then began seeing what I could afford. My budget was tiny, so I had to let some stories go. One thing the average reader doesn’t realize is that an anthologist is often limited by how much money he or she has to spend on permission fees. People will inevitably ask, ‘Why didn’t you include this story or that story?’ and often it has to do with money. Fortunately, I worked with a number of authors directly on this book, and authors tend to be far more generous than agents or publishers. They just want to get their work out there.

Q: Some readers might be surprised to see Patricia Highsmith’s name among the authors. She’s better known for dark thrillers like “Strangers on a Train” and “The Talented Mr. Ripley,” and baseball would seem a bit “out of the ballpark” of her principal genre. Can you talk a little bit about her story?

A: I like the idea of finding atypical stories for an anthology. That’s part of the anthologist’s task--finding fifteen to twenty-five stories that approach the subject from different angles. I had seen a list of baseball stories that mentioned the Highsmith story and mentioned that it had not been anthologized, and so I checked it out. It’s a trademark Highsmith story in terms of menace; you feel the narrator begin to unravel from having to listen to (and being assaulted by) these thuggish amateur baseball players. But you’re right” Highsmith isn’t a name that comes immediately to mind when you think baseball.

Q: What are you working on now? Are any of your own short stories or novels, or perhaps another anthology, in the works?

A: My next book is a novel titled The Book of Ralph. It will be released in March by The Free Press, a division of Simon and Schuster. I’m under contract with The Free Press for another novel, so that’s what I’m working on right now. I’m not far enough into the book to say much about it because I don’t know much about it myself. I’m taking a break from anthologies, too, though I’m piecing together a textbook on writing which would include a selection of stories--a mini-anthology. I have another idea for an anthology, but I want to take a different approach to this one and compile it over a period of years. And I’ll publish it only if I get enough money to include every story that I want in it.
-— By David Fyten

Bottom of the Ninth: Great Contemporary Baseball Short Stories, is available at Barnes and Noble Booksellers.

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