The Pitcher Has a Secret

It’s October and the Mets are in the post-season, so right away it is obvious that this new book is a heavy case of fiction.

The 6-foot-5 rookie pitcher and the young catcher are having an affair. Roomies. Love at first flashing of the signals.

Hence the novel “Curveball,” by Eric Goodman, published this week by Post Hill Press of New York and Nashville.

Goodman is such a Mets fan that he handles the sweet ironies of the Met condition – off the top of my head, including Casey and the bed-sheet banners. Marvelous Marv missing two bases, not one. Swoboda’s diving catch. Mookie’s dribbler. Santana’s no-hitter with an asterisk from an ump. DeGrom-the-Pheenom, vanished without a kind word.

Nowadays the Mets have an owner who wants to build a gambling den next to the ballpark in Queens, and call it an oasis for the working class. And meantime the franchise falls apart. Oy.

Then again, the Mets have always been a sweet-and-sour franchise. Now Eric Goodman, Yale ’75, has written a second novel about the improbable poignancy of the Mets, even using the real name of the franchise because, you know, you couldn’t make up this stuff.

The Curveball in question is tossed by life – a 6-foot, 5-inch pitcher with a  wingspan, whose father and grandfather nicknamed him Two-J’s, that is, Two Jews.
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Jesse Singer figured out long ago that he is gay, and he doesn’t try to have it both ways. He is gallant to the sweet young woman who offers to be his decoy;  but he knows he is attracted to the young Mexican catcher, Ramirez, nicknamed “Rah,” who is going to make the team this spring of springs. 

Jewish Joe Singer has been in an Eric Goodman novel before – “Days of Awe,” which in 1992 prompted me to write a sports column in The New York Times. (Honest, a sports column in The Times, the olden days. You could look it up.)
https://www.nytimes.com/1992/09/27/sports/sports-of-the-times-commish-a-literary-heavy.html
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Jewish Joe Singer got in trouble for not reporting a random suggestion (from his bookie father) to affect a game for gambling purposes. This was back when Baseball Commissioners like Bart Giamatti and Fay Vincent scorned gambling; Jewish Joe’s career veered into foul territory.

“Curveball” contains three generations – Grandfather Jack has a lusty lady friend in South Florida. Father Joe is seeking modern treatment for prostate cancer that involves a new procedure in, of all places, Portugal.

And Jess Singer is trying to make the varsity Mets squad, without calling attention to himself. The novel reflects how many players have been forced to keep their secrets.  Glenn Burke played for the Dodgers and came out in 1982 when he retired, and he died young.

Billy Bean, who played six years in the majors and came out when his career was over, and to baseball’s credit has beeb the official senior vice president of diversity, equity and inclusion. (Bean is currently fighting acute myeloid leukemia; his effective counterpart in the book is named Dean.)

Goodman does a fine job depicting the conflicts of a young player  – even as the Web leaks  rumors about the rookie pitcher.
Goodman’s other baseball novel – three decades ago! – brought Jewish Joe Singer to the “days of awe,” the very early fall, the time of Hank Greenberg and Sandy Koufax, who found their own ways to honor the Jewish holy days.
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The lore of real-life Jewish superstars. The Mets in this novel put a little extra pressure on the broad back of rookie Jess Singer – Number 32, once worn, and never to be worn again, by Sandy Koufax, once hailed in a winter baseball writers’ skit as “Sandy/you’re a Jewish Walter Johnson/you’re a dandy." 

In this knowing, compelling novel, Two-J’s path is his own.