Triumph and Tragedy in Mudville Read Free Page A

just about the time of both of their deaths in 2002—of the fact that May Williams, the ballplayer’s mother, was half Mexican, and there was a virtually secret part of the Williams family, something which surely, given the prejudices of Southern California in that era, must have had something to do with Williams’s exceptional rage to excel.)
    Steve Gould, it should be said, was a devoted and somewhat ritualistic fan. One of the reasons he loved baseball so much was because the past casts so important a shadow on the present: players are measured not just against those whom they play today, but against those who have gone before them. Other sports did not catch his fancy. His friend Dershowitz was a serious basketball fan as well as baseball fan, but he could never get Steve to buy in on basketball, arguably our most balletic and athletically demanding sport. It simply did not move him, and he could not be reconnected with his boyhood as he was when he watched baseball. By contrast, when he watched baseball, the man could become a boy once again. He had learned to keep score as a boy, and as a man, ever meticulous, he still kept score. When he was a boy, he had always gone to games by public transportation, getting a feel for the excitement of the crowd even before it got to the stadium, and as a grown man he still demanded that he and his friends go to games by public transportation, never by car, in no small part because he still liked getting a feel for the mood of the crowd. In addition, though he liked eating well in good restaurants, no amount of pressure from his pals could convince him to go to a good restaurant and eat well before a night game. That was not the way it was done, because it was not the way it had been done when he was a boy. If he was going to a ballgame, he was going to eat at the game. Hot dogs it would be, not coq au vin.
    At the game he was the most attentive of fans. Others might see a baseball game, with its languid rhythms, as a chance to get together and talk of other things, but not Steve Gould. He was not there to socialize. He was appalled once when Dershowitz brought a cell phone to a game and actually took incoming calls. Dershowitz might just as well have endorsed the DH rule. Gould protested vigorously and it did not happen again. He was there to see the game, to watch the field at all times, with one eye if need be on the scoreboard. He loved the subtle byplay of the game, certain pitchers against certain hitters in tight situations. Once he had gone to a game with his longtime editor, Ed Barber, and it was one of those nights when Roger Clemens was pitching and was absolutely on top of his game. About the eighth inning, Gould showed Barber his scorecard, and Clemens’s line went something like this: eleven strikeouts and two hits, and one or two walks. Perhaps in all, a hundred or so pitches thrown. As he showed this statistical update to Barber, Steve turned as if to the crowd itself, and said, talking about the game Clemens was pitching, but perhaps more important, the whole scene, and the pleasure of being a part of it, his words as much as anything an epitaph for his own exceptional and occasionally magical life, “Isn’t this wonderful!”

Editor’s Note
    I n the months before his death on May 20, 2002, Steve Gould had been hard at work on this volume. The subject had come up between us in the seventies, when Steve began to write his vibrant essays about baseball for Natural History and elsewhere. Early on, he had displayed a unique skill in blending his science and his game in a way that humanized the former and deepened the latter. We agreed then that there would be a baseball book but that it must wait in line. He had in mind The Mismeasure of Man , Wonderful Life , and of course there followed hundreds of essays gathered into his wonderful collections as well as long work on his final scientific statement that became The Structure of Evolutionary Theory .
    So, time