I forget the name of the book, but it was one of those big volumes devoted to “Baseball Through the Ages” or “100 Years of the National Pastime.” It’s long gone now; I’ve told the librarian to look out for it, but he’s no good. Nobody’s any good in here, you know? Anyway, this book was organized by decades: the 40’s, the 50’s and all that. At the beginning of each section, there was a photograph of some defining moment; I can still remember shots of Babe Ruth swinging (from the 20’s), Yaz waving fair his home run for the ’75 Sox, and so on.
Anyway, back then I had this “roommate” Billy who didn’t know much about baseball, and wanted to see what I thought was so great about it, so he picked up the book from my bunk. He flipped through it a bit, asking me about some of the photos, and I took pleasure in showing off my expert knowledge: he would show me a photo, demanding to know whether it was really so iconic, and I would tell him the place, and date, and name, and say why that moment was so great. He got a little nasty, as if refusing to believe that there could be so many special instants in one sport. Finally, with an aha! tone, he demanded to know what was so special about “this goddamn picture.” I could see why he objected to it. All the other photos were action shots, moments in games: swings, pitches, catches, celebrations. This one looked boring by comparison. Just three players sitting in a dugout watching the game. But I started crying.
He was a little freaked out, because he didn’t understand why. I explained to him that I thought one player in the photo would have been tickled, a little, to see his picture in a book like that one. But it would be even nicer for that ballplayer to know (and this is why I was crying, because he never would know) that, in 2006, some small-time thug couldn’t see why it was special, didn’t have any idea. It would have been nice for that ballplayer to hear Billy say what he did: that it was just three men, three ballplayers, sitting on a bench. How could that be a big deal? It would have been nice to talk to that ballplayer, to tell him that Billy didn’t see that two of the Dodgers were white and the third was black, to let Jackie Robinson know that, in some way, he was no longer an icon.
But Jackie died in 1974, I think. Sometime before I was even born, I know it was. And Billy beat the crap out of me that night, or the next day. It was just because he was scared, scared of the crying. That’s always the way, you know?
-sadfatman
The Arbiters 
Fisk does the waving
Indeed. But here we have the classic problem, developed most interestingly by Ford in the post-Victorian tradition of the Tietjens tetralogy, (and later by various doctrinaire modernists and post-modernists), of the unreliable narrator. If our imprisoned narrator mistakes the great Pudge for Yaz–in the context of the story rather a howler–do we take him for a bumbler or a con-man, showing his hand? If his beloved book is so imperfectly remembered, what of the time in which the story was set? Are roomates so common in prison? It seems highly likely that “Billy” (i.e. William, i.e. “Will I Am,” perhaps signifying not the venerable Pea but the bard himself, the inventor, Bloomingly, of the human, and thus of the narrator himself, in perfect circularity?) is a figment of the narrator’s warped imagination, that there is no prison or indeed no outside world for this denizen of his own mind, this Bonham-like prisoner in his own impotent consciousness–and thus no book, no icon, no racial justice red herring, and–perhaps most importantly–that he lives in a world in which baseball does not exist.