HOBART

Baseball Interview: Nick Ripatrazone

 

First up, I feel almost required to start with: why baseball? Did you grow up playing the sport? Who’s your team?

Baseball has always been the most fantastical of sports for me--although it’s comparably slow-moving (at least in relation to basketball and football), it feels like there are so many individual and group possibilities within a single game. I grew up watching Home Run Derby reruns, and have always viewed the game within similar iconic contexts.

I did play through high school, first as a starter, then a relief pitcher. I had a nagging shoulder problem, and left baseball to run track, but definitely missed the sport, especially the control and dynamic of being up there on the mound, the chance to win the game or let it go to shit.

I have to say the Yankees--I know it’s a common choice, but my family’s from the Bronx, and I was a sucker for the Gehrig/Ruth mystique. I still go to games when I can.



Second, and this will probably be either a seemingly-obvious-to-ask question, or a dumb one, but I feel I have to ask: were these guys (Barrett Stickle, King Dolan, etc.) real people? If so, how and where did you find them; and, if not, were there inspirations or research?

The players depicted in the book are not directly real, but they are certainly amalgamations of real players, teams, situations, etc. And I do mention some actual players, like Addie Joss. The sum collective is the archetypal dead-ball era player: scrappy, fresh, sometimes prone to off-the-field trouble. I’ve always been fascinated by Ty Cobb (even his name sounds larger-than-life), as well as players like Sam Crawford, who is legendary for hitting triples.

Now that I really think about it, that’s the defining thing for me about the era--a triple is a hustle-hit: a down in the dirt, win or lose it all kind of risk that we don’t see as often anymore in the contemporary game. It’s certainly still a crowd favorite--in some ways, I think of it as the player over-extending himself. The guys of that area were absolutely athletic, of course, but I also get the sense that they learned the tricks of the game, and were willing to exploit them whenever possible.

I pored over baseball stats as a kid, even made my own extensive record books and gave them to my family at Christmas (they humored me). I went back to some of those old books for the occasional idea, but then took the fictional results wherever felt authentic as narratives.


Continuing that... were there any of these players (of your own creation, from the book) that you fell especially in love with during the writing (or even later? during the editing or collecting for the book?)? Any that you kind of wanted to keep going with, give more than the space of only a page? Any that you kind of wish had really existed?

Tris Hooper, the last in the final version of the book, was actually the first profile I wrote, and the character I feel is most deserving of a full story (or something longer). His fate at the end feels a bit unfair, but I think the trajectory of his narrative and life is really representative of the dead-ball aesthetic. And Noone Pender is a bit of a pathetic soul, and yet someone who intersected with greatness.

I wish Box Joseph was a real person--I’m sure he’s an archetype of sorts, particularly the passing of the game from father to son. Although my father was a football player, we did play baseball together--and I spent so much time playing with my older brothers, who really broke down the game for me, represented it as an art form. One of my brothers chose football over baseball at the University of Delaware, and it sometimes sounds like a lament from him--another missed opportunity of sorts that adds to the legend of the game.



Part of what I love about baseball, I think, (and you mention this above) is its tendency toward narrative -- something about its slow pace, and also the way it feels so segmented. Games, down to innings, down to at bats. I’m probably overreaching for metaphor here, but that segmentation seems to really lend itself to the writing in this particular book. And, along those lines, is the language itself -- both precise in the way the best short-shorts are, and the, for lack of better term, “baseball-ness” of it. “long arms, stood far from the plate.” “At the chest, at the heart, where a throw belongs.” This is not really a question and, admittedly, more an excuse to highlight the baseball phrasings that I love and that you used so effectively, but could you talk at all abut the form and language of these pieces?

Thanks for the compliment--I’m a huge fan of Don DeLillo’s End Zone: a book about football, not baseball, but certainly a book about identifiable moments of athletic action (as you say, “segments” of a larger whole). DeLillo captured the cadence of football, and I’ve absolutely wondered if an equivalent existed for baseball, a game that, despite its boundaries of inning and such, could theoretically go on forever. Baseball happens in bursts: crack of the bat, sliding into a base, the hold-your-breath moment of a fly ball lost in heavy sun. Since I knew I wanted to work within a truncated form, I really thought the sentences in the book should occur as bunts: sometimes quite short, others dribbling along.

In terms of form, baseball is a conundrum: 9 innings, 3 outs per inning, so we know the frame of nearly every game (ones that are not canceled because of weather, or the home team up in the bottom of the final inning). That said, I always enter a game with a strong optimism that it is bottom-heavy: there’s nothing worse than a strong first 3 innings and a boring final 6. I tried to make the profiles lead somewhere, at least emotionally, even if baseball games so often end with an anticlimactic whisper. Last summer I went to a Yankees game like that--rally in the 9th, bases loaded, ended on a strikeout. I think nearly everybody in the stadium remained in their seats a bit longer than necessary, hoping the game would go on.

First books, Hobart contributors and friends & more

Lots of exciting news to report from the lands of books and Hobart lately. Here's a round-up:

-Hobart contributor (issue 11) Steve Himmer's novel The Bee-Loud Glade is out now from Atticus Books and it is an amazing, wild ride of a book about a guy named Finch, a decorative hermit. Yes, really. Here's an excerpt, published first at PANK in a story called, "Be Your Own Boss:" 

Before getting fired I’d never measured how much empty time makes a day. I’d spent years writing blogs on the company’s dime, leading dozens of made-up lives with their own careers and diseases and hobbies, and all those voices I had to keep speaking carried me through each eight hours of work and through five days of the week in which enough tasks and chores piled up at home to last me the weekend. And now, with seven of seven days free? Without those extra lives to occupy mine and at home every day to keep up with the house? I’d always worked at one job or another and though I’d never enjoyed it, that’s what I knew. As often as I might have imagined winning the lotto and quitting my job, now that I’d come closer than ever all that shapeless, idealized freedom had lost its appeal.

-Hobart contributor ("Not Hearing the Jingle") Brian Allen Carr's story collection Short Bus is out now from Texas Review Press. I got the book in the mail yesterday and have been reading it in little bursts. The stories are at turns grotesque, disturbing, hilarious and heartbreaking. Here's an excerpt from the first story, the terrific "Running the Drain" which first appeared in NOÖ Journal:

I’ll jump a bus to the coast at Tampico. I’ll rent a palapa and lay in a hammock in the shade. I’ll drink quarts of Corona with slices of lime. In the evenings the woman at the inn will slaughter a chicken and roast it over an open flame. The skin will crack and pop as the coals burn bright red below. When the bird is cooked she’ll wrap it in foil. I’ll buy half of the chicken. She’ll bring me a plate of onions, cilantro and lime. She’ll bring me corn tortillas and grilled Serrano peppers. I’ll eat giant mouthfuls, sucking down beer and salty air between bites. I’ll sleep with the inn keeper’s daughter. She’ll be fourteen, but her body will be mature. She’ll smell like cinnamon toasting in a cast-iron pan. My hammock will sway with our sex. I will not stay in Tampico. The beach is corrosive.

-And a sneak peak at Matt Bell's next book Cataclysm Baby in an interview with our own Aaron Burch over at the Ninth Letter blog. Here's an excerpt: 

When I wrote ["Abelard, Abraham, Absalom"], I didn't have any idea that I was beginning something larger, or at least not until I was nearly done with the first revision of it. There's a passage in that story that in, some ways, generated the larger book: "For our baby, a name chosen from a book of names. Each name exhausted one after the other. Sequenced failure." Once that emerged from the writing, I saw that it could be the structure for a series of the shorts, in which I could write out all these failed families, these futures that mostly didn't pan out. So from describing the project, it might sound like I had a "project" in mind that I then set about figuring how to write, and maybe that's partially true.

I like what Matt has to say here about a project coming together organically, in such a way that structure of the larger whole emerges from the dramatic potential of the language or the implication of idea, stacked, waiting to be realized. This book seems really exciting.

-Hobart friend and contributor Blake Butler's novel There Is No Year is out in the world now. Excerpt from The Collagist, called "What the Mower Found:"

The mother mowed the yard again. She mowed the yard, the yard, a prayer. The mother was slick with sweat. Her skin was red in certain places from sun and where she’d scratched herself to keep the ants and bees off. The insects swarmed her head no matter how fast she moved. They had wings and teeth and eyes. They swarmed the yard, the street, the long horizon. The mother had mowed the yard twenty-seven times in the last week. Sometimes she’d go on for hours. Her biceps and pectorals were getting meaty. The grass was going dead around the edges from where the mother had pushed the mower so much. The mother kept her eyes wide and turned her head back and forth from side to side. Where was the man who’d fixed the mower? What else could he put a hand to? All those surrounding lawns on all those houses.

-I'll be at the Juniper Literary Festival at UMass Amherst starting tomorrow with Hobart books and journals (and a couple flasks for new subscribers!). Stop by the table if you're in Western Mass. Bonus, for doing so: Hobart friend (and contributor) Roy Kesey is reading tomorrow night at 7:30! And, I'll be moderating a panel on first books and the publishing process, featuring Cynthia Arrieu-King, Margaret Luongo, Kiki Petrosino, Mira Bartok and Pam Thompson on Saturday at 2:45. Come see me be really nervous and ask some really talented writers and poets some questions about book publishing. I'd like to imagine you all in your underwear.

more about baseball from a lit blog we like:

The hypothetical Temple wasn’t destroyed, it fell apart brick by brick, and the team’s followers have waited in vain year after year for it to be rebuilt.  Some serious fanatics will cling to the idea that this is the year when they will be delivered, but the more pragmatic followers know better than to keep hoping.

Even if you don’t care about sports, you have to know about the plight of the Chicago Cubs; know that there is not a single franchise like them in professional sports, and know that in the great love affair that is Jews and baseball, there is no one team that mirrors the idea of a seemingly never ending quest quite like the loveable losers from the North Side.

team HOBART plays ball

Hobart friend, contributor, interviewee (2 x!), and fellow QUICKIES reader just this last weekend, Kyle Beachy, is excited about baseball and wrote up this amazing, kind of mini-essay:

It’s American, of course, with its odd balance of isolation and teamwork, a distinct division of labor. Stand roughly here in the grass or dirt and be ready because nobody can predict, man, when the ball might come your way. Chew whatever you like. Spit. When it comes, pursue the ball then throw it to the right place. Know beforehand to whom. Which is to say, plan ahead.