The Whole Juxt: From Underworld to Another World
The Whole Juxt: From Underworld to Another World
Eugene McMahon
“He speaks in your voice, American” [1]
He does not, in fact, speak in my voice. But it is spoken in my language, because I am English. This is my language, or so I’d thought.
It’s 1997 and I’m in my mid-thirties, a lawyer, a lifelong soccer fan, and a lover of books. I’m sitting at home in London reading the Prologue to Underworld. I’m no stranger to Don DeLillo, and the reviews have trailed this as his Big One, maybe even the Great American Novel. So although I know nothing about baseball, I can sense that DeLillo’s choice to set this breathtaking opening passage at the Polo Grounds in 1951, to make baseball fundamental to this big book’s plot, must surely be significant.
But while the prose dazzles me, I find the baseball references impenetrable:
“One out, last of the ninth”.
“Mueller sees a fastball belt-high and pokes a single to right”.
Unremarkable phrases to an American, no doubt, but imagine being a reader who knows these words have meaning yet cannot comprehend them. This is a language I simply don’t understand. No matter: I’m thrilled by the writing, the dialogue, the wisdom, and the sense that things of deep importance about a nation are being revealed to me.
This, then, is the moment baseball first lodges itself in my subconscious. Underworld plants within me the notion that baseball is a signifier, bears some kind of mystique, is encoded with symbolism about the American experience. That much is apparent, if only vaguely understood. But what I cannot possibly know in 1997 is that baseball will one day enter my life, enrich my world, and offer me comfort in challenging times.
“The knuckleball is groovy and still I can’t get into a game” [2]
It’s March 2017. Twenty years have passed since I first read Underworld and now Jim Bouton’s Ball Four is in my lap. Baseball is still a complete blank to me, so how did this happen? Blame the internet. I’ve recently been down a reading rabbit hole that began with Tom Wolfe’s The New Journalism, after which Amazon’s you-might-also-like algorithm offers me Bouton’s book. The thumbnail shows a cool-looking picture of a 1960s baseball player on the cover plus a critic’s quote saying this is a book “deep in the American vein.” That sounds intriguing, so I add it to my basket; in hindsight, this mouse click is a life-altering action. On delivery, I find the book so engaging, such a fun read, that it doesn’t seem to matter that I often have little idea what Bouton is talking about.
But by the final page I’ve developed a craving to see a game of baseball actually being played. I need to be able to visualize the things I’ve been reading about but not comprehending: the diamond, the mound, a soft grounder up the middle, a knuckleball. Google tells me that they show games in the small hours on UK TV; and so, there it is, April 2017, my first glimpse of a game of baseball. Instantly, I’m hooked.
“You know me Al” [3]
True to personality, I dive into baseball headfirst; books are my guide. To help get my bearings, I need some basics. Zack Hample’s Watching Baseball Smarter sets me on the way to making sense of the game as I watch it on TV during the 2017 season. George Vecsey’s Baseball overviews the history, and does a fine job of making me want to know more (and eventually much, much more) about it.
Baseball books quickly become a passion and I consume anything that comes to my attention. My first real inkling of the timeless aspect of baseball – the thing that roots it so firmly in American culture – comes during the winter of 2017/18. I find it in Ring Lardner’s You Know Me Al, the collected letters home of the unreliable narrator White Sox pitcher Jack Keefe. The book dates to 1914, but I’m amazed how the ballplayer concerns filling these fictional letters (contracts, travel expenses, performance anxiety, gripes about management) are identical to those populating Jim Bouton’s real-life diary from 1969. It’s also striking that the language Keefe uses to describe his baseball world feels wholly familiar, even to me, a brand-new consumer of the sport a full century later.
So Lardner’s ancient yet modern humor sparks in me a flash of deepened understanding. Time passes, yet baseball endures.
“The final game of the season, the last tick on the great summerlong hundred-and-sixty-two-game clock”[4]
The 2018 season is the first I truly follow day-by-day. Newly alive to baseball’s enduring nature, it’s through Roger Angell that I come to appreciate how each season embodies a fresh cycle of life, from the bright-eyed optimism of spring training through to the last tick of the summerlong clock; then the mournful winter hiatus before it starts over again. I’m beginning to comprehend, and become attuned to, the rhythm of The Life.
As the 2018 season progresses I’m driven to backfill my knowledge of the game, and Angell’s work is a wonderful new discovery: a half-century and more of unparalleled baseball writing to absorb. It’s detailed and educational about individual seasons, notable players, memorable series; yet also brilliantly reflective about baseball in the abstract. (Later, in 2022, I am startled to read a news piece about Angell’s death; it hadn’t occurred to me that he might actually still be with us. My reaction is to feel privileged to have shared even a tiny piece of the sport’s timespan with this great chronicler.)
At the same time, I’m also coming to understand that while each baseball season may represent a full life cycle, each player has his own life-clock: every career begins embryonic, passes through youth and then maturity before entering its elegiac phase as powers finally begin to wane.
The poignancy of the baseball player’s career arc is best revealed to me by fiction, rather than player memoirs: I discover and love Mark Harris’s The Southpaw tetralogy, especially the achingly sad Bang The Drum Slowly. There is resonance too in these stories for me personally since, at this time, I’m experiencing some health issues and beginning to struggle to cope with the late stages of my career as a lawyer. It’s a worrying, disorientating sensation, and I feel strong empathy with the ageing pitcher Henry Wiggens in It Looked Like Forever.
“The exquisite garden of the baseball field without the structure around it would just be a rural meadow”[5]
And so, by the late summer of 2018, baseball is increasingly feeling like a comfort to me: part new passion, part displacement activity. At this point, I make a big decision—it’s time to cross the Atlantic and see real baseball in real America. A rapidly organized road trip takes me through Chicago-Detroit-Cincinnati-Cleveland-Milwaukee for six games in ten days.
Experiencing baseball in the flesh, engaging with its crowds, colors, noises, smells, and myriad quirky traditions is exhilarating; almost a sensory overload after accessing it only through the printed word and television screen. Criss-crossing the country is also eye-opening, my first taste of American life outside major cities. It’s an enriching experience and I embrace the notion of a road trip. I’m no Dean Moriarty but, predictably, I take with me Kerouac’s On the Road and tell myself that all the miles I’m driving are helping me to grasp it better than I could in my teens.
I’m also excited to discover that each stadium has its own unique character, its own special relationship with its city. The literature of ballpark history soon becomes another rich seam to explore. So many fascinating books, but the best of them all, for my money, is Paul Goldberger’s Ballpark: Baseball in the American City. An utter joy.
I return from my trip a newly minted fan of the Milwaukee Brewers and afflicted with an itch to visit all thirty major league ballparks.
“Baseball is too much of a business to be a sport and too much of a sport to be a business” [6]
2020 is of course a tough year for the whole world, and even the baseball season only partially survives COVID. Simultaneously, as health issues persist, I feel my career as a commercial lawyer coming to an abrupt halt – skipping right past the elegiac late-career phase – and I am having to come to terms with that shock to my system.
It’s during this time that I first pick up John Helyar’s Lords of the Realm. I love this lively, comical but authoritative exposition of the decades-long legal, contractual, and personality tussles between baseball’s owners and players. Now, in hindsight, I can see how Helyar’s book was offering me a way to keep feeling connected to the commercial dynamics that had hitherto filled my working life. In any event, during this supremely odd, disconcerting year of 2020, Lords of the Realm becomes (and remains) one of my favorite baseball books.
“Whoever wants to know the heart and mind of America had better learn baseball” [7]
More than that, though, Helyar’s book has a transformative effect on my reading, acting as a kind of gateway drug to broader US history and culture.
My lawyer’s brain first homes in on baseball’s anti-trust exemption. This proves a fertile stepping-off point and, while 2020 moves into 2021, and as the end of my working life becomes a reality, I find myself feverishly tracking down academic articles, court judgments, professorial books. The exemption leads naturally enough to the reserve clause, collusion, Curt Flood. But one issue inevitably raises another and soon it’s not just baseball-focused: my shelves are starting to fill with books on an ever-broadening range of topics. The Revolution; the Constitution; the West; the Gilded Age; political and social history, and much more besides.
Jacques Barzun’s famous aphorism (he too was a foreigner) about coming to know America by learning baseball seems by now to fit me perfectly.
“The whole juxt of my argument” [8]
Underworld’s obsessive baseball memorabilia collector, Marvin Lundy, has an eccentric way with words, but the more we hear from him the better we get his juxt. This, of course, is how language-learning works: through familiarity understanding is born.
In 2025, when I re-read DeLillo’s great Prologue, it’s as if I’ve cracked a code: what was once incomprehensible is now quite clear. And while the American boy leaping the Polo Grounds turnstile still doesn’t speak in my voice, because I’m still English, I have now learnt his language, the language of baseball.
If this started out as a rabbit hole, I’ve long since made it a permanent home. Every day, all summer long, I watch ballgames and listen to radio commentaries. I cross the ocean when I can, and this year I’ll visit my thirtieth major league ballpark. During the winter months, just like you, I count the days until the cycle starts over again.
In short—and incredible as it would have seemed to my 1990s self—I now live a life in which baseball is deeply embedded. I credit baseball for providing me with something solid to lean on as my life wobbled. America has become real to me. These are precious gifts from Don DeLillo and baseball’s wonderful literary tradition. And another small miracle rippling out from the Shot Heard Round the World.
[1] Underworld (1997) by Don DeLillo, p.11
[2] Ball Four (1970) by Jim Bouton, p.172
[3] You Know Me Al (1914) by Ring Lardner
[4] La Vida by Roger Angell, collected in Season Ticket (1988)
[5] Ballpark: Life in the American City (2019)by Paul Goldberger, p.viii
[6] Lords of the Realm (1994) by John Helyar (quoting Phil Wrigley, owner of the Chicago Cubs), p.12
[7] God’s Country and Mine (1954) by Jacques Barzun, p.151
[8] Underworld (1997) by Don DeLillo, p.316
Eugene McMahon lives in London, England. A retired lawyer, and a lifelong fan of English football, he now unexpectedly finds himself a baseball obsessive, ballpark road trip enthusiast and Milwaukee Brewers fan, with an increasing interest in writing about baseball from his non-US perspective.
Andy Lattimer is a gay guy who lives in Southern California. He makes comics, most of which are about baseball. You can read them on his website, andylattimer.com
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