Savoring a wonderful book, Ron Shelton's THE CHURCH OF BASEBALL

       In 1989 while staying with generous hosts on Park Avenue I worked methodically at the tasks I had laid out for myself at the New York Public Library then yielded to temptation, giving myself fifteen minutes to treasure-hunt in a folder with an alluring title, “Undated Letters or Unidentified Correspondents.” Soon I recognized familiar handwriting—what has become known as Melville’s “D. D.” letter to Evert Duyckinck, in which he declined to review a book. I asked for the head librarian at once, but I became so nervous that I shakily rubbed her back as she leaned over to look at the document. She took away the document and did not return, although she sent someone out with a photocopy. Did she understand that I was trembling from excitement at finding the letter? It did not matter that the letter was of no great obvious importance—what mattered was the way a few minutes of self-indulgent kicking over the traces had paid off, for once.

       Still febrile, I shared the new letter with my hosts but did not report to them the phantasmagorical nature of my walk in Manhattan that night. Two Costner brothers from northern Mississippi, sons of a Confederate soldier who had gotten as far north as Gettysburg, had homesteaded near Guymon in the panhandle of Oklahoma Territory, my grandfather Edgar Lugene and his older brother Moses Amariah (Uncle Mode, in my mother’s stories). My mother was born there, in O. T. Now near my hosts’ apartment one of Uncle Mode’s great-grandsons, Kevin Costner, stood on a billboard, looking down, his left jeans-clad leg straight, the right crossed over it at the shin. Who was living a fantasy? There was my 2^nd cousin Bill’s son on the billboard for a new baseball movie, after Bull Durham, and here was I with a newly discovered Melville letter I had found by asking with reckless abandon for a folder of “Undated Letters or Unidentified Correspondents.” Was this Guymon, O.T., or Gotham, N.Y.? Now, 33 years later, with a Zio Patch taped to my chest and the pulse dropping erratically down to 30 per minute, I am enthralled by Ron Shelton’s The Church of Baseball, a gift from Paul Seydor, a copy Ron Shelton had held as he inscribed it to me. Michael Sragow, Douglass K. Daniel, and many other reviewers understood its value. A Chicago reviewer calls it a “casual” book. What was he reading? This is a masterwork about creativity.