“The game was played hard in those days, Mr. King, with plenty of fuck-you.”
I’m a huge fan of Stephen King. I’m an even bigger fan of Stephen King’s short stories. And I was once an enormous baseball fan. Throw all that together (along with his dedication of “This is for every guy (and gal) who ever put on the gear.”), and it would appear that I had no choice but to dig “Blockade Billy.”
Baseball is not a new theme for King; hell, he somehow found a way to pen an entire story around a real-life pitcher, Tom “Flash” Gordon of King’s beloved BoSox. Yet he does a tremendous job of honoring the game’s past and honor, but in a way that comes across less sappy and sanctimonious than, say, “Field of Dreams” (the movie version).
Anyway, “Blockade Billy” slipped through the cracks a bit because it was released without much, if any fanfare, so I was a little late in stumbling upon it. It’s really just a short story that was hardbound and packaged with a “bonus” story, titled “Morality.” Much to my dismay, I had already read “Morality” when it appeared in Esquire magazine, so it was a bit of a disappointment when I started to read it and then recognized it after finishing “Blockade Billy.”
In the featured story, told in the voice of an old man in a nursing home being interviewed by the author, King paints the picture of a mysterious catcher named William “Billy” Blakely, who is called up to the majors thanks to an unfortunate string of injuries to other catchers dooms the season before it ever really starts (“We flew north that year instead of riding the rails, but it still felt like a train wreck.”). Though something about Billy seems to be a little “off,” he captures the imagination of the New Jersey Titans faithful, mostly due to his seemingly supernatural ability to block the plate despite his spindly frame (“Catchers should be built like fireplugs … This one looked like a bunch of broken ribs waiting to happen.”).
This aspect of the tale especially resonated with me a lot because, as I’ve watched so many horrific home-plate collisions over the years, I always wondered what would happen if a catcher got the ball a fraction quicker than the runner was expecting and simply lowered his shoulder into the runner instead of the other way around. I’ve always thought that it’s a little unfair that the catcher has to simply sit there and wait to get creamed even if he’s in a position to protect himself and the plate first. Maybe if a catcher one day set himself and lowered the boom on an incoming runner, the days of the catcher being the sacrificial lamb on the wrong end of hellacious train wrecks at home would be over.
Set in the 1950s, King does a tremendous job (as usual) of capturing the essence of the age. His vivid imagery and quick character sketches fill out the story in right around 80 pages, a feat that I still maintain is unique to King in all of American literature. He also sprinkles in his customary laugh-out-loud turns of phrase, such as describing someone as “as important in the great scheme of things as a low far in a high wind.”
Anyway, when “Blockade Billy” adds home run power to his skill set, he becomes a folk hero, though his teammates and coaches start to get an uneasy feeling about the unknown catcher from Nowhere, Iowa. Of course, it’s hard to shake the sense that this will and only can end badly, but that’s an ending for you to discover.
All in all, it’s yet another in a long line of King stories that leave you wishing for just a few more chapters, pages or even lines -- and you simply can’t ask for much more of an author of any level or genre.
“I turned to Joe. ‘How could a thing like this happen?’
“‘Because he was good,’ Joe said. ‘And because he wanted to play ball.’”
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