As a new baseball season opens, one of crime fiction’s biggest baseball fans is no longer sitting in the stands. John Grisham has lost interest in the game even after writing a novel about baseball and considering another. He loves reading stories of minor leaguers who have been playing for years and finally get to Triple A.
“They realize everyone is better than they are and they’re not going to make it. They’re approaching thirty and have no money. I love those stories and I’m going to write one someday.”
In 2012 he published Calico Joe, a novel about a rookie professional ballplayer from Arkansas who just happens to face a fireball-throwing pitcher with tragic consequences, as Grisham did in his younger days. In 2004 a screenplay he’d written called “Mickey” was turned into a film about a baseball player on the run. Even the protagonist in his novel, A Painted House, has dreams of becoming a professional baseball player. And on occasion, he’s written about baseball for Sports Illustrated and other publications.
‘The Cardinals games were our world.”
Back in the 1960s you could find the Arkansas farm boy on a hot summer night kicking the dust at home plate and taking a few practice swings anticipating the first pitch. Everybody did in his world, he recalls. Nearly every summer evening, the powerful transmitter of radio station KMOX out of St. Louis broadcast Cardinals baseball through the humidity of the South and Midwest. Grisham remembers the entire town coming out for little league games carrying transistor radios echoing the play-by-play of Harry Caray and Jack Buck through the stands as the kids played.
“The Cardinals games were our world,” Grisham says. Grisham describes himself as a rabid fan back then and it was generational. His father loved Cardinals great Stan Musial, and his grandfather was a fan of Dizzy Dean and the Gashouse Gang listening on his very first radio back in the 1930s and ‘40s.
Grisham loved baseball but couldn’t hit. “I was a very mediocre high school baseball player.” It wasn’t until college at an intersquad tryout that he gave up his dream to play professionally.
“Until you’ve seen that and experienced that, it’s terrifying…”
“I saw a fastball one day in a college try out. You know ninety (mph) is nothing these days. It was a big deal back then in college. If you’ve never seen one coming at you at ninety, it’s pretty frightening. I said, ‘that’s it. I’m done,’ and the coach cut me the next day. My dream was over, but I’d gotten farther than my talent should have let me.”
“Until you’ve seen that and experienced that, it’s terrifying…” he told David Rubenstien on CSPAN’s America’s Book Club. “I was kind’a glad to be done with it because I didn’t want to see a fastball again.”
As an adult he still loved the game and journeyed to a couple of Cardinals games a year with his friend (and fellow lawyer) Hall of Fame Manager Tony La Russa. But now, even those trips have ended. The only baseball Grisham watches is college, especially the University of Virginia, which is not only one of the best college baseball teams in the nation, but right next door. He lives just outside of Charlottesville, Virginia and frequently goes into town where he keeps an office away from home.
“We’re huge college baseball fans. Not minor league. Haven’t been to minor league since the Memphis Blues at McCarver Stadium, fifty years ago.”
But professional? “I cannot sit down for three hours and watch a game. I’d rather be reading a book…I just lost the love for the game.”
Grisham still loves baseball history because it mirrors the history of America, he says. He may have lost his love for today’s professional game, but nostalgia for its roots and the way the game was once played in the Arkansas dirt of his childhood, is still very much alive and well with him.
I’m novelist Rick Pullen, former investigative reporter, magazine editor, and author of the best selling thriller Naked Ambition, its sequel Naked Truth, and a stand-alone thriller The Apprentice. I’m also a magazine columnist and feature writer.
Thanks for reading Idol Talk! Subscribe for free or support my work with a paid subscription. — Rick Pullen
Love this piece, Rick.