Triumph and Tragedy in Mudville Read Free Page B

passed. Steve lived a busy life, constantly balancing teaching, research, writing, speaking, travel, and a personal life that prominently featured baseball, as well as, tragically, the first onset of his cancer, over fifteen years ago. But by late 2001 he was ready to go out to the literary ballpark. In 1992, his friend Stephen King had written him a letter suggesting that Steve “devote a small but not inconsequential block of time” to writing a novella-sized memoir about baseball, a pivotal exhortation. In the introductory piece that follows, Gould says that this book “exists to fulfill a promise” made to King, meaning the memoir to come.
    Steve went to work, first gathering all of his writings on baseball, choosing and revising the pieces to accompany the memoir and lining up an order of presentation. He’d always been good at titles, and the title here is his. This was the same procedure Steve had always used in turning his various essays into book form. At last he turned to the long, personal work which was to have been the book’s cornerstone, only to be overcome by the cancer that would take him from us. Game and enthusiastic to the end, Steve called in the early spring of 2002 to assure me that he would deliver the book, and he has. He had left it, neatly organized and in good hands, in his office at Harvard. With the revised earlier essays, designed to accompany the memoir, were two new pieces: the warm introduction to this volume and his fond—and analytical—story of a boyhood spent playing stickball on the neighborhood streets of Queens, as far as he could go with the longer work.
    We at Norton are proud to present this book, and we are grateful to Patricia Chui for her invaluable work and to Kay McCauley who so professionally smoothed the way.
    Steve Gould loved baseball; and he loved the New York Yankees, loved them not so much because they were champions, but because they were his champions—he’d grown up with them. Millions of readers have, in a way, grown up in science with Steve Gould. With this last legacy, he offers to us a celebration of both as only he could, with depth, grace, wit, and passion.
    Edwin Barber
W. W. Norton & Company
September 2002

TRIUMPH
AND
TRAGEDY
IN MUDVILLE

Seventh Inning Stretch: Baseball, Father, and Me
    Introduction and Rationale
    T his introductory and longest piece of the book exists to fulfill a promise made to one of my best baseball friends, author Steve King, who wrote to me in late October 1992: “I think you should set aside a small but not inconsequential block of time—three weeks, maybe a month—to write a long (20,000 to 30,000 words) ‘linchpin essay’ that would place your love and knowledge of baseball among the other landmarks of your rather remarkable life.”
    Obviously, I appreciated the implied compliments in Steve’s remarks. But I quickly resolved to follow his suggestion for a set of more literary and personal reasons. I have published eleven volumes of essays, ten from my monthly series in Natural History magazine that ran to three hundred successive pieces, without a break, from January 1974 until January 2001, and an eleventh ( Urchin in the Storm ) based primarily on essays originally published in the New York Review of Books . I have been writing about my serious dedication to baseball (in a wide variety of formats, from short op-ed statements to fairly lengthy articles) since the early 1980s; and I suppose that, for at least fifteen years, I have been intending to collect these baseball scribblings into a volume once enough material had accumulated. Steve King’s suggestion of a decade ago (I began this “novella” in mid April 2002) made my resolve firm, but the press of other commitments and the need to accumulate more material made this palindromic year of the new millennium an appropriate time to begin in earnest.
    As much as I have loved and followed baseball all my conscious life, I never thought, before deciding to