The Fairport Nine, the American Boy's First Baseball Novel

THE FAIRPORT NINE, THE AMERICAN BOY'S FIRST BASEBALL NOVEL Douglas Street Those lovers of sports fiction who grew up on Ralph Henry Barbour, the Frank Merriwell sagas, and Ring Lardner; and those who devoured biographies of "the Babe," Lou Gehrig, Ted Williams, Jackie Robinson, and "Say Hey" Willie Mays; may think it strange that the creation which sired them all should today be forgotten. Yet even Ann Thaxter Eaton, writing on the "field of Adventure in England and America" within A Critical History Of Children's Literature, the only children's critic to note the author and work so widely enjoyed in the last century, gives the author, Noah Brooks, but a short paragraph. She addresses her brief comments to his better remembered The Boy Emigrants and The Boy Settlers, wrapping up casually with: "First Across the Continent (1901) is an account of the Lewis and Clarke [sic] expedition and The Fairport Nine (1881) [sicl is the first baseball story. Brooks's books were lively and very readable." "Lively and readable" to be sure, Noah Brooks's fiction was readily experienced and enjoyed. Though dated in parts, it is still competitive alongside many recent boys' sports offerings. While The Fairport Nine, when read today, may seem to some passe and regional (focusing as it does on boyhood adventures in 1840' s Maine), there is still a remarkably vibrant quality about the writing that warrants it deserving of exposure to a new generation of readers of sports fiction. America's first novel to employ the sport of baseball as its skeletal framework is now one hundred years old. The Fairport Nine, the progenitor of tales from Barbour to Heywood Broun to The Bad News Bears, first appeared in serial form beginning in The St. Nicholas Magazine ' s May 1880 issue. The further antics of Maine's boys of Fairport flourished through the subsequent five issues with reader response eagerly encouraging the parent Scribner Company to publish the complete novel before the year was out. With the appearance on bookshelves that November of Brooks's St. Nicholas serial turned hardback novel, literary history of a sort was made, and a new course for American boys' fiction was irrevocably set. The Fairport Nine is an intriguing novel, notable for its author's symbolic comparisons of the baseball team with the martial regiment, for the sporting event likened to the military skirmish, as well as for his capabili- ties in character portrayal and development — factors seemingly enhanced by his reliance on the northeastern rural setting. The action of the novel takes place in 1840 in a village on the Maine coast; the town, Fairport, is a thinly disguised fictional rendering of Brooks ' s boyhood home of Castine on Penobscot Bay. Further sharpening this sport/military intermingling is the conversion of the town's old Revolutionary War fort compound, "a huge, high earthwork, inclosing about three acres of ground," into a baseball park of which the author boasts that no other "in this or any other country can be compared with what, the British army left for generations of boys at Fairport." Pseudo-military maneuvers abound; opening strategies for the "Night before the Fourth o' July" siege on the town bell lay groundwork for the late inning scoring tactics seen in the first great baseball game. The mustering of the boys' militia from pomp and pageantry to midnight warfare and establishing a pattern leading to the repelling of invaders from an imaginary "Kingdom of Pedan" all comes together in the final barrage of game plans and strategies spelling victory in the last great ball game for the "famous Nine." All such action is carried out against the outcast White Bears by the Fairports' field general Sam Perkins and lieutenants Billy Hetherington and Sam Black, assisted by their ten-year-old baseball teammates. In Sam Black, Brooks injects the most intriguing element into the book, for here, one hundred and seven years before Jackie Robinson broke baseball's color barrier in Brooklyn, and longer still before "Hammerin' Hank" Aaron starred in the Braves' left field, Sam Black, called "Blackie" by his friends, "a term which carried with it no idea of contempt," (p. 8) the...