You Know Me Al: A Busher's Letters

At one time early in the first part of the 20th century there was no question that baseball was the American pastime. That was a time that the name Ring Lardner was well known in sports writing and literary circles. The sports writing part was easy because that was his beat. The literary part is much harder to recognize but clearly the character of Jack Keefe has become an American classic. Does one need to be a baseball fan to appreciate this work? Hell, no. We all know, in sports or otherwise, this guy Keefe. Right? You know the guy with some talent who has no problem blaming the other guy for mistakes while he (or she) is pure as the driven snow. That is the concept that drives these stories told in the form of letters to Al, his buddy back home. The language, the malapropisms and the schemes all evoke an early more innocent time in sport and society. I do not believe that you could create such a character based on today's sport's ethic. They would all have a spokesperson `spinning' their take on the matters of the day. The only one that might have come close is Nuke LaRouche in the movie Bull Durham but as that movie progressed Nuke was getting `wise'. Read these stories. More than once.

In the early days before ballplayers made a few billion dollars a year there was a young pitcher by the name of Jack Keefe who got called up from the minors to pitch for Comiskey's Chicago White Sox. He tells the story of this and his whole season in a series of letters to his friend ,Al. These letters are written in a special colloquial style and include the spelling and grammatical errors of the young pitcher, and also his quite surprising startling and humorous language. This is what this classic work of American humor is largely about. And while it is filled with sarcasm and a kind of mockery at the arrogance and naievete of its main character it also presents a picture of the baseball world of those days in the terms and language of that world. A small American classic.

I had not never heard of Ring Lardner until a visit to his home town in Niles Michigan right near outside of Kalamazoo. Born in Niles Michigan in 1885 Lardner was a sports writer for the Chicago Tribyoon but he is best well known for these busher letters that he rote as instalmints for The Satirday Eevning Post. The best letters were collected for this book You Know Me Al that were first published in 1914. It cronikles a bushers rise to the major league threw a serious of letters written to his pal Al in Bedford Illinoy. Jack Keefe is a right hander pitcher who has got some good stuf but he is offten his own worse enemy. He sees the baseball world round him threw child inocents seeing his skills as supeerier to every one. Think Nuke LaLoosh in Bull Durham. His qwik tempurr shows when he looses it is because he got no support from his team and so he blaims every one but him. And in these letters to his pal Al he shows how all too human he is even as he shows no skill with girls his team mates his manager or at writing. No atemped is made to kleen up miss-spelled words or fix up bad grammer. These letters show a glimpse into the great game of baseball threw the eyes of some one who played for Charles Comiskey, ohner of the White Sox and against Ty Cobb and Walter Johnson. You dont have to be a fan of the game to like this book. In fact I never knowed what a fadeaway fast ball was until I red this book. It is a fast ball that when the hitter hits it it fades away over the fence. And it can be red in a lot of ways. As historik fikshun a baseball book or a caractor study that shows that athaletes even then lived in a difrent world then ours. You can't not like this book. Hily reckomended.

This amusing look at baseball circa 1914 by sportswriter Ring Lardner (1885-1933) remains among the sport's top fiction. The story is told through a series of letters written by pitcher Jack Keefe of the Chicago White Sox to his buddy Al back home in Indiana. Keefe is a modestly talented pitcher finally getting his chance in the big leagues. Keefe is naive and immature, he has an excuse for every failure, and his childish emotions range greatly according to how his last game went. The author uses many real baseball figures in this story (Ty Cobb, Sam Crawford, manager Nixie Callahan, etc.) and that lends an added layer of authenticity. This book also mixes readable prose with down home wit, and the result is a highly amusing novel in the style of Mark Twain.

The travails of the boastful, blame-shifting, naive-unto-the-point-of-stupidity White Sox rookie first went into print 85 years ago. It's one of the miracles of 20th century fiction -- or a comment on the eternal childishness of America's national pastime -- that the bush leaguer's absurd confidences to a friend back home are still fresh and funny. "I have not worked yet Al and I asked Callahan to-day what was the matter and he says I was waiting for you to get in shape. I says I am in shape now and I notice that when I was pitching in practice this A.M. they did not hit nothing out of the infield. He says That was because you are so spread out that they could not get nothing past you. He says The way you are now you cover more ground than the grand stand. I says Is that so? And he walked away." Yeah, this is clearly the same sport where the portly John Kruk turned aside a question a few years ago about conditioning with the Bartlett's-worthy, "We're not athletes. We're ballplayers." Lardner does more than get laughs at the expense of his dense protagonist, though. He gives an intimate picture of baseball in its first classic era -- the busher comes face to face with Ty Cobb and Tris Speaker and Walter Johnson with interesting results. But it's not a sentimental depiction of the age: Among those with whom the busher crosses paths is the famously parsimonious and autocratic White Sox owner, Charles Comiskey. The book gives a hint of the resentments that led his players to agree to throw a World Series (as they did a few years after Lardner wrote "You Know Me Al") and illustrates the indentured servitude that all but the best players endured before free agency arrived in the mid-'70s.