author Jerry Gabriel
Sports Saturday
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My creative writing colleague Jerry Gabriel has just published Drowned Boy (Sarabande Books, 2010), a collection of his short stories that won the 2008 Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction. To celebrate the start of Major League Baseball’s spring training this past week, I am sharing here some excerpts from “The Slump.” Jerry says the story was inspired by, among other things, the strange case of Steve Sax, an all-star second baseman for the Los Angeles Dodgers who one season lost the ability to make the routine throw to first base.
Sax would go on to commit 30 errors that year, and the infirmity would become known as the Steve Sax disease. Although Sax recovered, another all-star player, Chuck Knoblauch of the Yankees, later developed the same problem and ultimately had to move to the outfield.
Jerry’s story is narrated by a high school shop teacher and umpire in the local youth league who watches a gifted player enter such a slump. Only in this story, the narrator comes to conclude that the slump is actually faked. Here’s how the story begins:
Brookwater’s first error was impossible to forget. It came in the bottom of the seventh against Kentucky Fried Chicken—and they only had seven innings at this level. With the score at 3-4, and Rotary winning, KFC, the visiting team, had one last go at it. They had base- runners on second and third and the top of their order at the plate. With a 2-2 count, the pitcher—a boy named González—threw a fastball strike, a meaty pitch, and the ball came off the bat with a piercing crack. He had gotten all there was to get of it, and it went straight up the middle, nearly taking out the pitcher, scudding hard overtop second base.
It surprised no one when the diving body of Sherman Brookwater disappeared into a cloud of dust behind second base and an instant later sprung upright with the ball transferring from glove to right hand. In nearly one motion, he looked back at the base runner on third, and then took the step toward first to make the out, the boy who had hit the ball not even halfway to first. But then something happened. Brookwater released the ball too late, and it flew past the first basemen wide to the left—fifteen, maybe twenty feet wide. A very long moment of disbelief fell among those watching, a real quiet spreading over the place.
And then it became a foot race. Rotary’s first baseman, a kid easily thirty pounds overweight, turned to where the ball had gone and threw down his glove and started out after it; if Brookwater had run after it himself, he might have gotten there sooner. The base runner on third scored easily to tie the game, and the one on second came rounding third for home, his coach jumping up and down, swinging his arm in mad circles like some human haywire timepiece. Through all of this, Brookwater stood where he had just seconds before made the errant toss. You could see it drain from him, whatever it was that had made him stand out. He watched as the first baseman finally reached the ball and turned to throw it home. He stood, impassive, holding his glove strangely at his side; it seemed not to contain a hand at all anymore, but some maimed limb.
All of the stories in The Drowned Boy are set in blue collar Ohio, and the narrator, a lover of the game, is aghast when he discovers the slump is manufactured. It goes against everything that he holds sacred. He can’t believe that the boy continues to hold his head up, that his father continues to support him, that the community isn’t as shaken as he himself is. We start to realize that the story is as much about him as it is about Brookwater.
Then he develops a theory about the slump. If Brookwater sheds the label “baseball star,” he can redefine himself as a student. His shift helps him escape the town that has trapped those around him (including perhaps the teacher). He begins to get A’s in all of his classes and is admitted to a state university.
We aren’t certain that he has deliberately manufactured the slump, however. Near the end of the story the narrator, while supervising a gym class, happens to see Brookwater execute a dazzling play of the sort that he once made routinely. When he accuses Brookwater of having manufactured the slump, however, the boy appears not to know what he is talking about. The narrator may be mistaken.
Whatever the explanation, the story ends with Brookwater accomplishing an escape that may be a metaphor for his ability to slip free of the town’s hold on him. Here’s the final paragraph:
I walked along the top row of the stadium and leaned against its back wall and watched as he walked around the track, that unmistakable and graceful gait that had persisted through adolescence. When he got to the gate, he started to squeeze through the small opening where the chain locking the two bars together wasn’t quite taut. He threw his books onto the concrete sidewalk on the other side, and then stuck his right foot through, and for a moment, he had his feet pointing in opposite directions, like the figures in Egyptian paintings. He turned his head to the side then, so that he could fit it through, and then slowly he moved it past the bars. Finally, he pulled his other leg through, and reached down and picked up his books, and began walking up Mulberry Street. And just as he was just about to disappear, I wasn’t thinking about where he would be going. I was wondering how he had gotten through that damn gate.
In her forward to the book, author Andrea Barrett says that Jerry’s fictional world calls to mind poet Philip Levine and short story writer Raymond Carver. Both write about people from this milieu, and Jerry further resembles Carver in the understated way that he captures the small twists and turns of everyday life. Tragedy and comedy mingle quietly and we must pay close attention lest they pass beneath our notice.
The rhythms of baseball are a major part of small town life. I can testify to this as my two older sons participated in the Southern Maryland youth leagues. Although they played for a high school adjacent to a trailer park, which prompted visiting opponents to jeer them as “trailer trash,” Justin and Darien were the sons of a college professor and therefore had fairly automatic tickets out of the area. Jerry captures the lives of people who have to find other ways to escape.
