Hitting into the Wind: Stories

Studies in Short Fiction, Spring, 1996 by David Dougherty

Hitting into the Wind: Stories by Bill Meissner. New York: Random House, 1994. xiii 205 pages. Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 1997. $19 cloth; $12.95 paper.

It's hard to imagine a better title for a collection of baseball stories than Hitting into the Wind, a condition that makes difficult tasks daunting, perhaps impossible. When a batter must hit into the wind, line drives hold up long enough that fielders can run under them and home runs dwindle into long fly-outs. Unfortunately, the title describes the achievement of the stories in the collection somewhat too well. Not quite sharp singles, many are routine outs. Few qualify as extra-base hits.

Part of the problem is that in some circles the cliche that a sport is a metaphor for life is taken seriously. Sports can be many things: sophisticated entertainment forms, ruthless business arenas, occasions demanding that we compete and grow, causes for great joy and sorrow, missed opportunities and risks joyfully and productively taken. All of that, however, doesn't add up to a metaphor for life. In the sports-fiction business today, it seems that the "metaphor-for-life " idea is mandatory for stories about playing sports, a concept a real baseball expert, Thomas Boswell, sent up brilliantly with his title How Life Imitates the World Series.

Meissner writes about baseball with some knowledge of the game, though not quite the expertise of essayists like Boswell or Frank DeFord. It's a paradox of sports literature, however, that one need not know a sport intimately to write about it well. The Natural would be less culturally significant if Bernard Malamud had known that left field, the position for which his hero Roy Hobbs must vanquish the team clown Bump Bailey, is one at which any knowledgeable manager sacrifices defense to get offense. Because both challengers are represented as excellent fielders, any sensible manager would position the one with the stronger throwing arm in right field. Had Malamud represented the sport accurately, a minor mythic confrontation preparing readers for the book's proletarian hero theme would have been lost in a decision any competent minor-league manager would consider a no-brainer.

Another increasingly generic problem with sports fiction is that it tends to be sentimental, and Meissner follows W. P. Kinsella of Field of Dreams fame in his often cloying portraits of the love of a man for baseball or of the bonding of young friends or fathers and sons in their backyard game. It's nostalgia for an agrarian America with sandlots; and small-town values. But the lack of insight into why or how this dream is vanishing leaves the reader hungry for substance after the story is done.

Clusters of individual stories, however, work quite well. Many about failed ballplayers, or never-been athletes who couldn't quite give up the dream as it became an illusion, have authentic power. "In the Middle of a Pitch" is undermined by its sentimental ending, but most of the story movingly portrays an ex-pitcher who has adjusted, to some degree, to an injury that cost him his major-league career. Dusty, the hero, has become a successful used-car salesman, and his efforts to cope with his lost possibilities create an elegy for lost hopes and dreams. "Things Are Always So Close" tells with force the story of a minor-league umpire who has come to doubt his vision and his calls, and who sacrifices personal relationships for his vocation and wonders whether he has made the right choice. Although the story does not quite avoid the "baseball-as-metaphor-for-life" cliche, it's the most effective story that I have ever read about that unnoticed figure who is always on the field, the umpire. And the metaphor may apply here. Umpires sometimes have to make close calls, even on plays they're not sure about. Although Meissner doesn't work the intuition through fidly, the difference between deciding safe or out in a ballgame and in a human relationship, where there's no rule book to follow, opens a rich new set of fictional possibilities.

The best stories in the collection explore critically those conflicts that arise within families when sports become an obsession that obscures more important human values. "What About the World" describes with grace and style a conflict between a man and his wife as she wants him to pass beyond late adolescence toward mature family life, while he wants to play baseball. He learns too late that his game was not a metaphor for life but a strategy for avoiding responsibility and commitment. "Ancient Fires" represents powerfully a family relationship rendered nearly dysfunctional by the father's demand that his son compensate for his own failed aspirations by excelling at baseball. The boy says, "It's just a game," but for the father it's a way of life. Excellent as the premise is, however, the conclusion, in which the outraged son, in a spasm of adrenaline, suddenly manifests all the skill his father has hoped he had, is disappointing. Reconciliation via a game of catch seems anticlimactic after so compelling a study of a frustrated father.