Close Reading on the Pitcher's Mound

  Andrew Forbes' The Utility of Boredom

“Like writers, pitchers initiated action, and set the tone for their games. They had all sorts of ways of achieving their effects.”—Michael Lewis, Moneyball

Like writers, pitchers manipulate audiences. They use rhythm and variation to keep opposing batters, their primary audience, off balance while the fans look on in appreciation. And while every word matters for a writer, the same can be said for pitches; just as a bad line can ruin a poem, so can a bad pitch turn a shut-out gem into a loss. The potential importance of each individual pitch means that you can close read a pitcher’s performance—or composition—just as you would a piece of prose or poetry. Beyond pitches themselves, the “all sorts of ways” implied by Lewis—style, process, biography, legacy, etc.—add to the effect a pitcher’s composition has on batters, fans, or both. I’ll admit that my concept of the connection between pitchers and writers is vague, but I would argue that is a good thing. As Myra Bloom, Joseph Thomas, and I discovered in our conversation about Andrew Forbes’s The Utility of Boredom, baseball contains a wealth of free-floating potential meanings. So I asked a few literary baseball fans to pair pitchers with writers, and the results are below. We’re just scratching the surface here, so please feel free to leave your own thoughts and suggest your own pairings in the comments. And as I told these writers, please feel free to add your own spin (or grip) to the way I’ve framed this. I’d love to read it.—E Martin Nolan

Stacey May Fowles: Mark Buehrle and Joan Didion

“A place belongs forever to whoever claims it hardest, remembers it most obsessively, wrenches it from itself, shapes it, renders it, loves it so radically that he remakes it in his own image.”—Joan Didion“The faster you work, the better off you're going to be.”—Mark Buehrle

While I’m not a person who would ever complain about a long, languishing day at the ballpark, there was always something preternaturally inspiring about the lean, brief, staccato way former Blue Jay Mark Buehrle would pitch a game. The way he worked had a Joan Didion quality to it, in the sense that he would get right to it, wouldn’t linger in his execution, and get in and get out of his subject matter for maximum impact. He viewed throwing the ball not as a meditative, egotistical, or bloated poetic exercise, but as a job that simply needed to be done. In turn, he did exactly what was required—rarely shaking off signs or taking the usual amount of time to move along to the next transition.In July 2009, while he was with the Chicago White Sox, Buehrle pitched a perfect game (a feat that has only happened 23 times in MLB history) against the Tampa Bay Rays in an incredible two hours and three minutes. That’s 53 minutes shorter than the current average. In 2010 he was considered the fastest pitcher in the majors, taking only 16.4 seconds between tosses to get the job done, and as time went on and he improved his craft, the gap only lessened. Watching him work on the mound was much like reading a finely crafted sentence from Play It As It Lays or Slouching Towards Bethlehem—brief, assured, strong, razor-sharp, and astoundingly effective. Like the writer, and unlike so many others in his field, his primary focus never wavered from efficiency and accuracy.

D.D. Miller: Marco Estrada and Bill Gaston

In an era of baseball where power and velocity seem to be infinite, where the Strasburgs, Verlanders, and Chapmans chuck 100 mph routinely, the Blue Jays’ Marco Estrada is somewhat of a throwback. Estrada—to use a baseball cliché—is a painter of strike zones. His palette consists of 88-mile-an-hour fastballs and cutters mixed in with slightly slower curves. But the greatest weapon is his changeup: emerging out of the wind-up like one of his corner-caressing cutters, there’s nothing better than watching million-dollar major leaguers meekly swing well before the ball has completed its leisurely 77 mph journey to the plate. By the time it casually drops into the catchers’ mitt, the batter is usually half way back to the dugout cursing himself for being burned so badly by a pitch with the velocity equal to that of a high schooler’s.It’s uncomplicated, blue-collar pitching, relying on subtlety, selection, and timing, that appears on the surface to be simplistic and unsophisticated, but is actually cunning—and almost certainly underappreciated.In all of these ways, watching Estrada work an at-bat is an awful lot like reading a Bill Gaston short story: simple, understated, yet in the end it leaves you as exasperated as his more flashy counterparts. Just as Estrada is a pitcher’s pitcher, Gaston is a writer’s writer. Beautifully crafted short stories that sometimes seem to explode out of the gates only to slow deftly before whizzing by and leaving you to wonder what just happened. Estrada has been the Jays’ most underrated pitcher over the past two seasons, while for two decades, Gaston has been CanLit’s. Gaston lands in the Top 3 of my Canadian short-fiction power rankings. His peak seasons, which run through the collections Sex is Red (1998), the Giller-nominated Mount Appetite and conclude with the GG-nominated Gargoyles in 2006, is a run of quality short-fiction that our country has only rarely seen. Individually, the stories offer a subtly unexpected gut-punch that will leave you as perplexed as a batter who’s just whiffed on an Estrada changeup.

Andrew Faulkner: Margaret Atwood and Tom Glavine

Name a line or sentence by Margaret Atwood. I bet you can't. And even if you were an Atlanta Braves fan c. 1987-2002, I imagine you'd be hard-pressed to remember Tom Glavine's presence on the mound. He was rarely overpowering and frequently overshadowed by the more dazzling Maddux or Smoltz. But he was almost uniformly effective, remarkably consistent in his precision and the deception of his off-speed pitches, and workman-like in his output.You see where I'm going with this—Atwood is our Glavine, and since she first appeared she has been one of the defining, generational talents in CanLit's rotation. Like the Atlanta lefty, Atwood never had blazing stuff, but she executed to near-perfection, grinding out her craft with a cold precision that left readers—and other writers—looking on in awe at her consistency, her output, and her ability to work with such apparent ease.Both are award-laden. Both are advocates for their people, Glavine as a long-serving union rep dating back to baseball's years of labour strife, and Atwood as a constant voice for libraries, for writers, and for the common decency of literature. Both are still present as elder statespersons. Peggy will die at her desk. Tom will keel over in an announcer's booth. When they're both gone, ball fans and readers alike will tell their children: we saw the best at their best and it was glorious.

Leigh Nash: Lisa Robertson and Liván Hernández

I tend to favour position players in baseball, but the poet in me can’t resist a good constraint—hence my dream-team combo of Lisa Robertson and Liván Hernández. Both are expats—Robertson now lives in France, and Hernández was a Cuban defector when he made it to the big leagues—practising their craft away from the familiar, but still recognized as stars back home. Robertson has published books with a number of different publishers, while Hernández played for ten different teams over the course of his major-league career, and both stand alone as more than the sum of where they’ve published or pitched. Both are consistent—Robertson publishes a new work every couple of years, while over the course of a ten-year span Hernández never threw less than 199 innings a season. Neither has made many missteps—Hernández was an especially great defensive pitcher. Both are known for owning a distinctive style. Robertson’s books are often constraint-based but experimental; her writing sets you up and hooks you in over the long haul—her most recent book, Cinema of the Present, comes to mind—rather than blowing you away with single lines. Hernández, known for his signature slow hook curveball, also played the long game, becoming a finesse pitcher rather than relying on velocity as he aged. One could argue that Robertston is finding that same finesse now—and that she’s likely to make it through her next seven books without a single error, just like Hernández.

E Martin Nolan: Kilby Smith-McGregor and Anibal Sanchez/Josh Wilson

The dominant imagery in Kilby Smith-McGregor’s Kids in Triage moves from red-to-blue. Asked if that was by design in The Puritan’s annual Omnibus Interview, she told me “the red/blue thing was immediately evident” and that she wrote one later poem because “the collection needed more blue.” She continued, “in poetry, I’m keen on principles of composition that serve (or supplant) the function narrative might in prose.” But while the use of colour helps thread the book’s separate poems together, that thread also at times creates “false narratives” that “complicate and destabilize” reader expectations. Pitchers use a similar technique. Let’s consider a pitcher’s basic compositional unit as the outing: a distinct sequence of pitches isolated within one game. The longer that sequence is, the more the “principles of composition” come into play. A successful starting pitcher faces the opposing lineup 3 or 4 times, so to keep them guessing he needs a wide array of pitches at his disposal. This is why a starter generally needs more than two good pitches, because otherwise hitters would more easily figure out his patterns. A reliever, pitching over a shorter span, can get away with less possible variations but still needs to be able to surprise. As I wrote this, Detroit Tigers starter Anibal Sanchez carried a no-hitter into the seventh inning against the Kansas City Royals. All of his pitches were working like “false narratives” that the Royals kept guessing wrong: the fastball had movement, the change up deceived, and the curveball ducked below bats. As Smith-McGregor establishes and subverts the contrast between red and blue, Sanchez played the pitches off each other to “complicate and destabilize” the batters’ expectations, much to a Tigers fan’s onlooking delight. His no-no was lost in the seventh, but he left with a 1-0 lead. Sanchez was replaced by Josh Wilson. He’d been hurt, and his slider was not working, so Wilson stuck mostly to his decent fastball. Rightly guessing he’d be offering up the fastball, the Royals hit a homer and a triple off of him, erasing the Tigers lead en route to a comeback win. Wilson’s composition needed more slider. Tigers fans suffered for its lack.

Joseph Thomas: Greg Maddux and Ernest Hemingway

Ernest Hemingway and Greg Maddux—two titans of their craft—could be summarized in two words. The first is efficiency. Both men were remarkably focused upon doing as much as they could with as little as possible. Hemingway tried to pack as much meaning as he could into short, simple sentences. This made him, amongst his nothing-if-not wordy modernist peers, unique. Maddux similarly stood out from the pack, flamethrowers like Randy Johnson, Roger Clemens, and Dwight Gooden. His fastball famously averaged around 85 MPH later in his career (barely enough to get a high school scout to turn his head). His bread-and-butter was that most basic behaviour of the baseball: spin. He relied upon a masterful changeup and an arsenal of slower, moving pitches. He wasn’t afraid to let batters swing. Strikeouts might be sexier, but he knew that an out on the ground was as good as one at the plate. Better, in many cases. To pitch a “Maddux”—a complete game shutout in less than 100 pitches—remains revered today.The second word is precision. Maddux’s command is legendary. He was so successful because he managed to put the ball exactly where he wanted, and exactly where the batter didn’t. Rather than overpower the batter, he aimed to induce weak contact—putting the right spin on a ball in the right place virtually guarantees a ball on the ground. Hemingway kept the ball on the ground in his own way. His philosophy was to keep his language as simple as possible—to cut what he referred to as the “ornament out”—and just say the thing he wanted to say. When William Faulkner—the highly-decorative Roger Clemens to Hemingway’s Maddux—complained in an interview that Hemingway had never used a word that might send his readers to the dictionary, he responded: "Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words? He thinks I don't know the ten-dollar words. I know them all right. But there are older and simpler and better words, and those are the ones I use." Wordiness was the enemy. Every word had to do something, had to hold weight, helping him tighten like a gyre around that one, impossibly true sentence. If Hemingway was concerned with finding le mot juste, Maddux hunted for le jeté juste. To throw high heat for the sake of it was, to him, the equivalent of wordiness. “The reason I think I’m a good pitcher,” he said, “is I locate my fastball and I change speeds. Period.” Could Hemingway have even summarized it that succinctly? Stacey May Fowles is an award-winning novelist and journalist. She is the co-editor of Best Canadian Sports Writing (ECW, 2017,) and the author of the essay collection Perfect Game (McClelland and Stewart, 2017.)D.D. Miller is a Toronto-based writer whose most recent book is Eight-Wheeled Freedom (Wolsak & Wynn, 2016), an examination of the modern revival of roller derby.Andrew Faulkner is the author of Need Machine (Coach House, 2013). He co-curates The Emergency Response Unit, a chapbook press, and lives in Picton, Ontario. He edited The Utility of Boredom: Baseball Essays by Andrew Forbes. Leigh Nash makes books with Invisible Publishing and The Emergency Response Unit. Mansfield Press published her first poetry collection, Goodbye, Ukulele, in 2010. She lives in Picton, Ontario. Joseph Thomas is a writer out of Toronto, ON. He is a recent graduate of The University of Toronto’s creative writing program. He regularly performs ritual sacrifices in the hopes that someone will want to buy his first novel and to keep Bryce Harper out of Yankee pinstripes.