The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Making the Team: The Cultural Work of Baseball Fiction by Timothy Morris
Dennis Barone

Timothy Morris. Making the Team: The Cultural Work of Baseball Fiction. Univ. of Illinois Press, 1997. 190 pp. Paper: $13.95.

There is an old saying about sports fiction: the smaller the ball, the better the writing. Timothy Morris’s study of baseball fiction is a very good book and for reasons other and more significant than that it is about stories of that small, hard ball. Many academic books in the field of sports-oriented literature are overly descriptive and, at best, offer a taxonomy of such writing. (Perhaps this is so because of the newness of this area of literary studies.) Morris’s work, however, is interpretative and theoretically sophisticated. It is as if scholarship in sports literature has now grown up, moved beyond kids’ games. Morris argues that “the cultural work and ideological constructions of adult baseball fiction are continuous with those of juvenille baseball fiction” and that “the rhetoric that denies and conceals this continuity can in turn provide a model for insights into the cultural construction of other kinds of literature . . . and into the function of the literary as a cultural value.” In chapters on assimilation, heterosexuality, language, and meritocracy, Morris convincingly charts and provocatively analyzes the parallel cultural functions of adult and juvenille baseball fiction. In a final chapter he moves from these functions to a speculation on the larger significance of the literary in a community’s self-perpetuation. In the introduction to this book and in the playful language indicative of it (something else that separates it from many previous studies of sports literature), Morris claims that “the instincts of someone born just on the waning edge of the Baby Boom impel me to critique what I have been raised to accept.” Morris succeeds in critiquing unexamined assumptions of baseball fiction and the American civilization of which it is a part. [Dennis Barone]


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The Review of Contemporary Fiction Making the Team: The Cultural Work of Baseball Fiction by Timothy Morris Dennis Barone Timothy Morris. Making the Team: The Cultural Work of Baseball Fiction. Univ. of Illinois Press, 1997. 190 pp. Paper: $13.95. There is an old saying about sports fiction: the smaller the ball, the better the writing. Timothy Morris’s study of baseball fiction is a very good book and for reasons other and more significant than that it is about stories of that small, hard ball. Many academic books in the field of sports-oriented literature are overly descriptive and, at best, offer a taxonomy of such writing. (Perhaps this is so because of the newness of this area of literary studies.) Morris’s work, however, is interpretative and theoretically sophisticated. It is as if scholarship in sports literature has now grown up, moved beyond kids’ games. Morris argues that “the cultural work and ideological constructions of adult baseball fiction are continuous with those of juvenille baseball fiction” and that “the rhetoric that denies and conceals this continuity can in turn provide a model for insights into the cultural construction of other kinds of literature . . . and into the function of the literary as a cultural value.” In chapters on assimilation, heterosexuality, language, and meritocracy, Morris convincingly charts and provocatively analyzes the parallel cultural functions of adult and juvenille baseball fiction. In a final chapter he moves from these functions to a speculation on the larger significance of the literary in a community’s self-perpetuation. In the introduction to this book and in the playful language indicative of it (something else that separates it from many previous studies of sports literature), Morris claims that “the instincts of someone born just on the waning edge of the Baby Boom impel me to critique what I have been raised to accept.” Morris succeeds in critiquing unexamined assumptions of baseball fiction and the American civilization of which it is a part. [Dennis Barone]

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