Thursday
As excited as I am for Washington’s long suffering baseball fans now that they finally have something to cheer about, I have one disappointment over this year’s world series match-up. I wish they were playing the Yankees.
I say this even though I’m not a Yankee fan and have nothing against the Houston Astros. But a Washington-New York match-up would have given me an excuse to reflect upon the Faustus story as applied to baseball.
I have in mind, of course, the musical Damn Yankees, where a Washington fan sells his soul to the devil to ensure the success of his team. The team at the time was the Senators, and in those days they were in the same conference as the Yankees (otherwise they would never have met). When the musical appeared in 1955, the Senators had spent decades mired in mediocrity whereas the Yankees won the pennant, along with the world series, almost every year.
Just because we don’t have a Washington-New York match-up, however, doesn’t mean that I can’t write about frustrated fans fantasizing about doing whatever it takes to land a championship. In their dreams they may even imagine themselves as the player who makes it possible.
That’s the plot of Damn Yankees. Aging real estate agent Joe Boyd makes a deal with the devil to leave his wife and become Joe Hardy, a young slugger that the Senators desperately need. He include an escapes clause in his soul-selling contract, however: if he walks away from the team before 9 pm on the night before the end of the season, he returns to his old self, and also to his former life and wife. Otherwise, he is Joe Hardy until he dies, at which point (if we go by Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus) he will be dragged screaming off to hell.
Because it’s a Broadway musical, perhaps we shouldn’t expect to learn anything profound about the cost of soul-selling, and in fact we don’t. With the pennant on the line, Joy Hardy pulls out of the contract at the last moment. Then, since he happens to be at the plate at the time, somehow he manages to hit the pennant-clinching home run as Joe Boyd. Now there’s a fantasy for you
Watching the amazing pitchers in this world series, I can say for certain that there’s no way Boyd even touches a pitch thrown by a major leaguer, much less hits it out of the park. The fantasy—that you can have what you sold your soul to get without giving up your soul—pretty much makes a mockery of the Faustus story. It could just as well have been written by the devil.
If you want fiction that accurately captures soul-selling in baseball, read Bernard Malamud’s The Natural. And don’t go by the movie, which changes Malamud’s ending to match Damn Yankees.
Here’s what soul-selling really looks like in athletics: Using performance enhancing drugs. Letting fame so get to your head that you forget the love of the game. Forgetting what really matters in life. Putting profits from China sales ahead of human rights. Ignoring domestic violence history to get a good player. Thinking that winning is the only thing and that you should use any means necessary to get there.
The great Faust stories teach us that everything looks cheap when set against the soul. Even a championship.
With that said, Go Nats.
