Eliot Asinof is most famous for writing “Eight Men Out.” (He is less famous for once being married to Marlon Brando’s sister.) Asinof played minor league ball in the Phillies system for three years before World War II. His first book, a novel about a minor league lifer, “Man on Spikes” was published in 1955 and to my mind is one of the best baseball novels. It is a hard, gripping portrait of baseball under the reserve system (none other than Marvin Miller wrote the foreword for the most recent edition of the book). The prose is plain and clear, the details are vivid and Asinof displayed considerable skill as a dramatist.

If you’ve never read it, pick up a copy when you can. It’s well worth it. Here is an excerpt, from a chapter about an old ballplayer named Herman Cruller:

And now, before the umpire hollered “Play ball!” for the last time that season, Herman felt deflated. He could not look forward to the tension and excitement of the game. The crowd was there, sweltering even in the shade of the stands behind him, pressing the players with their boisterous presence. Even the bleachers, where the Negroes sat blistering under the naked sun, were full and demanding. They were all there, defying the heat, for this was “the big one,” the game that decided and ended a season of games.

Herman looked up into the stands and watched people fanning themselves with their programs, their throats already parched from rasping calls but soon to be lubricated by long draughts of cold beer. For years he had listened to their routine, opinionated braying during the practice hours, the little pieces of stupidity from the big blaring voices. Sullenly, he watched them hollering their pre-game nonsense: “Lefty Moss stinks. He couldn’t even strike out my Aunt Mabel, and she’s ninety-one!” “I’ll bet ya a ten-spot he goes the route, horseface; I’ll bet ya another ten-spot he wins it too!” “Aah, hell. Gowann.” Thinking with their brains in their asses like a bunch of children betting their hard-earned money as if they knew what they were talking about. For all the years he had played professional baseball, for as far back as he could remember, he hated the loud ones in the crowds who had watched him those thousands of innings. He hated them for their fickleness, their blaring derision, their hooting and squawking, the sadistic way they kicked at the guy who was down. He hated the phony effort at what they called sportsmanship, the brief moment of applause that supposedly justified the hours of razzing they had really come to revel in. It was as if the ballplayers were not playing a game they could watch and enjoy, but were caricatures representing objects of love and hate, were either heroes or villains. And if they had love for a player, still they were quick to jeer at him when he booted one or fanned with a crucial run on base. They seldom considered the player a human being, capable of error as well as competence. Their money was their admission to the arena, and it gave them rights unlimited. For half a buck they could scream and jeer and sound off with their cruddy opinions as if they were speaking gospel. When they felt like it, they unleashed their venom against a ballplayer who displeased them until their scorn itself was part of their picture of him. He was a bum in their eyes, and he had to battle against them with as great a power as he did against the legitimate opposition on the field. When the crowd was down on a kid, the odds were you could count him out, for he was hitting with a pair of strikes against him and the rattling of catcalls in his ears.

He had seen the whims of a crowd make a goat out of more than one good ballplayer and then ride him right out of the league.

But it was the crowd who paid him for his stinking forty bucks a week, fair weather and foul. If he forgot, the management was right there to remind him. Baseball was a big game, and all kinds of people came to watch it for all kinds of reasons. He was paid to play for them all.

But the afternoon was hot and he was tired, and the game was a chore. It wasn’t in him to please this crowd.

You’re bitter, Herm, he told himself finally. You’re bitter and beat by the heat. You’re old and tired and near the end of the stinking line in this game, and you’re taking it out on a bunch of people no different from yourself. Give yourself another year or two and you’ll be paying your dough to sit up there and guzzle beer with the rest of them.

[Photo Credit: Old Film]

Check out this review of a tough but compelling-sounding memoir:

One Saturday night in the mid-’70s, I stood on the deck of a shabby duplex watching my teenage boyfriend — a character who could have walked out of the pages of Andre Dubus III’s powerful new memoir, “Townie” — beat another boy senseless in the parking lot below. Under the yellowish dusk-to-dawn lights, I could see my boyfriend’s blond sideburns, denim jacket and dingo boots, and I could see him punch the boy in the stomach until he crumpled to the ground, then kick him over and over until his nose and lips were split and bleeding. In “Townie,” which details Dubus’s 1970s coming-of-age in the poor mill towns of Massachusetts, there are none of the usual signifiers of today’s ’70s Nostalgia Industrial Complex, no peace-sign key chains or smiley-face T-shirts, none of the goofy stoners and ditsy girls in tube tops that American television viewers have become accustomed to on “That ’70s Show.” Instead, Dubus writes about “the apartments” where his older sister buys drugs, two rows of three-story buildings surrounded by packed dirt worn smooth, a Dumpster in back always filled with dirty diapers, used condoms and pizza boxes. He writes about an early manifestation of “Fight Club” culture at his school, where, whenever there is a fight, boys and girls rush to one spot “like they were being pulled there by the air itself. . . . Kids were yelling: ‘Kill him! Kill him!’ ”

It was his parents’ divorce that left Dubus fatherless and living in a world of violence and poverty. Dubus’s father (and namesake) was a well-known writer, famous among other things for his short story “The Winter Father,” about a man recently separated from his family. The most vivid image in the story is of the protagonist watching through his rearview mirror as his young son chases after him: “A small running shape in the dark, charging the car, picking up something and throwing it, missing, crying You bum You bum You bum.”

Click here for an excerpt from “Townie,” by Andre Dubus III.

[Photo Credit: Alan Guido]

…Who beat the Heat last night as the Oscars ceremonies dragged on.

Meanwhile, good stuff from Florida. Here’s Ben Shpigel,  John Harper and George King (times two).

My ma is in town visiting, so I made a minestrone soup and we’re going to cool out and watch the cheesefest.

Rest in Peace, Duke Snider.

Yanks and Phils are on YES again this afternoon.

How about the Meters to start the day? Feel the funk, baby.

[Picture by Bags]

The sounds aren’t the same during the spring. The parks are small so the crack of the bat gets swallowed up in space. The light is different. The games are not played to be won. But it is still baseball and for some, that’s enough.

Enjoy it.

[Photo Credit: CBS News]

Down in Florida, exhibition games are starting up, and our man Cliff will be on pernt as usual.

The Yanks will be televised on YES this afternoon. Enjoy.

I have not seen the Cezanne Card Players’ show at the Met yet but it looks wonderful.

From the GQ vaults–and thanks to Long Form Reads for pointing it out–here’s James Ellroy’s disturbing piece on researching his mother’s killer:

The police reconstructed the crime.

My mother went out drinking Saturday night. She was seen at the Desert Inn bar in El Monte with a dark-haired white man and a blonde woman. My mother and the man left the bar around 10 P.M.

A group of Little Leaguers discovered the body. My mother had been strangled at an unknown location and dumped into some bushes next to the athletic field at Arroyo High School, a mile and a half from the Desert Inn.

She clawed her assailant’s face bloody. The killer had pulled off one of her stockings and tied it loosely around her neck portmortem.

I went to live with my father. I forced some tears out that Sunday—and none since.

[Photo Credit: xd360]

“Holiday” is playing this afternoon at 1:30 at the Modern.

Last summer I had the pleasure of interviewing former Yankee Fritz Peterson, who informed me of his involvement with a Ben Affleck/Matt Damon film project chronicling his famed wife swap with Mike Kekich. Now comes the news that Kekich will not give his approval to the project; in fact, one news report in the NY Post claims that the reclusive left-hander is “panic stricken” about the movie and “freaked out” that filmmakers actually found out where he lives.

I can’t say that I’m surprised to hear of Kekich’s reaction to the film. Ever since he retired in 1977, he has remained out of the baseball spotlight. I have never seen or heard him interviewed about his career, whether it’s talking about the Yankees or other stopping points in Los Angeles, Cleveland, Texas or Seattle. He has always been reluctant to talk about the wife swap, remaining so even with the passage of time. Unlike Peterson, I don’t think Kekich is planning any trips to Cooperstown in the near future.

So who exactly is Mike Kekich? Kekich the person remains a mystery, but Kekich the pitcher is very much the story of the highly touted left-hander who didn’t live up to his promise. Although he and Peterson are often mentioned interchangeably because of the wife swap, the reality is that Peterson was the far more accomplished pitcher.

Kekich came up in the Dodgers’ system in the mid-1960s, heralded as a talented left-hander with a blazing fastball. Some dared to call him the “next Sandy Koufax.” Unfortunately, the Dodgers at the time were just about the worst destination for a young pitcher because they were already bulging at the seams with talented hurlers; they had the actual Koufax, along with Don Drysdale, Don Sutton, Claude Osteen, and the up-and-coming Bill Singer.

Kekich could never gain traction with the Dodgers. After a terrible five-game stint in 1965, he went back to the minor leagues for two full seasons and didn’t return to Chavez Ravine in 1968. Kekich didn’t pitch particularly well, but he suffered from an unusual share of bad luck and poor run support, losing ten of 12 decisions while making 20 starts.

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Heads Up

Mildly disturbed or potentially dangerous? This is a calculation every subway rider has to make a few times a week – maybe more. Somebody is going to be preaching, that’s just competition for your headphones. Sometimes it’s Showtime, and you need to make sure you’re out of the dancer’s kick-zone. Somebody is going to begging for money, but those guys never threaten. It’s tricky when someone is muttering indecipherable but unmistakably belligerent things to themselves. I see this a lot.

The clear tipping point is physical proximity. When I see a person going out of their way to occupy other people’s personal space, that’s when I take notice. One time, I was taking the train at an odd time – one or two in the afternoon – and only a handful of people were in my car. Two kids hopped on the train, 15 or 16 years old, obviously geeked up on something. They’re banging on the doors, ceiling windows, making their presence known. I was riding the train with a work buddy and, over a pause in our conversation, we heard them mocking our glasses. Trying to be heard.

There are no stops between 125th and 59th. That’s a long time to contemplate a perceived threat. We pretended we didn’t hear them. They got louder. We kept up the shield of ignorance, but we couldn’t return to our conversation. We were on full alert.

They bounced off at 59th St and, just as I thought the ordeal was over, one of the kids threw a punch at me as he was walking off the train. His hand got stuck in the plexi-glass divider that separates the three-seaters from the doors and his extended fingers ended up about 2 inches from my nose. He pulled his hand out just in time to squeeze through the doors.

I felt really stupid and helpless. These kids were obviously dangerous. I was aware of them the moment they got on the train and was prepared, I thought, for anything. And still if it wasn’t for that divider, I would have gotten punched in the face.

[Photo Credit: John Conn]

In the words of the immortal Oscar Madison, “Now it’s garbage.”

Hey, Leroy, You’re Mama’s callin’:

It is dark and wet this morning so let’s get right to some nourishment of the sinful kind. The New York Times gives a tour of the best doughnut shops in town.

[Photo Credit: NY Mag and Good Point]

New York City picture by our man Bags.

I’m tired and grouchy today, and Alex told me I was having an Oscar Madison kind of sports writing day. Which I am. This got us on a stream-of-consciousness email thread that moved naturally onto Jack Lemmon and led to our discovery of the following facts:

-Alex can’t stand Billy Wilder’s “The Apartment,” which in case you haven’t seen it, is awesome;

-He thinks Alfred Hitchcock is overrated;

-He doesn’t like Jimmy Stewart;

-He didn’t come right out and say it, but I assume he hates puppies and picks his teeth with their adorable little bones.

Meanwhile, I don’t like Faulkner and am kind of bored by Buster Keaton.

Pistols at dawn.

What do your friends or loved ones inexplicably dislike?

Over at PB, Jay Jaffe takes a look at concussions in sports, specifically in baseball. The piece picks up on a column that Bob Klapisch wrote last week on Jorge Posada. Sobering material, indeed.

[Photo Credit: PS70]