“Most of history gets forgotten, a foul ball sailing into the dark.”

August 5, 2024 2:13 AM

I’m drawn to the mystery of Ring Lardner’s assailant and the details of Ike Francis’s life for reasons I find difficult to define. It’s a sense of something essential hidden away, a small secret part of what made us who we are. It makes me think of those scientists who comb the soil of the Amazon for evidence of ancient civilizations, where nothing else remains but the quality of the earth those vanished people fertilized. The world of the Central League went into the ground with World War I, in both literal and figurative ways. Even Jack Keefe, the Central League narrator of Ring Lardner’s short stories, finds himself eventually in the trenches of France. As the regional minor leagues died out, so-called industrial leagues began to proliferate—semipro organizations of ballclubs populated by workers at factories in New York and Pennsylvania, Ohio and Indiana. This world, too, was as complex as any before, and like all the others it ultimately goes into the ground itself. It is left to memory, and often not even that. from Ring Lardner’s Mysteries of the Central League by By Nicholas Mainieri/
posted by chavenet (4 comments total)

I really enjoyed this, particularly the end summation. I poke around with a bit of genealogy and I’m the family photo scanner and I get that emotion very much.
posted by PussKillian at 6:13 AM on August 5, 2024 [1 favorite]

searching for F. Scott Fitzgerald's obit of Ring, i found that of his eponymous son [latimes] & learned of his other son's participation in the Lincoln Brigade [nyu]
posted by HearHere at 6:55 AM on August 5, 2024 [2 favorites]

Thank you for this!

Larndner's baseball stories are some of my favorite American writing, and sadly underrated. Who else could have given us this brilliant exchange?

Are you lost daddy I arsked tenderly.

Shut up he explained.

-- The Young Immigrunts
posted by wenestvedt at 7:42 AM on August 5, 2024 [2 favorites]

Aside from Lardner being the hook that the piece is hung on, this is a lovely read. It touches on family and grief and drink and migration and, eventually, the failure of memory.
posted by wenestvedt at 8:46 AM on August 6, 2024