I've never managed to cultivate an interest in baseball, but I often enjoy baseball writing. I finally sat down with Paul Auster's baseball-themed noir novel, Squeeze Play. It was his first novel, supposedly written for money, and published under the name Paul Benjamin. It includes very little baseball and few glimpses of Auster-prose. It's a surprisingly straight-ahead pulpy noir with dames and toughs, punches and sarcastic quips.
The summer before the pandemic Crystal's parents took us to a Twins game. The appeal of baseball was clearer to me in the stadium than it is to me on TV. The most impressive moment, though, was entering the stadium. Auster captures it precisely:
Walking into a major league stadium is like no other experience in the world. You've been in the subway, crowded into narrow spaces, surrounded by metal and machinery, and then you've gotten out to find yourself in yet another landscape of bricks, stones, and urban blight. You've circled the stadium with a few thousand other people looking for the right gate, given your ticket to a guy in a uniform, gone through the turnstile, and entered the gloom of bare concrete tunnels, echoing voices, and jostling bodies. It makes you feel you've come all this way just to become part of a dream sequence in a Fellini movie.Paul Benjamin, Squeeze Play (1982) p. 181.
But then you walk up the ramp, and there it is. It's almost impossible to take it all in at once. The sudden sense of space is so powerful that for the first few moments you don't know where you are. Everything has become so vast, so green, so perfectly ordered, it's as if you've stepped into the formal garden of a giant's castle.
