Baseball Musings
From my earliest years on, growing up near New York City, I was a huge baseball fan in
the days of Joe DiMaggio, Mickey Mantle, and rivals Pee Wee Reese and Jackie
Robinson, etc. After Ken Burns’s fabulous documentary BASEBALL I found myself
cogitating a story about early baseball after the Civil War. In my novel FAR STONES,
African-American twins originally come from St Louis, where in 1860, at age 7, they see
one of the first games ever played by the so-called New York rules—and before that
they’d played various versions of stickball and rounders.
The heart of the novel FAR STONES is that after being violently torn apart in an Indian
raid, each of the twins clings to his bond with the other by continually finding baseball
symbols and meanings everywhere. The captured one, Tom, makes a baseball out of
horsehair and deerskin, and finds them in everything round, whether the moon or a hair
ball from a buffalo stomach pouch. Stefan, the twin seeking him, appropriates a small oak
finial from a rocking chair and uses it as a talisman, with spiritual powers for him no less
than what beads and the rosary provide. Stefan also comes to see baseball played by the
black cavalrymen called Buffalo soldiers—and here he comes to know more about the
rules of the game (some from white Federal officers) than “anyone for 500 miles.” Much
comes from a book he is given, printed in 1867, Haney’s Base Ball Book of Reference by
Henry Chadwick, one of the game’s early pioneers.
Tom the captured one is a gifted hurler—in fact he comes to be called Far Stones because
he is so deadly accurate at throwing stones. Though as an adult and at one point resistant,
Tom Far Stones comes to let the remembered throwing motions and rhythms of his body
take over as he rediscovers the game of baseball. It’s what had made him legendary in his
Indian band—and beyond—about the fluidity of his throwing motion, imparting to
stone or ball the maximum effort of every muscle fiber so that he hurled a distance
few could match.
One time, resting on the ground after some pickup play Stefan rubs his shin, sore from a
bad-bounce grounder. Plays from myriad games he had by then seen and played in dance
in his head as he watches the Buffalo soldiers hitting and fielding grounders. He thinks
about the skills of baseball, displayed in the rhythms and moves of those who excel in the
game. The fundamentals of the game keep reenacting something satisfyingly repetitious
and they burrow into one’s brain images of chance and possibility. Even the bruises and
strains one takes to bone and muscle get absorbed into bat-swings and running and
fielding, in rain and heat and dust. The years all melt together as he sees those moves
grown up into him and his brother, as if from the playing field itself. He suddenly
appreciates the playing field, this ground he sits on and they play on—“the Land” he
pictures his brother on with the Indians.
Baseball has long struck me as being a sport that unlike others takes us in its own
particular way to the land and thus to how we seek to be grounded, secure. Being of the
land, it’s agrarian, where one has bases on which one is safe, and a home to which one
always has a chance to return. It involves no greater physical prowess to learn with and

begin to play than afforded a determined farmer, exercised on a field that in its earliest
days was usually a dirt lot, but planted over the decades into expanses of pastoral green.
Blessedly, my grandsons, age 7 and 11 are huge devotees also and I love coaching them
and teaching them the finer points of the game.

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