wnyc.org / 93.9fm / am 820

SELECTED SHORTS went out to the ballgame a few seasons ago, up at The Mount, the home of Edith Wharton, up in Lenox Massachusetts in the Berkshire hills, with a program consisting of baseball stories and poems that have been collected in a handsome volume by Library of America, our partner along with The Mount in this summer literary adventure. From that program we begin this radio event with a Chicago White Sox memoir by the great American Chicago writer James T. Farrell, famous for the Studs Lonigan trio of novels. The title alone promises wry humor: “My Grandmother Goes to Comiskey Park.” Our reader was one of our clean-up hitters who had flown and driven across the Commonwealth of Massachusetts from his home on Martha’s Vineyard for the occasion, John Shea.

Next up, a baseball-centered excerpt from Philip Roth’s PORTNOY’S COMPLAINT, read by host Isaiah Sheffer.

Our western Massachusetts baseball literature program also included some poetry. The writer Rolfe Humphries had a father who was an old-time big leaguer and in his poem “Polo Grounds” there is an elegiac section that attempts to remember the pretty-much forgotten old-timers, including his dad. The poem is about time, how time is essential to its very nature—the time it takes an infielder to retrieve and control a fiercely hit grounder and relay it to first base versus the time it takes the batter to get there—the split second difference between success and failure. But it is even more about the passage of time, and how we spectators grow older each season while the ballplayers remain young. The metaphor of the afternoon shadow moving slowly from the plate to the mound and out to second base acts as a metaphor for the passage of life’s seasons. “Polo Grounds” was by David Strathairn who, at the time of this reading, had already finished filming but had not yet begun to win awards for his portrayal of Edward R. Murrow in the movie “GOODNIGHT AND GOOD LUCK.”

The Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, Yusef Komunyakaa, who teaches at Princeton, also finds something of life in baseball. Isaiah Sheffer read his poem, “Glory.” And for the fifth element of this compendious program, John Shea returns to the pitcher’s mound to read W.P. Kinsella’s whimsical fantasy “The Thrill of the Grass,” in which a cadre of old-timers attempt to return baseball to its days of honor and glory—by subverting the Astroturf.

This baseball program concludes with one of the most memorable readings ever to take place on Symphony Space’s stage. The late Commissioner of Baseball, A. Bartlett Giamatti, less than a year before his untimely death, joined the eminent baseball writer Roger Angell in hosting a program of baseball prose and poetry. Our crew painted the stage green, with white foul lines coming from up left and up right to meet downstage center, where two readers’ microphones had been set up, one for right-handed readers and one for southpaws. The climax of the program was Giamatti’s reading of his own essay on the true meaning of baseball, “The Green Fields of the Mind.”

James T. Farrell, "My Grandmother Goes to Comiskey Park," read by John Shea
Philip Roth, Selection from Portnoy's Complaint, read by Isaiah Sheffer
Rolfe Humphries, "Polo Grounds," read by David Strathairn
Yusef Komunyakaa, "Glory," read by Isaiah Sheffer
W.P. Kinsella, "The Thrill of the Grass," read by John Shea
A. Bartlett Giamatti, "The Green Fields of the Mind," read by the author.
For additional works featured on SELECTED SHORTS, please visit Symphony Space