“a pinch of a bad Mexican hombre, a fun-loving Joe Pepitone, and a collegiate peacenik…liberalized, long-haired, mustachioed thinking pinko… [who if he] ever got too close to a police van at a protest mop-up…would find himself in need of a lawyer.”
The figure being described in the newspaper article excerpt quoted here is Lynn Sweet, the embodiment of 1960’s counterculture rebelling against the conventions and expectations of the 1950’s in a small town described as still being stuck in that decade even in 1965. So, essentially this is the story of the most conservative team sport in America in an equally conservative community being forced to face the fact that the world was changing. Baseball, once again, proves itself the most felicitous sport of them all for metaphor as the tale of a rebel defying convention becomes a metaphor for the entire era itself.
“[their coach] wore a Fu Manchu, dark sunglasses, long hair, and looked like Abbie Hoffman in a ball suit.”
The book takes place in the early seventies by which time the hippie counterculture had fully manifested itself into the mainstream. Not that the mainstream was particularly happy or even ready for it. Baseball, it must be stated affirmatively once again, is the most conservative of all the major American team sports. And so when a team allowed to fully embrace to look of the era arrives for an away game, notice is taken. For the record, Abbie Hoffman was at one time the hippie of all hippies, one of the infamous Chicago Seven, and author of Steal This Book.
“You’ve got to get rid of Lynn Sweet. That man is a communist.”
Drop a man with a Fu Manchu mustache who throws out all the individual desks in his classroom and replaces them with round tables, jettisons the official curriculum in favor of his own and then to top of it off manages a baseball team populated by players with long hair flowing from beneath their caps into any conservative town in America and there is going to be blowback. But the parent who one night stood up and not just railed against the methods of Sweet, but demanded he be run out of town on a rail like shady character in a 1930’s movies is really the epitome of those sections of America that the 1960’s was passing by completely unnoticed. The accusation of being a communist was straight out of the McCarthy-era 1950’s and is an act that encapsulates almost more than any other the divide between those small towns in the 1960’s that had hitched their train to progress and those struggling to hold onto the past in a way that history would be prove to be absolutely in vain. Well, not absolutely. Ultimately, this particular parent got exactly what he demanded.
Sweet told the Macon hitters to make a big show of taking their lone bat back to the dugout, then pretending to assess an unseen stock of choices before pulling the same one out of the bag, a subterfuge they took to with great enthusiasm.
Being a book about baseball, the narrative inexorably moves toward the Big Game. Or, in this case, The Big Season. The 1970/1971 season for the Macon Ironmen. And the Big Game against Bloomington; a high school with more students than Macon’s entire population. Books generally don’t get written about how Goliath beats up on David to win the championship that everyone expected them to win the first place. Sports stories thrive on the underdog. And there is almost nothing that can happen during a baseball game that more perfectly illustrates just how much of a David one team is to other’s Goliath than, having broken all but one of team’s entire bat collection, having to actually make a show of pretending the team has more than just that one single bat which keeps coming to the plate. Does that mean this is a story that ends with scrawny little David miraculously taking down the seemingly invincible Goliath? Maybe.
