Baseball in fiction VS actual baseball

It's funny how things that might seem cliche and overly dramatic in a baseball novel can take on near mystical qualities in real life. For example, in this year's MLB playoffs, there have been at least three separate games where a team that was losing in the ninth inning has gone on to win the game, and in some cases runs were scored with nobody on base and two outs. It's the equivalent of needing an extra $100 to be able to pay your rent and then finding $500 on the ground. It's pretty rare and when it happens you never forget it and feel great for the next couple of days.

And yet in literature, baseball stories rarely have happy endings. Two of the most famous pieces of baseball literature both end with the protagonist being soundly defeated. In Casey at the Bat, there is no joy in Mudville because Mighty Casey strikes out. While in Bernard Malamud's The Natural, superstar baseball player Roy Hobbs strikes out to end the game and fails to lead his team to the World Series (unlike the movie version where Redford hits a homerun to win the game and lives happily ever after.)

The question is, why do writers need to be such downers? Don't they know that baseball is already hard enough as it is. Don't they know that for every ninth inning rally that is successful, there have been six previous ones that have failed. Don't they know the majority of baseball fans' teams will not win the World Series. The Pittsburgh Pirates for example haven't won the World Series since 1979, and have now had losing seasons for the past 17 years. So if you were born in Pittsburgh in 1992 you have yet to see a competitive baseball team.

Baseball can also be painfully slow at times, and losing can anger you in ways that you just weren't expecting. I can't tell you how many times I've watched the Dodgers lose and then scream at the tv, "I just spend three and a half hours to see this?! Thanks for nothing jerks!"

As a consumate reader the last thing that I need when reading a baseball novel is to be reminded of just how painful losing can be. And yet on the other hand, I don't think anybody is going to be satisfied with a book where the team wins a game in miraculous fashion. It seems like a lose-lose proposition. Perhaps baseball fiction just can't and shouldn't be revived, like the Dukes of Hazard remake. Maybe baseball fiction belongs to the era when boxing, horse racing and radio were king, and people relied on the newspapers and not the internet for the boxscore.

At any rate real baseball is awesome, and baseball fiction (excluding Don Delillo's Underworld) might be dated and done with. So let's root, root, root for the Dodgers and eat hot dogs and popcorn as we cheer them on. And if they don't win it all this year, we can drown our sorrows in beer and talk about how there's always next year!