A Rare Baseball-Shakespeare Confluence

It's not often that there's an intersection of the disparate universes of Shakespeare and baseball. Yet even such distant areas of experience occasionally overlap.

A contributor to a Shakespeare discussion group of which I am a member recently wrote about Jim Bouton's Ball Four (1970) (a very good baseball book), "Like Bill Bradley's excellent Life on the Road, it was written from the player's perspective." If I remember correctly from my own reading, it neither sensationalized nor glamorized professional athletics.

This Shakespeare correspondent had "recently read Howard Bryant's earnest history of baseball in the 1990s called Juicing the Game (Viking, 2005) and was reminded that Ball Four did not make Bouton's fellow ballplayers happy." "Bouton revealed to the world what most everyone in baseball already knew, and what most people outside it suspected: Players took amphetamines.... They had girls in different cities.'  Ball Four sold two million copies but Bouton himself was ostracized and eventually harassed out of baseball."

Now comes the baseball-Shakespeare confluence. Juicing the Game reports that sometime after Ball Four appeared, Bouton was "on the mound against Cincinnati... when he heard the voice of Pete Rose bellowing from the top step of the dugout, 'Fuck you, Shakespeare'. Literary criticism has seldom been more explicit."   

It's a good story, but the correspondent to the Shakespeare list does not fully explicate its significance. "Fuck you, Shakespeare" uses the epithet "Shakespeare" as a generic term for a writer -- almost as though Pete Rose could not think of the name of any other author. Under ordinary circumstances, to call someone a Shakespeare would be laudatory. This particular usage is either a very uncommon or a unique instance of the epithet serving as a term of derogation. In a way, it's a tribute to Shakespeare's prominence. "Fuck you, Flaubert," had such words been bellowed by Pete Rose, would have carried a dissimilar valence.

I myself feel confident in surmising that Rose's acquaintance with Shakespearean drama -- and with the written word in general -- is less than profound. No one, even those who vastly admired the convicted rapscallion's skill with the bat, has ever confused 'Charley Hustle' with 'Bertie' Russell or Charley Dickens.

"Fuck you, Shakespeare" reminds me of two of my favorite baseball/intelligence anecdotes. The first is the laudatory evaluation of Yale-educated Yankee pitcher Ron Darling by his teammate, center-fielder Mickey Rivers: "he knows the answers to things what I don't even know the question of."  A second anecdote has a similar valence. I 'll call the participants in the following genuine conversation Player A and Player B because I no longer recall who they were (although I do remember that both were Yankees). Player A: "That guy is a total idiot." Player B: "What are you saying? He has an IQ of a hundred thirty." Player A: "Yeah?  Outta what?"

May 9.  My brother Jon called to say that Ron Darling never played for the Yankees. He hypothesizes a memory failure on my part: Darling was with the Mets and the center-fielder in question therefore must have been Mookie Wilson (former Rockies outfielder Preston Wilson's uncle and stepfather [note Hamlet reference] and the man who hit the grounder that went through Bill Buckner's legs). But the identification of Darling's admirer isn't crucial; let's just agree that he was someone with the linguistic competence of a Pete Rose.

Comments

[Don Z. Block]

Bouton wrote an entertaining and informative book. And he was hounded, but I think his sore arm also contributed to his career ending. He never gave up, though, and he did develop a knuckleball that enabled him to make a brief comeback.

Jim Brosnan also wrote at least two good books about baseball, and players were afraid to talk in his presence.