John Malamud Baseball Analysis

Jake Kaufman
Kevork Bardakjian
AAPTIS 474
20 March 2012
Baseball’s Place in American Literary Tradition and Culture As American culture has evolved through time, the game of baseball has remained a largely unchanged staple in our society. It is a game so culturally revered, so quintessentially American, that it has been forever dubbed our national pastime. Baseball also has an illustrious literary tradition that surpasses simply writing about a sport. The stories told on and off the field by some very distinguished twentieth-century American writers have undoubtedly carved out their own place in American literary tradition and have used the game as a metaphor for American childhood and innocence. John Thorn says it best in his 1995 essay
Hobbs starts as a starry-eyed kid who dreams of making a living playing a game, but as life’s distractions of money and women enter his world, they pull him away from baseball and American innocence. Malamud’s writing style allows him to beautifully use baseball as a mechanism for describing the American quintessence. Hobbs, like many common men, is not perfect but strives for greatness. He has a self-centered desire for wealth and an upscale lifestyle which eventually lead to his ruin at the end of the novel. At the beginning of the story when he is still young, Hobbs says, “What I mean, […] is I feel that I have got it in me—that I am due for something very big. I have to do it” (Malamud). But as his life progresses and he grows up with American culture and traditions, Malamud uses baseball as a metaphor for Hobbs’ very “natural” progression through adulthood. This passage is when Hobbs first opens up to Lemon about his past: “‘What happened fifteen years ago, Roy?’ Roy felt like crying, yet he told her—the first one he ever had. ‘I was just a kid and got shot by this batty dame on the night before my tryout, and after that I just couldn’t get started again. I lost my confidence and everything I did flopped.’ He said this was the shame in his life, that his fate, somehow, had always been the same (on the train going nowhere)—defeat
Probably the most well-known and critiqued piece of baseball literature in the past decade is Michael Lewis’ Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game which he wrote in 2003. Lewis tells the story of the 2002 Oakland Athletics and their general manager Billy Beane. The A’s were held to a very low payroll and competing with teams like the New York Yankees who spent about three times as much money seemed impossible, but Beane employed radical personnel evaluation methods with the help of Bill James’ revolutionary statistical analysis method called sabremetrics. Using these tools, Beane was able to guide the A’s to the 2002 playoffs against all odds (Lewis). Moneyball has been the subject of both strong criticism and acclaim. Its supporters believe that the book launched a new age of talent evaluation and essentially changed how the game of baseball is viewed for the better. The critics of Lewis’ book say that it dehumanized the game. Beane’s evaluation methods are almost exclusively based off of statistics, not what he sees on the field. Lewis even writes about how Beane doesn’t like to watch the games because it may skew his commitment to his statistics. Whatever the opinions are on Moneyball, it has clearly made an impact on how teams are operating currently and has become an important part of baseball literature.