Chain Reading

I bought my copy of this book for 25 cents at the Durham, NC public library book sale in part because of the cover art (I am a sucker for books with great covers) and in part because of the quote on the cover by W.P Kinsella, the author of Shoeless Joe which was made into the excellent movie Field of Dreams, “Simply the best baseball novel ever written”. Although my copy didn’t say so, the book won the 1983 CASEY Award given to the best baseball book of the year.

The novel tells the story of Jackie (Yakov) Kapinski a middle son in a family of immigrant jewelers in New York during the first two decades of the twentieth century. Jackie is unable to convince his parents that playing professional baseball would be an honorable way for him to meet his obligation to provide for his younger brother’s education. He accedes to their wishes and joins the family firm working for Uncle Sid designing rings, brooches and pins. On a western business trip with older brother Eli, Jackie watches his hometown NY Giants play the St. Louis nine on a blistering hot Midwestern afternoon as the Giant pitcher, Christy Mathewson, tosses a no-hitter. Jackie is so impressed with Mathewson and his accomplishment that he designs a beautiful ring to celebrate the rare feat and has it delivered to the ball player. The novel chronicles the long and intense relationship, albeit mostly from a distance, between the pitcher and his chief ‘celebrant’, Jackie Kapinski.

Although the book is clearly a novel since the Kapinski family is fictional, much of the prose is given over to detailed, and apparently highly accurate, play by play reporting on key baseball games for the Giants and Christy Mathewson. And more than simply providing the backdrop for the story, major league baseball is shown as an Americanizing agent for many immigrants; a morality play with multiple heroes and villains; and, in an era before television, a huge entertainment and gambling enterprise for major cities lucky enough to have their own team. Finally the book also reminds us that some things never change. The 1919 Black Sox scandal presages the current struggle major league baseball has with steroids and other performance-enhancing drugs and the buying and selling of teams and players during the early 20th century reminds us of the buying and selling of teams and players we read about today.

If you love your baseball there is much in this novel to capture and hold your attention. Unfortunately, for me, that was not enough to make the novel worth recommending. It obviously took a lot of research and skill to seamlessly weave the details of the no-hitter between the NY Giants and St. Louis on July 15, 1901 into the story but that didn’t help my expectations to connect with the authors’ objectives. I was looking for a story about the immigrant family making good in their new world set against the background of the ‘All American Game’ but what I feel I got was just the opposite, a detailed story of the early days of major league baseball as seen through the eyes of one Jackie Kapinski. In short, much of the novel felt too much like reading the sports page.

I thought the tone of most of the book was curiously melancholy, capturing very little of the joy and ebullience when the hometown team and heroes win a World Series game. This melancholia carried right though to the end of the book which was, for me, lacking a satisfying conclusion. But perhaps the ending was appropriate for an article on the sports page –attempting to conjure up drama and life lessons from the actions of grown men and women paid very well for playing children’s games.