William Faulkner and Other Literary Greats on the Miss State / Georgia Baseball Game

Well I must say sports writing has got better these days

William Faulkner tells us what happened in the seventh through ninth innings . To see the full post and contributions of Cormac McCarthy and Tom Wolfe and their play by play action in earlier innings see Mississippi State Bulldogs 9, Georgia Bulldogs 8: Another Diamond Dogs Loss, As Told by Cormac McCarthy, Tom Wolfe, and William Faulkner

Now let me post the exciting conclusion as brought to us by the great Southern Literary giant.

The seventh through ninth innings are brought to you by William Faulkner.

From a little after 7:30 until after sundown of the long chill drowsy dying March evening they played in what State fans still called the park because Ron Polk had called it that---a dim ringed baseball diamond cool in the dark even as an odor of lilac and magnolia, wisteria and verbena, wafted across the field and hung in the air, portentous and profound---but above all, the mound; the epicenter, the locus, the raised hub about which the spokes spin in their whirring and wheeling span; squatting, hovering, in the middle of the diamond’s circumference like a lone hawk circling in the ring of the horizon, casting its vast shadow to the uttermost rim of the world’s encircling edge; mulling, pondering, avatar and synecdoche, high as the sky, inscrutable as the earthworks dotting the landscape ominously left lonely and mute by the Indians in their time, towering over all: repository and vanguard of the ambitions and the dreams. My pitcher is a fish.

As the seventh inning got underway, I could just remember how my old coach used to say that the reason for playing baseball was to get ready to stay beaten a long time, but the sport of the long season calls us to toil, admits no apostasy, uncoils incrementally, undeterred and unbidden by time clicked off by little wheels, embodiment and epitome of all the passions and foibles of the human heart in conflict with itself, the players like mules who labor ten years willingly and patiently for the privilege of kicking you once. I feel like a hot pitch fouled off the wild blind bat.

Without knowing it then, since he had not yet discovered that innocence which cannot be acquired but by the losing, sacrifice, of that which was without meaning until it had been named, Verdin led off with a double to center field. Hyams popped up and Cone grounded out, sending into the bland gloved hands of the awaiting infielders the horsehide that was not an actual horse, living creature, to writhe and whinny and expel sonorously the rich zephyrs of its voluptuous and feminine-encompassing entrails. Shipman singled to score a run, evening integer of achievement and striving. The baserunner smelled like trees.

Once a loss, always a loss, what I say. I says you’re lucky if us losing a baseball game is all that worries you. Steve Esmonde opened the bottom of the inning by striking Ogden, granting him first base uncontested, the ensorcelling sack awarded after a plangent plunking. Did you ever hit a batsman? Did you?

The runner was sacrificed over to second by Frost, a prime freshman who emanated a quality, inviolate and invincible, that seemed to suggest that, between an RBI and nothing, he would take the RBI. A pair of outs, moist conjoined and annealed, the image of each shattering and combining with that of the other in a ripple of fading sunlight through the trembling verdant fecund leaves of spring, followed without scoring ensuing. The seventh inning wasn’t dead; it wasn’t even past.

Carson Schilling sardonically smacked a two-out double, desolate doomed and futile, into left field in the eighth frame, and his teammates surrounded it by actual strikeouts. "Sho now," the catcher said, and spat, seated shrewdly in the dugout as though perched atop a buckboard, the reins dangling loosely from his tanned hands. Powers was hit by a pitch and Sneed walked in the bottom of the canto, the former finally scoring on a wild pitch lofted, flung, into the thick damp evening air like an overripened peach bursting with the old Dionysian honeyed symbology of all mammalian rapacity suffused with scornful and graceless unrequited longing. Save us, ump, the poor sons of bitches.

Through the screen, between the tiny diamond places, I could see them hitting. They were coming toward where the plate was and I watched behind the screen. The pitcher was throwing the ball from the mound. He threw the ball, and Verdin hit. Then Verdin went to second and I watched behind the screen. Hyams flied out to left. "Baseball, s---!" the tall infielder said.

Cone walked and Shipman walked. My, my. A body does get around. Here we ain’t been coming from first but three batters, and now it’s already third. May struck out and Davidson grounded out and the diamond was empty and green and serene again as three baserunners were stranded, each in his ordered place, and the Diamond Dogs fell 9-8 to lose their seventh straight.

"I don’t hate baseball," Quinton McDawg said, hastily, at once, swiftly; "I don’t hate it," he said. I dont hate it he thought, panting in the cold air, the iron Mississippi dark: I dont. I dont! I dont hate it! I dont hate it!