SOURCE: "Baseball and Baseball Talk in The Old Man and the Sea," in Fitzgerald/Hemingway Annual, 1975, pp. 281-87.

[In the following essay, Barbour and Sattelmeyer argue that baseball and baseball talk in The Old Man and the Sea serve as the boy Manolin's initiation into adulthood and establish a course of heroic action in the novella, as the struggles of baseball player Joe DiMaggio and Santiago are shown to be emblematic of humanity.]

Since the education and range of reference of so many of Hemingway's characters seem to come chiefly from the newspaper, he presents us with the curious problem of a modern novelist who increasingly requires historical annotation. This is especially true of his references to the world of sport, where the names of yesterday's heroes may evoke only bewilderment. For foreign readers and for Americans whose minds are uncluttered with old earned-run and batting averages, Hemingway's many baseball references, in particular, warrant explanation.¹ This is certainly true of The Old Man and the Sea where baseball forms the inner stitching of the story. As Philip Young notes, "Baseball stars are the heroes of this simple man [Santiago]; their exploits are the incidents, and the pennant races the plots of his mythologies."² But the old man's heroes are now obscure: Sisler, Luque, Gonzales, and perhaps even McGraw have faded from popular memory; DiMaggio alone endures, but the heroic significance of his bone spur, to which there are repeated references, has been forgotten. These figures, their exploits, and Santiago's conversations about the game need to be examined within the framework of the old man's struggle with the sea.

Superficially "baseball talk" serves as a kind of masculine small talk in The Old Man and the Sea. Santiago and Manolin pass the time during supper talking about the pennant race in the American League; later the old man recalls that the conversations were a way of whiling away the hours "at night or when they were storm-bound by bad weather."³

How baseball functions on this level can best be seen in an earlier Hemingway story, "The Three-Day Blow," where the conversation serves to relax Nick Adams and his friend Bill (it performs much the same function that whiskey does later in the story) and to introduce Nick's cynical mood:

"What did the Cards do?" [Nick asks.]

"Dropped a double-header to the Giants."

"That ought to cinch it for them."

"It's a gift," Bill said. "As long as McGraw can buy every good ball player in the league there's nothing to it."

"He can't buy them all," Nick said.

"He buys all the ones he wants," Bill said. "Or he makes them discontented so they have to trade them to him."

"Like Heinie Zim," Nick agreed.

"That bonehead will do him a lot of good."

Bill stood up.

"He can hit," Nick offered. The heat from the fire was baking his legs.

"He's a sweet fielder, too," Bill said. "But he loses ball games."

"Maybe that's what McGraw wants him for," Nick suggested.

"Maybe," Bill agreed.⁴

Like any kind of "in" talk, that of baseball has its own vocabulary with words such as "doubleheader" (now a part of the idiom) and "bonehead."⁵ Problems for all but the most knowledgable baseball historians are posed in the cryptic remarks about Heinie Zimmerman, third baseman of the New York Giants, who had a reputation for making mental errors ("that bonehead"). Bill's reference is to the final game of the 1917 World Series, when Zimmerman had a runner trapped between third and home; rather than throw the ball, he held it and chased Eddie Collins of the White Sox across home plate for the run that opened up the game for the American League team. Because of his poor judgment the boys believe he won't do McGraw (manager of the Giants, 1902-32) much good. Perhaps, they conjecture, McGraw, who had a reputation as a gambler, acquired him to lose games—a remark reflecting the general suspicion about baseball that resulted from the fixed World Series of 1919.⁶

While this kind of talk, without the baseball slang, occurs in The Old Man and the Sea, conversations between Santiago and Manolin generally have a more serious function. Because "baseball talk" is shared by young and old, it is a means whereby the young demonstrate their ability to participate in an adult environment, while the adults may use baseball as an object lesson with appropriate analogies to life. Thus, baseball conversations are similar to rites of passage ceremonies: they serve as initiation talks in which Santiago is the teacher, Manolin the pupil, and baseball a topic through which desirable attitudes and behavior are taught.

Santiago's conversations reflect the simple fidelity that is so basic to his character—one has to trust one's team. The first talk, before Manolin goes to get the cast net and sardines, concerns the pennant race in the American League:

"When I come back you can tell me about baseball."

"The Yankees cannot lose."

"But I fear the Indians of Cleveland."

"Have faith in the Yankees my son. Think of the great DiMaggio."

"I fear both the Tigers of Detroit and the Indians of Cleveland."

"Be careful or you will fear even the Reds of Cincinnati and the White Sox of Chicago." (p. 18)

The old man's wise pronouncements about the pennant race are the product of his experience: he trusts in skill, strength, and endurance. He believes in the New York Yankees because they are the best team and have the best player, DiMaggio. In the end, skill is more important than chance and will win out ("The Yankees cannot lose"). It is chance, however, that is more evident in the daily scores, and it is these results that trouble Manolin:

"Tell me about baseball," the boy asked him.

"In the American League it is the Yankees as I said," the old man said happily.

"They lost today," the boy told him.

"That means nothing. The great DiMaggio is himself again."

"They have other men on the team."

"Naturally. But he makes the difference." (pp. 22-23)

The lesson Santiago teaches the boy is clear: if one does not trust what he knows to be true (that the Yankees are best), he will be overcome by fears—even by ones that are unfounded, such as fears of the inferior Chicago White Sox or of a team not even in the same league like the Cincinnati Reds.⁷ The old man's later struggle with the sharks exemplifies this lesson. He trusts to his skill and copes with adversity as it occurs: after killing the first dentuso, he tells himself, "Don't think, old man. . . . Sail on this course and take it [the struggle with the sharks closer in] when it comes" (p. 114).

Santiago's observations about the probable winners in the American and National Leagues are astute. (Of course, he is a prophet after the fact, for The Old Man and the Sea was written in January and February of 1951⁸ and focuses on the baseball season of 1950.) Making his predictions in September, the final month of the baseball season, Santiago correctly anticipates the winner of the American League and expertly qualifies his prediction in the National League. The New York Yankees won the pennant in 1950 and went on to win the World Series in four games. The Detroit Tigers and the Cleveland Indians finished second and fourth, three and six games behind the Yankees. The Chicago White Sox (whom it would be foolish for Manolin to fear) finished thirty-eight games out of first place.⁹ Of the National League Santiago said, "In the other league, between Brooklyn and Philadelphia I must take Brooklyn. But then I think of Dick Sisler and those great drives in the old park" (p. 23). The old man remembers Sisler for the home runs he hit in the old Tropical Park while playing winter ball in Havana. (Sisler led the Cuban Winter League in home runs in 1945-46; in a two day period he hit four home runs, one of which was the first ball to be hit completely out of the stadium.)¹⁰ The old man's fears about Brooklyn's chances are realized, for in the final game of the 1950 season against Brooklyn, Sisler hit a home run in the tenth inning to win the game and the National League title for the Philadelphia Phillies.

The old man and the young boy also discuss baseball managers. Santiago believes the best manager was not the great John J. McGraw of the New York Giants, who was also part owner of the Oriental Park racetrack in Havana:

"Tell me about the great John J. McGraw." He said Jota for J.

"He used to come to the Terrace sometimes too in the older days. But he was rough and harsh-spoken and difficult when he was drinking. His mind was on horses as well as baseball. At least he carried names of horses at all times in his pocket and frequently spoke the names of horses on the telephone."

"He was a great manager," the boy said. "My father thinks he was the greatest."

"Because he came here the most times," the old man said. "If Durocher had continued to come here each year your father would think him the greatest manager."

"Who is the greatest manager, really, Luque or Mike Gonzales?"

"I think they are equal." (pp. 24-25)

That the greatest managers in the eyes of Santiago and Manolin be two Cubans is appropriate. Both Mike Gonzales and Adolpho Luque managed in the winter leagues in Latin America. During a period when third-rate talent often filled the managerial ranks in the major leagues the two Cubans who had such a keen knowledge of the game¹¹ were relegated to coaching duties, Luque with the Giants and Gonzales with the Cardinals (where he served as interim manager in 1938 and 1940—a total of twenty-two games¹²). An unwritten law prevented the two from managing in the majors. As a player Gonzales caught for seventeen years in the big time, but it was Luque who truly excelled. He pitched for more than twenty years in the majors until he was forty-four (he won a World Series game at the age of forty-three): he had a total of 193 victories and was reputed to have the best curve ball in the game.¹³

But Joe DiMaggio is Santiago's hero. Unlike the others, DiMaggio has no association with Cuban baseball. However, the ball player has much in common with the old man: both are associated with fishing (DiMaggio's father was a fisherman, as Santiago mentions on page sixty-eight): both are strong men, although each has a physical weakness (Santiago's unreliable left hand cramps and DiMaggio has a bone spur in his heel); and each has had a recent streak of bad luck (Santiago has gone eighty-four days without a catch¹⁴ and DiMaggio missed almost half of the 1949 season because of his extremely painful heel).

Santiago refers repeatedly to DiMaggio's bone spur (pp. 75, 107, and 114). But the references are only the tip of the iceberg. Unstated but understood by the old man is the great centerfielder's courageous recovery. On June 28, 1949, with the season almost half over, DiMaggio joined the Yankees in Boston for a series against the league-leading Boston Red Sox. What followed was incredible. Not having faced major league pitching in more than eight months, DiMaggio proceeded to bat .455 in the three-game series, hitting four home runs and batting in nine runs.¹⁵ Little wonder that the old man tells Manolin, "he makes the difference."

DiMaggio's achievement in the face of pain and adversity provides a precedent for Santiago. DiMaggio overcame his difficulties to lead the Yankees to the pennant. The old man demonstrates the same indomitable will and courage. Betrayed by his old body as he attempts to preserve his fish in a shark-infested sea, the old man takes encouragement and resolve from the achievement of his hero. In staying with the fish and again in killing the first shark the old man thinks of the example set by the great Yankee center fielder: "I wonder how the great DiMaggio would have liked the way I hit him in the brain? It was no great thing, he thought. Any man could do it. But do you think my hands were as great a handicap as the bone spurs?" (p. 114)

The final function of baseball in The Old Man and the Sea is to establish a course of heroic action. Baseball heroes—and particularly the gifted DiMaggio—demonstrate what is great in man: his skill, his endurance, and, most of all, his courage. The same qualities are apparent in the old man. In their struggle and in their victory DiMaggio and Santiago are emblematic of humanity. Thus, baseball hero and humble fisherman demonstrate the possibility of human achievement. In a thoughtful moment Santiago muses, "I wonder what a bone spur is. . . . Maybe we have them without knowing it" (p. 107). Perhaps we do. Considering our metaphorical bone spurs, perhaps all accomplishments are heroic.

Notes

¹ Roger Asselineau's error indicates the problems inherent in Hemingway's references to sport: in the two-volume Pleiade edition of Hemingway's works, he erroneously identifies Frankie Frisch, the Hall of Fame second baseman, as "a celebrated agnostic." The pitfalls for literary scholarship seem endless, for George Monteiro, who exposes Asselineau's mistake in "Hemingway's Pleiade Ballplayers" (Fitzgerald/Hemingway Annual 1973, 299-301) is himself in error in spelling Frisch's name "Fritsch" and in consenting to Asselineau's assumption that the events of "The Three-Day Blow" transpired in 1916. Nick's reference to Heinie Zimmerman as a "bonehead" places the story sometime after the 1917 World Series when the third baseman pulled his well-publicized mental error.

²Ernest Hemingway: A Reconsideration (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1966) p. 103.

³ (New York: Scribners, 1952), p. 43. References will be taken from this edition and cited parenthetically within the text.

⁴The Nick Adams Stories (New York: Scribners, 1972), p. 207.

⁵ For an excellent account of baseball jargon and its currency in the American language see Tristram P. Coffin's chapter "Baseball Talk" in his book, The Old Ball Game: Baseball in Folklore and Fiction (New York: Herder and Herder, 1971), 51-75.

⁶ The disillusionment with baseball is mentioned by Bill Smith (Bill in "The Three-Day Blow") in an interview with Donald St. John: "[Hemingway] liked to follow baseball in those days but it was hard for him to become passionate about anything he couldn't do well himself. And I think he was disillusioned, like all the rest of us, by the Chicago Black Sox scandal of 1919, the first summer he was back from the war"—"Interview with 'Bill Gorton'," in Bertram D. Sarason, ed., Hemingway and the Sun Set (Washington: NCR, Microcard Editions, 1972), p. 171.

⁷ Another version of why Hemingway included the Cincinnati Reds in the conversation is given by Richard A. Davidson in "Carelessness and the Cincinnati Reds in The Old Man and the Sea," Notes on Contemporary Literature, 1(1971), 11-13.

⁸ Carlos Baker in Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story (New York: Scribners, 1969, pp. 489-490) notes that Hemingway began writing after the Christmas holidays of 1950. "By January 17th, his manuscript stood at 6,000 words, about a quarter of the whole." On February 6th he wrote to a friend that he had been averaging about a thousand words a day and "by February 17th it stood virtually finished."

⁹The Baseball Encyclopaedia (New York: Macmillan, 1969), p. 368.

¹⁰ Samuel E. Longmire, "Hemingway's Praise of Dick Sisler in The Old Man and the Sea," American Literature, 42 (March 1970), 96-98.

¹¹ 'Gonzales, an excellent appraiser of talent, was used frequently by the Cardinals as a scout. He is credited with the oft-quoted phrase that has doomed many a promising prospect, "Good field, no hit."

¹²Baseball Encyclopaedia, p. 2216.

¹³ Luque's exceptional ability is supported by the veteran baseball writer Bob Broeg, who picked him as one of five pitchers on an all-star team of National League players from 1919-1937 (The Sporting News, 1 February 1975, 32).

¹⁴ Robert Broadus reports that Hemingway selected eighty-four as a number that would break Zane Grey's record eighty-three consecutive days without a catch ("The New Record Set by Hemingway's Old Man," Notes & Quotes, 10 n.s. [March 1963], 152-153).

¹⁵ Joe Reichler and Ben Olan, Baseball's Unforgettable Games (New York: Ronald Press, 1960), pp. 167-168. For DiMaggio's own account see "It's Great To Be Back," Life, 27 (1 August 1949), 66-70 ff.