“In 1951 you couldn’t get us to talk politics. Ball players then would just as soon talk bed-wetting as talk politics.” These are the opening lines of Jim Shepard’s 1994 short story “Batting Against Castro,” in which a few feckless members of the 1950-51 Philadelphia Phillies make their way to Cuba in an attempt to revive their baseball careers. The young ball players sign on with a Cuban club called the Cienfuegos, and in the course of the story, despite the narrator’s political disavowal, the Americans find that they can’t quite escape Cuba’s revolutionary fervor. Fidel Castro, just on the cusp of power, starts showing up at their team’s games, always rooting for the other side, even pelting one of the American sluggers with a burrito. He doesn’t like the idea of capitalist pigs playing in the Cuban league.
I’m not about to give away the ending, but Shepard’s story is a classic of the American-guys-trying-to-make-it-in-foreign-sports-leagues genre, or at least it would be if there were such a genre. And I’ve been thinking of this story a lot lately because of this month’s 
World Baseball Classic, a16-team tournament that organizes the best players in the world by nationality and acknowledges hardball’s global reach. Three years ago, the American squad was ousted from the competition after the first round; Cuba played Japan in the final; I think Japan won. The best part about the first World Baseball Classic, from my perspective, was seeing passengers on the New York City subway wearing their beautiful new Puerto Rico and Dominican Republic jerseys, embodying that complex drama of tribal loyalty that energizes the best American cities. But in the media run-up to this year’s tournament, what has struck me is how the American players stick to a script Jim Shepard himself might have written—it’s not about politics or international tensions, they insist, and nobody seems aware of the fact that there might be some extra relish in the act of defeating Team USA, a.k.a. Goliath. It’s just young guys learning from veterans, playing the game that is their American birthright.
Of course no book captures the problematic myth of baseball’s American-ness the way Bernard Malamud’s The Natural does. I recently found Kevin Baker’s elegant, insightful introduction to Malamud’s novel online, and it gave me a new understanding of the story’s dark probing of “America’s” game. Baker writes that “the ballpark is a swath of idealized nature, plunked down in the middle of an urban block and meant to reform us, morally and physically.” Malamud forces us to see the city grime just a few steps away from the stadium, dramatizing the greed, self-interest and sense of American entitlement that surrounds the sport. The Natural is no nostalgic tale aimed at children; Malamud’s achievement is grown-up and, as Baker notes, almost alarmingly free of easy sentiment.
Getting back to Cuba, though: What does Fidel Castro think about the upcoming World Baseball Classic? Well, take it from the state-approved Chinese press: he’s feeling pretty cocky, especially for a guy whose fundamental alive-ness I was a bit uncertain about. (I had to Google him real quick to make sure he was still alive.) I can’t quite fathom why this Chinese article about Castro’s baseball pronouncements exists, but here it is. It makes me think, again, of the Shepard short story, especially the moment when Castro strides onto the field and takes the mound, convinced that his righteous curveball can make short work of the damn Yankees.
So, unlikely as it may seem, the World Baseball Classic reminds me of why I love to read fiction. A good story lets me witness the improbable interconnections of personal history and world events. It spins confections out of imagined idioms, fesses up to the wisdom of the street, the dugout, the locker room. I don’t want fake baseball memoirs. I don’t want dictionaries full of baseball terminology. Actually, come to think of it, I wouldn’t mind having a dictionary full of baseball terminology. But what I really want is a storyteller to put an arm over my shoulder and tell me something that’s truer than true.
