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The Heavenly World Series
by Frank O’Rourke
edited by Edith Carlson
introduction by Darryl Brock
Carroll & Graf, 2002; xi plus 325 pages.
If I had a nickel for every time I have used baseball to illuminate some aspect of life, I would be in possession of a significant collection of nickels. Whether talking about the diverse roles of various team members in a business context, or the value of patience in the life of a nine-year-old, or the fact that being successful thirty percent of the time is quite a feat, baseball has often backed me up like a pitcher behind the catcher on a play at the plate.
Pass me another nickel.
Frank O’Rourke (1916-1989) was a versatile writer who produced more than a hundred short stories and sixty novels including westerns and war stories. In the 1940s and 50s he was a prodigious writer of stories about baseball, many of these appearing in major magazines like The Saturday Evening Post and Collier’s. Eighteen of these stories are gathered in The Heavenly World Series, restoring to print the work of a master of a deceptively challenging genre.
Reading O’Rourke’s stories is, quite simply, a pleasure. He brings the reader close to the game, the men who play it, and the obstacles they face as they attempt to fulfill themselves as players. The obstacles vary -- age, injury, vindictive management -- as do the strategies to overcome them. But O’Rourke’s characters are sympathetic, and his stories are compelling, because the players he portrays approach baseball as more than a game, a job, or an activity they are especially skilled at; for these men, playing baseball is a vocation or calling.
We commonly limit the idea of vocation to so-called “religious callings,” but O’Rourke presents characters who are clearly called to play ball and to do so while maintaining personal and professional integrity. In “Flashing Spikes,” a disgraced Black Sox player, now a shortstop on a barnstorming squad that takes on local teams at county fairs, plays despite the inevitable moment in which he is recognized and despised and violently spiked by one of the local boys. The title character of “The Catcher” puts together a quality major league career despite the willful ineptitude of management’s choices regarding his position on the team. And in “Look for the Kid with the Guts,” major league scout Bill McGee looks beyond the flashy, vain, bonus-seeking obvious prospect and sets his sights on the opposing team’s unassuming third baseman, demonstrating a knack for discernment that would be the envy of even a great monastic novice master. In story after story O’Rourke’s ballplayers live out their callings with grace, grit, and dignity.
In many cases, a lesser writer would have reduced the situations O’Rourke depicts to the level of “us versus them” -- players versus management, for example. But O’Rourke transcends that sort of reductionism because his characters ring true and genuine, and because he places them on baseball diamonds that look and feel equally genuine. There is nothing “staged” about the baseball in The Heavenly World Series. O’Rourke’s connection to baseball was very strong -- he was a good enough amateur player that the Philadelphia Phillies allowed him to work out with them during spring training in the late 40s -- and there is no doubt when reading his stories that he understands the aching, sweating repetition that is behind a big leaguer’s every ground ball scoop or sidearm throw to first base. The reader, brought thoroughly into the game by O’Rourke, will find it hard to resist becoming attached to the players who populate his ball fields and dugouts.
The collection’s title story, “The Heavenly World Series,” stands in marked contrast to the other seventeen in the book. In this whimsical story, God allows the best big leaguers of all time to play a world series in heaven to determine whether the National or the American League is the best. The story has its funny moments (there is only one umpire to be found in heaven, presenting a logistical problem) as well as a great depiction of a game that might go on forever, but the story concludes with a rather mundane “lesson.” Frank O’Rourke is at his best when his games are played on the red dirt infields of planet Earth, and when an apparently typical inning among the thousands of innings played all summer long stands out as a key moment in one man’s effort to live out his vocation with integrity.
The stories that comprise The Heavenly World Series work because they are fine yarns in which we witness genuine characters in truthful situations that entail personal transformation. Anyone who has ever struggled to maintain integrity in the face of external obstacles will find kindred spirits in Frank O’Rourke’s ballplayers. If you like your baseball with a bit of spirit, read this book. O’Rourke hits for the cycle and clinches the pennant.
Pass me another nickel.
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