It’s funny, isn’t it, the things that change our lives?
Novelist Paul Auster, who passed away on Tuesday at the age of 77, may have owed his career to baseball.
From The Guardian:
The author was born in Newark, New Jersey, in 1947. According to Auster, his writing life began at the age of eight when he missed out on getting an autograph from his baseball hero, Willie Mays, because neither he nor his parents had carried a pencil to the game. From then on, he took a pencil everywhere. “If there’s a pencil in your pocket, there’s a good chance that one day you’ll feel tempted to start using it,” he wrote in a 1995 essay.
(Although this apocryphal story about Mays righting the wrong in the Columbia University magazine seems a bit far-fetched since he c.aims he didn’t know Charles Einstein, the writer who supposedly worked on the Hall of Famer’s memoir, Willie Mays: My Life in and Out of Baseball.)
Auster’s obituary in The New York Times noted “[H]is home was not a happy one, he wrote. His parents’ marriage was strained, and his relationship with his father was remote…. He took refuge in baseball, a lifelong passion, as well as books.”
In 2014, Auster submitted a letter to the Times in which he offered “a radical idea to speed up games” and no, it didn’t involved a pitch clock. He suggested:
Eliminate the two-strike foul ball as a neutral play (neither strike nor ball) and rule it a strike. To compensate for the advantage this would give the pitcher, allow the batter to go to first base after three balls instead of four.
Sportswriter and author Andy Martino posted this on X (I hope the link remains still valid by the time you read this.)
There’s more baseball-related items to be sure, but I’ll close with this:
is available on Amazon.com,
Comments on this entry are closed.