Review: The Dixon Cornbelt League and Other Baseball Stories

The Dixon Cornbelt League and Other Baseball Stories by W.P. Kinsella
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A friend once observed to me that there’s ultimately no difference between a taco, a burrito, a tostada, or any number of other Mexican dishes. They’re all the same ingredients, in slightly different proportions. My answer then, as now, was that it didn’t especially matter; they all tasted good in any case.

I think that general principle may apply to Kinsella as well. You know what you’re going to get almost every time: baseball, some fantastic element, and a character confused by the speed of modern life. I enjoyed The Iowa Baseball Confederation and Shoeless Joe as much as anyone back in the day, and it’s like slipping into a Mexican restaurant to come back to him in reading these stories. It’s familiar and, even if it doesn’t seem special next to his better work, it still tastes good.

That’s a bottom line assessment: I found two-thirds of these nine stories to be pleasant enough, ones I read, enjoyed and turned the page on. As I reflect on reading them just a few days ago, I have to cheat to look at the table of contents to be reminded of them.

That said, there are three that have stuck with me, and I don’t have to refresh my memory on them. They’re the kind that linger a while. They are, in an easy metaphor that seems appropriate for Kinsella, solid hits.

The first one in the collection, “The Baseball Wolf,” tells the story of a ballplayer in an imaginary country sandwiched between Haiti and the Dominican Republic who develops the capacity to become a wolf. It’s a variation on the werewolf story in that he wants the power. Our narrator discovers there’s nothing off about the transformation. It’s a fulfillment rather than a curse. And it helps the guy play baseball as well. There’s something about it, though, that’s gripping and inspiring.

One of the later ones, “Searching for January,” is more a single scene than a narrative, but it has a strange beauty to it. A man wandering the beach is startled to see Roberto Clemente come ashore in a raft. It’s been 15 years since Clemente’s plane crashed, but the Hall-of-Famer thinks no time has passed at all. He’s back, and he wants to play for the Pirates again. When the narrator explains that it’s 1987, Clemente decides he’d rather go back into the mist, back to where he might be able to find his own time.

Kinsella makes us do most of the heavy lifting ourselves – which is a good thing in a story – but I take it to mean that Clemente the character has come to understand that he is wedded to his own time. He might “survive” as a figure in a transformed world, but he meant something particular when he risked his life in 1972 to carry supplies to earthquake-ravaged Nicaragua. He would necessarily mean something else in 1987, something diminished, so he resolves to seek his own past rather than live someone else’s present.

I admire the story for the way it suggests the power of a baseball player to represent something more than himself. It insists on the potential of a surpassing player to be a metaphor for his team, his moment, and even his culture. Clemente excelled at all that in 1972, and he won’t settle for the shadow of it in 1987.

The best of these, though, is the last one, the title story. In it, our narrator is a college player who, drafted highly as a junior, has a lousy senior year. When no one drafts him, his agent finds him a spot in a tiny independent league no one seems ever to have heard of.

Everything is idyllic, almost too much so. For a moment I was irritated by Kinsella’s saccharine description, but I forgave him when the truth emerged. There is, in fact, no league. The small town has a team, but it plays only scrimmages against itself. It exists to help populate the small town which is hemorrhaging its youth. The team draws new citizens who, finding the place appealing, marry local girls and stay.

What’s even more compelling, though, is the way the community conducts its scouting. It looks for players with real skill who come slowly to recognize that they “choke,” that they don’t deliver when the pressure rises. There’s nothing wrong with such people. In fact, when they relax and accept that about themselves – when they realize they’d be happier in small town Iowa than in a big-league city – they have the opportunity for a happiness that seems otherwise impossible in late 20th Century America.

I got my 11-year-old son to read this, and he characterized it as asking, What do you love more: the game or the games? That is, do you prefer the idea of the game, the possibility you feel every time you pull on your glove or put on your cleats, or do you prefer the actual competition where, in ways beneath that Platonic ideal, you scrap to do your best and win the game?

It's a great question, but it’s even more provocative because Kinsella’s answer – the answer that’s built into the story from its premise – becomes the foundation for a whole community, for a whole way of life. The people of the community use baseball to build their town, and then they use the town to build baseball. Each institution is a dream – the town and the team – and each functions to make the other real.

It’s Kinsella at his best, as I see it, and that means something awful good to chew on. I read this one as part of my mission to find material for the class my friend Will and I are team-teaching, and I think this final short story (and maybe the Clemente one as well) is the first sure thing I’ve come across for what we’re doing.


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