During the Covid lockdown, I became increasingly obsessed with archival footage of “actual human life,” so I scoured the internet for videos I could find of Pedro Martinez, my favorite baseball player, in action. Watching him pitch was like accessing memories I had forgotten or never quite had. Fortunately, the most illustrious game of his career – which took place on September 10, 1999, when his team, the Boston Red Sox, played the Yankees in New York in that year’s playoff race – is now available everywhere online. Contemporary viewers can see what I believe is not just a baseball game, but a novel, an opera, a lyrical masterpiece. Watching it feels a bit like Virginia Woolf ‘Mrs. Dalloway,” in real time, right in front of you.
Inevitably, my viewing habit began to influence my own work. “That’s what writing feels like lately,” I wrote in my journal. “It’s all about pitch sequencing, about sentence variation. You need to guide the reader through the paragraph. Fastball, curveball, change. Normal sentence, long sentence, short sentence. Straight declarative sentence, periodic sentence, sentence fragment. Keep them sharp, keep throwing the ball past them. I always think of the role that rhythm and movement play in my own prose and in the prose of my favorite writers; I like the way language can jump out of my head and then onto my fingers, like a curveball shooting out of an All-Star pitcher’s hand. I studied Martinez, first as a baseball player and eventually as an artist—reading him closely as you would a modernist author. I found out that he is an excellent writing instructor, as wild as that sounds. His signature games are a master class in shifting registers, strategizing, creating shapes and patterns and leitmotifs. From Martinez you can learn how to perform on the page.
The Yankee game gets off to a strange start: In the bottom of the first inning, Martinez cuts leadoff hitter Chuck Knoblauch’s jersey with an inside fastball, putting him on base. Many of my favorite masterpieces also start with a bit of whimsy. For example: “Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself,” Woolf wrote. What kind of pitch is that? It’s a declarative and confident opening line, and it stakes its claim: maybe a brushback fastball itself. “Because Lucy had taken her work off her hands.” At first glance, we have another fastball here, but the first “for” gives it some twist, turning a declarative sentence into a notsentence or an addition to the previous one: curveball on the outside corner. After Knoblauch is caught stealing, Martinez retires the next four batters before throwing an uncharacteristically flat fastball to Yankee slugger Chili Davis, who hits a home run against the stands in right field to make the score 1–0 after two innings comes.
Given the awkwardness of the first two frames, it might be easy to miss what’s happening. In fact, several of Martinez’s greatest performances seem to be catalyzed by a self-inflicted limitation of a showman’s upping the ante. (Remember the game against the Tampa Bay Devil Rays in August 2000, when he provoked a bench-clearing brawl after he drilled the lead-off hitter, Gerald Williams, before pitching a no-hitter for eight full innings.) It’s like his pitching potential – his “stuff,” as baseball scouts call it – is a powerful and unwieldy beam of light that he must refine and locate as the game progresses.
