5 Baseball Books Full of Wonder, Defeat, and Triumph for Opening Day

Underworld, by Don Delillo
The first 60 pages of Don DeLillo’s Underworld comprise the best work of baseball fiction ever written, and I’ll gladly arm wrestle anyone who contests this. The first time I read it, I did so in a sort of stunned rapture, just barely remembering to swallow every once in a while. “Longing on a large scale is what makes history,” DeLillo writes in the opening section, originally published as novella Pafko at the Wall. In it, a boy sneaks into the Polo Grounds on October 3, 1951, to watch the Giants play the Brooklyn Dodgers, a game J. Edgar Hoover is also taking in, which DeLillo conveys through a panoramic vision of the crowd. The Dodgers win the pennant on a three-run homer, “The Shot Heard Round the World,” and for the rest of DeLillo’s circuitous novel, characters seek the game-winning ball.

 “The Smile on Happy Chang’s Face,” from Nine Inches, by Tom Perrotta
Tom Perrotta brings all the angst of suburbia to bear on this story of a Little League championship game that goes awry, from his collection Nine Inches. The life of the home-plate umpire, Jack, fell apart after he punched his son in the face, “the one thing I’ll regret forever,” prompting his wife to divorce him. The meathead coach of one of the teams, Carl, who “had ripped the sleeves off his sweatshirt, the better to display the rippling muscles he worked for like a dog down at Bally,” is also Jack’s neighbor, and a witness to his downward spiral. The animosity between the two men comes to a boil as the kids’ game builds toward its unexpected finish.

 The Iowa Baseball Confederacy, by W.P. Kinsella
W.P. Kinsella spins stories out of baseball’s sense of magic and connection to its own history. Unlike basketball and football, a baseball game could theoretically last forever, as the rules allow no ticking clock or sudden death overtimes. Kinsella’s 1986 novel concerns the quest of Gideon Clark to prove the 1908 Chicago Cubs visited Iowa to play against a mysterious team called the Iowa Baseball Confederacy, a game that lasted for more than 2,000 innings. Sounds like Iowa heaven—if you’re a baseball fan, anyway.

 Ball Four, by Jim Bouton
Jim Bouton was a pitcher for the Seattle Pilots in 1969, the only year this MLB team existed. In this zany 1970 book, Bouton gives a behind-the-scenes look at baseball, including the players’ rampant use of methamphetamines, interpersonal squabbles, ogling of women, and Mickey Mantle’s drinking problem. Bouton got into a lot of trouble for writing it—he was ostracized by fellow players—but his witty voice and honesty about his decline as an athlete are what make it still entertaining and insightful today. “Baseball players are smarter than football players,” he writes. “How often do you see a baseball team penalized for too many men on the field?”

 The Natural, by Bernard Malamud
The movie version of The Natural depicts baseball phenom Roy Hobbs, played by Robert Redford, ending his career in triumph—but the book, Malamud’s 1952 debut, concludes on a darker note. Still, the plot, inspired by the 1949 shooting of Phillies first baseman Eddie Waitkus by a deranged 19-year-old woman, has an inspiring comeback at its heart, and a bat named Wonderboy that helps Hobbs enter baseball legend by hitting a pitch so hard he rips the cover off the ball: “Wonderboy flashed in the sun. It caught the sphere where it was biggest. A noise like a twenty-one gun salute cracked the sky. There was a straining, ripping sound and a few drops of rain spattered to the ground. The ball screamed toward the pitcher and seemed suddenly to dive down at his feet. He grabbed it to throw it to first and realized to his horror that he held only the cover. The rest of it, unraveling cotton thread as it rode, was headed into the outfield.”