Book review: Pafko at the Wall by Don DeLillo

The dotted line shows Thomson's shot into the lower left field deck

It's baseball season and if you're a fan, your favorite major league team will have 162 chances, plus playoffs and the Series, to thrill or frustrate you.

Of course, if you're not a fan you have unlimited other entertainment options. That wasn't always so. Baseball isn't nearly what it once was in America, back when the world was much smaller and it was rightly called our national pastime. The high-water mark of that era is arguably October 3, 1951, when two New York City teams, the then-Brooklyn Dodgers and the New York Giants, fought it out for the National League pennant in a three-game playoff. The regular season had ended in a tie, the Giants fighting back from the dead by winning 37 of their last 44 games. Now it was uptown versus downtown, tenement versus townhouse. The loser in the bitter cross-town rivalry would take a long, disappointed subway ride home, taunted by opposing fans.

Bottom of the ninth and the three-game playoff is tied at one game apiece. Things look bad for the Giants—down two runs, one out, runners on second and third. Third-baseman Bobby Thomson up to bat against Dodgers reliever Ralph Branca. The great Willie Mays on deck, but he'd gone 0 for 3 in the game.

Thomson stepped up to the plate and took the first pitch, a strike. The second was a fastball, high and inside, and Thomson pulled it in a quavery arc over the left field wall, into the lower deck. The Dodgers' left fielder Andy Pafko could only watch "the shot heard 'round the world" sail over his head, and the game and the Dodgers' season were over.

Even if you know nothing about baseball maybe you're heard the meme—Giants announcer Russ Hodges, his voice almost gone, ecstatically shouting, "The Giants win the pennant! The Giants win the pennant!" Or you've seen the pictures: A pileup of Giant players at home plate, the field confettied in every kind of paper the crowd could toss.

Legendary sportswriter Red Smith wrote about the game the next day: "Now it is done. Now the story ends. And there is no way to tell it. The art of fiction is dead. Reality has strangled invention. Only the utterly impossible, the inexpressibly fantastic, can ever be plausible again." DeLillo takes up the challenge.

His novella Pafko at the Wall is set at the game and opens on Cotter Martin, a skinny fourteen-year-old Black kid who's skipping school and jumps the turnstiles to see the game. He finds himself seated next to a seemingly-nice older white guy named Bill who buys him a soda and peanuts.

We cut back and forth among Bill and Cotter, Hodges in the announcer's booth, the motley and raucous crowd, the action on the field, and the fictionalized dialogue of the crapulous foursome of Frank Sinatra, Jackie Gleason, Toots Shor, and the germophobic J. Edgar Hoover, all there to see the game. And, oh yeah, it's the day the Soviet Union announces it's perfected and test-fired a new atomic weapon.

Pafko (a stand-alone version of the prologue to DeLillo's immense novel Underworld) is ostensibly about that game, and the home run ball that skitters into the lower-deck to land at Cotter Martin's feet. But the thing is, DeLillo is never writing about just one thing, whether it's the storm cloud-heavy sense of dislocation and miscommunication that hangs over modern life (White Noise) or corporate greed (Cosmopolis) or modern technology (The Silence) or terrorism (Falling Man). He's writing about the mythology America creates of itself every day from its detritus of jargon and sports and politics and news flashes and popular culture.

Thomson's home run ball—the most famous ball in baseball history, maybe in any kind of history—clatters around the lower deck stands, everyone grabbing for it, including Cotter Martin. “He’s after the baseball now and there’s no time to ask himself why. They hit it in the stands, you go and get it. It’s the ball they play with, the thing they rub up and scuff and sweat on. He’s going up the aisle through a thousand pounding hearts. He’s prodding and sideswiping. He sees people dipping frantically, it could be apple-bobbing in Indiana, only slightly violent.”

Cotter ends up with it, secreting it in the pocket of his frayed blue jeans and making his way through the crowd. But Bill sees he has it and wants it too, that famous and valuable ball, and follows Cotter out of the stadium. Cotter can't break into a run, not in the white neighborhood outside the Polo Grounds.

The baseball turns up again and again, in different hands, as a mute witness in DeLillo's massive Underworld novel, a loosely woven set of stories about America in the second half of the twentieth century, but you don't have to read Underworld or anything else to enjoy the slim (96 pages) Pafko novella, and you can read the whole thing in less time than it takes to watch a game.

DeLillo is writing about baseball, about one game, one home run, one particular ball, but he's really writing about American myth-making, about the Cold War and racism and celebrity and tribalism and loss of innocence, about Hollywood endings and what comes after.

Whether you care about baseball or not, you'll care about Cotter Martin, and Pafko at the Wall will give you a deep sense of a uniquely American time and place. It's the book about baseball to read even if, or especially if, you hate baseball. One crack of the bat in a run-down stadium, the memories of people who saw it or claimed to see it or hear it on the radio, the fate of one baseball and one kid, all say more about our country in that era than any longer book could.