The Bazaar of Bad Dreams

Yeah, it’s about baseball, but give it a chance, okay? You don’t have to be a sailor to love the novels of Patrick O’Brian, and you don’t have to be a jockey – or even a bettor – to love the Dick Francis mysteries. Those stories come alive in the characters and the events, and I hope you’ll find a similar liveliness here. I got the idea for this tale after watching a postseason playoff game where a bad call resulted in a near riot at Atlanta’s Turner Field. Fans showered the field with cups, hats, signs, pennants, and beer bottles. After an umpire was bonked on the head with a pint whiskey bottle (by then empty, of course), the teams were pulled from the field until order could be restored. The TV commentators moaned about poor sportsmanship, as though such ventings of disgust and outrage had not gone on at America’s ballparks for a hundred years or more.

I’ve loved baseball all my life, and wanted to write about the game as it was in a time when such energetic demurrals, accompanied by declarations of ‘Kill the ump!’ and ‘Buy him a Seeing Eye dog!’ were considered a valid part of the game. A time when baseball was almost as smashmouth as football, when players slid into second base with their cleats up, and collisions at the plate were expected rather than outlawed. Those were days when the reversal of a call based on a TV replay would have been regarded with horror, for the umpire’s word was law. I wanted to use the language of those earlier ballplayers to summon up the texture and color of mid-century sporting America. I wanted to see if I could create something that was both mythic and – in a horrible way – sort of funny.

I also had a chance to put myself in the story, and I loved that. (My first paying gig as a writer was as a sports reporter for the Lisbon Enterprise, after all.) My sons call that sort of thing ‘metafiction.’ I just think of it as fun, and I hope that’s what this story is: good old-fashioned fun, with the last line cribbed from a great movie called The Wild Bunch.

And watch out for the blade, Constant Reader. It is a Stephen King story, after all.