Name me a more perfect game! Name me a game with more possibilities for magic, wizardry, voodoo, hoodoo, enchantment, obsession, possession. There's always time for daydreaming, time to create your own illusions at the ballpark. I bet there isn't a magician anywhere who doesn't love baseball.

—W. P. Kinsella, The Iowa Baseball Confederacy

Baseball is a game without limits. It is a game of infinite possibilities not measured by seconds ticking off a stadium clock, nor by the parameters of an enclosed playing field. A baseball game may continue until Armageddon unless both teams are able to put out twenty-seven batters, and though a team may be losing by one hundred runs there is always the possibility of redemption in the bottom of the ninth. The baseball field, too, is without limits. The foul lines extend infinitely outward, and no boundary determines how far a ball may be hit, or how far a fielder may track it to make a play. A pop fly may travel forever up into the blue sky. The only limits placed on a baseball game are the limits supposed by those who play in it, the limits—forever expanding—of our accomplishments.

It is this notion of unlimited possibility that makes baseball the most magical of games, a sport in which anything can happen. Two recent novels focus on the boundless possibilities inherent in baseball, but from very different perspectives. W. P. Kinsella's The Iowa Baseball Confederacy employs baseball as a magical vehicle for self-discovery across the realistic limits of time. The book also includes a particular baseball contest that makes the most of possibility; it is a game that you will never forget.

Every Young Man's Dream, a first novel by Morry Frank, also suggests that baseball is imbued with magical powers, particularly having to do with the redemption of lost souls and marginally talented minor league ballplayers. Darrel Skaits, a terminally minor league shortstop, narrates this book and manages to kill off the magic not only of baseball, but of life and literature as well. Though Darrel suggests that baseball could redeem his wayward life, he fails to capitalize on any of the magic inherent in the game. Rather than being redeemed, he is left regretful and mean.

Kinsella's novel is redolent with magic. When Gideon Clarke's father commits suicide by letting himself be hit in the head by a line drive at a Milwaukee Brewers game, Gideon discovers that a strange transformation has taken place in his own head; Gideon instantaneously inherits his father's knowledge about a baseball game played in 1908 between the Chicago Cubs and the Iowa Baseball Confederacy all-stars, Gideon also inherits his father's obsession to prove that the game actually occurred, though all records of it—including human memories—have for some reason been erased from the world.

It is not in the least unusual in Kinsella's magical world that Gideon Clarke steps through a crack in time back to the year 1908 to view the historic contest. The game itself slogs on through forty days of rain for 2,614 innings, during which time Gideon falls in love, meets Leonardo Da Vinci and President Theodore Roosevelt, and comes to understand that the game is being manipulated by a 300-year-old Indian whose wife's reincarnation depends on the Confederacy all-stars beating the Cubs.

Kinsella has created an entire world as unlikely and fathomless as the 2,614 inning game itself, a world reminiscent of Robert Coover's Universal Baseball Association. By manifesting the limitlessness of baseball and the potential for magical occurrence within the scope of the sport he manages to expand our conceptions of the possible. His novel is ultimately about love and obsession; by learning the secrets surrounding the Iowa Baseball Confederacy, and why the memories of it have been erased from men's minds, Gideon Clarke learns about the working of magic, and the possibilities of redemption that exist not only within baseball, but in the world.

In Morry Frank's Every Young Man's Dream, Darrel Skaits whines for several hundred pages about why he never made it to “the Bigs.” Mostly, Darrel claims, it is because certain managers and sportswriters took a dislike to him and ruined his career. It doesn't occur to Darrel that their dislike might have been caused by the fact that he is a thief, a rapist, and a misanthrope.

While baseball is not really central to this novel, the game does stand out as the only splash of hope in a dry, dirty world. It represents everything that could go right for a man; as in The Iowa Baseball Confederacy, baseball holds the possibility of redemption. If Darrel could just make it to the major leagues he would be a changed person.

But he does not make it to the bigs, and by the end of the novel the reader has joined forces with the managers and sportswriters who dislike Darrel Skaits so unequivocally. Morry Frank has created a character for whom there can be no sympathy, and Darrel's first person narrative becomes tiresome and offensive so early in the book that I kept reading only because I believed some kind of change was inevitable, that perhaps baseball would redeem Darrel in some way after all. While Morry Frank is a good storyteller—the structure of the book and the way it moves between the periods in Darrel's life resemble Bellow's narrative of the life of Augie March—the stories he tells are not pleasant and seem to lead nowhere.

Every Young Man's Dream suggests to us that the game of baseball contains magical possibilities. But the book itself and the life of its protagonist are completely without magic. Even the depiction of baseball in these pages is a portrait of unlikable, unlucky characters demonstrating their bodily functions in public and wishing there were something more to their worlds. They inhabit the kind of reality that exists in the wake of lost opportunities for redemption.