Still Pitching: A Memoir (review)

Given the opportunity, I'm sure that Michael Steinberg would like to make a minor addition to the Beatitudes: Blessed are the schleppers, for they will ultimately inherit a championship season.

A schlepper, according to Steinberg, author of Still Pitching: A Memoir, is "a slightly awkward but not entirely inept athlete." By admission, Steinberg was a schlepper on the baseball fields of his middle and late childhood, a kid who had the heart and guts and brains to play the game, but lacked the "effortless grace . . . ease and fluidity that infuses" naturally gifted athletes. In sum, any success on the mound or at the plate was through a conscious application of discipline, resolve, and cunning.

We are a world composed, in the main, of schleppers, and in a way, Steinberg's youthful passion for baseball is a graceful and wonderfully articulated coming-of-age narrative where the author emerges as a 1950s denizen of doo-wop, D.A.s, leather jackets, tight jeans, joy rides, and the rough-and-tumble milieu of tough, inner-city school grounds. Along the way, we find that schlepping is really an extended metaphor for the exigencies of growing up, for the social, sexual, and physical awkwardness of youth, the stumbling, stuttering courses all of us, by necessity, have taken down the slippery slopes of self-discovery.

Steinberg, who has edited three collections of essays and published widely in literary journals, recreates the blue-collar milieu of mid-twentieth-century New York City, a place where Giants (not to mention Dodgers and Yankees) stalked the streets of Brooklyn, Manhattan, and the Bronx. It was the "Golden Age" of baseball, which commenced with the signing of Jackie Robinson with the Dodgers and concluded with the "migrations" of the Giants and Dodgers to the West Coast.

While baseball may constitute the connecting thread that ties the wide-ranging Still Pitching together, it is the life of a child and maturing adolescent that makes this much more than just a baseball story. A short, pudgy, socially and athletically awkward Jewish kid, Steinberg actively disliked baseball until his ninth year when he started attending his father's weekend softball games. It was an epiphany of sorts to see his father, a fortysomething linen tablecloth salesman, pull on a baseball uniform and step out onto the diamond with "his middle-aged paunch bulg[ing] slightly beneath a gold and navy nylon jersey with 'Jerry's Esso' scripted across his broad chest." Steinberg was mesmerized by how baseball magically transformed salesmen and pharmacists and teachers into "ballplayers, guys who razzed each other and shouted obscenities at the opposing team" while diving for pop flies, sliding spikes-up into home, blasting fastballs over the heads of the outfielders.

Even as a nine-year-old, coming late to the game, Steinberg knew he lacked the requisite skills to naturally take up the ball and glove. His father helped him, but the real learning came on his own; he became a student of the game's complex rules and strategies, reading books and studying the players, becoming a human encyclopedia of baseball's esoteric intricacies. And while he was not (at least not initially) very adept at the nuts-and-bolts application of his self-acquired knowledge, he was at least good enough, and before long he found himself no longer shunned at the pick-up games and summer leagues that became the center of his childhood universe.

But Still Pitching is also a story about passion, and how passion leads to a sense of identity. In a place and time that adhered to an almost Darwinian social hierarchy, baseball was the internal compass that guided Steinberg through a treacherous world of "Archies and Reggies" (clean-cut preppies), "genteel greasers" (tough Jewish kids who aspired to the "brooding insolence of Marlon Brando or James Dean"), "losers and outcasts" (kids with "Vitalis-trained...