Literature and the Mets

This weekend, Hofstra University hosted a symposium honoring the fiftieth anniversary of the New York Mets:

Judy Van Sickle Johnson, a former English teacher at Phillips Academy, presented “Literature, the New York Mets, and the Tug of Baseball.” She summed up (Jose) Reyes’s return (as a Marlin) with a local literary comparison: It’s a little like Jay Gatsby seeing Daisy Buchanan again—the woman he loved so passionately and innocently in his youth, hated losing, and now she’s back in his life, as beautiful as ever. But she doesn’t really want him anymore, and he can’t have her. It’s a bittersweet experience—the love he feels for her is still genuine and it’s still there, but his affection is mixed with the ache of longing and the sting of loss. In “The Great Gatsby,” Fitzgerald described a stretch of wasteland along West Egg as a “valley of ashes.” Since 1964, the Mets have called that spot home. In Reyes’s absence, many Mets fans have turned their affection toward R. A. Dickey, a knuckleball pitcher with a scruffy beard and a slight Southern drawl. Dickey was particularly adored among the literary types at the Hofstra conference: he majored in English literature at the University of Tennessee, recently named one of his bats “Hrunting,” after Beowulf’s sword, and has a new memoir memoir out, titled “Wherever I Wind Up: My Quest for Truth, Authenticity and the Perfect Knuckleball.” Currently, we hear, Dickey is reading “Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman,” by Haruki Murakami, and two months ago he climbed Mount Kilimanjaro, inspired an Ernest Hemingway short story. Earlier in the week, Dickey lamented that he could not attend the conference—the Mets flew out to Colorado late on Thursday evening—and talked about the influence Hemingway had on his own book. “I think one of the keys to writing is who can say the most while writing the least,” he said. Dickey can relate: he’s been the Mets’ most reliable pitcher during the past two seasons, despite boasting an arsenal of just two pitches—a knuckleball and fastball. “Hemingway mastered that. Most of what he wrote could resonate with the human condition and he draws from that deeply.”

Knuckleball pitchers (other than me) are cool.