You won’t find John Grisham among the tens of thousands of fans migrating south this month for spring training as they warm up to the idea of Opening Day. Once one of baseball’s biggest fans, one of the world’s top selling novelists has lost interest in the game.
Yet back in the 1960s you could find the Arkansas farm boy on a hot summer night kicking the dust at home plate and taking a few practice swings anticipating the first pitch. Everybody did in his world, he recalls. He grew up moving from one small farm town to the next, his family sometimes just ahead of the bill collector. But in each crossroads they called home, the Grisham family quickly found a little league baseball team and their own Field of Dreams. Nearly every summer evening, the powerful transmitter of radio station KMOX out of St. Louis broadcast Cardinals baseball through the humidity of the South and Midwest. Grisham remembers the entire town coming out for little league games with their portable transistor radios echoing the play-by-play of Harry Caray and Jack Buck through the stands as the kids played.
“The Cardinals games were our world,” Grisham says. Grisham describes himself as a rabid fan back then and it was generational. His father loved Cardinals great Stan Musial, and his grandfather was a fan of Dizzy Dean and the Gashouse Gang, listening on his very first radio back in the 1930s and ‘40s.
Grisham loved baseball but couldn’t hit. “I was a very mediocre high school baseball player.” It wasn’t until college at an intersquad tryout that he gave up his dream to play professionally.
“I saw a fastball one day in a college try out. You know ninety (mph) is nothing these days. It was a big deal back then in college. If you’ve never seen one coming at you at ninety, it’s pretty frightening. I said, ‘that’s it. I’m done,’ and the coach cut me the next day. My dream was over, but I’d gotten farther than my talent should have let me.”
“Until you’ve seen that and experienced that, it’s terrifying…” he told David Rubenstien on CSPAN’s America’s Book Club. “I was kind’a glad to be done with it because I didn’t want to see a fastball again.”
He still loved the game and journeyed to a couple of Cardinals games a year with his friend (and fellow lawyer) Hall of Fame Manager Tony La Russa. But now, even those trips have ended. The only baseball Grisham watches is college, especially the University of Virginia, which is not only one of the best college baseball teams in the nation, but right next door. He lives just outside of Charlottesville, Virginia and frequently goes into town, where he keeps an office away from home.
“We’re huge college baseball fans. Not minor league. Haven’t been to minor league since the Memphis Blues at McCarver Stadium, fifty years ago.”
He loves reading stories of minor leaguers who have been playing for years and finally get to Triple A. “They realize everyone is better than they are and they’re not going to make it. They’re approaching thirty and have no money. I love those stories and I’m going to write one someday.”
It wouldn’t be his first story about baseball. In 2012 he published Calico Joe, a novel about a rookie professional ballplayer from Arkansas who just happens to face a fireball-throwing pitcher with tragic consequences. In 2004 a screenplay he’d written, called “Mickey,” was turned into a film about a baseball player on the run. Even the protagonist in his novel, A Painted House, has dreams of becoming a professional baseball player. And on occasion, he’s written about baseball for Sports Illustrated and other publications.
But today?
“I cannot sit down for three hours and watch a game. I’d rather be reading a book…I just lost the love for the game. I haven’t watched the World Series for years…There’s so much about the game I don’t like these days. It’s not the same baseball I watched forty, fifty years ago.”
Big bucks changed the game. Stars play under bigger contracts than players in every other sport, including the NFL. Yet television revenues dropped, home runs dominated, games routinely dragged on for more three hours, and pitchers were changed more often than a newborn’s diaper. In recent years baseball has undergone some major rules changes to meet the needs of an attention deficit sports fan base. One of those is the new play clock, which has sped up the game considerably and which Grisham credits his friend La Russa with having been in charge of testing.
Grisham still loves the history of baseball. He says it mirrors the history of America. He may have lost his love for today’s professional game, but nostalgia for its roots and the way the game was once played in the Arkansas dirt of his childhood, is still very much alive and well in his memory.
