"The All-Star Series" (1958)

“When a pitcher’s throwing a spitball, don’t worry and don’t complain, just hit the dry side like I do.” — Stan Musial

Lafferty’s unpublished 1958 short story “The All-Star Series” is slight, though it touches on themes that are pretty dear to Lafferty: tradition vs. sterile progress, the letters vs. the spirit of the law, nostalgia and loss, ingenuity and getting one over on the system, and the importance of fun. We have an uncomplicated bad guy, the Imperator, who cannot wait for baseball to go extinct, and a bunch of baseball-loving aliens.

The story starts with sportscasters Red Rawson and Skeet Skomberg looking on as the final All-Star Series is about to begin. The game is ending not because baseball is unpopular, but because of a legal technicality. "It was always a game of strict interpretations," Red says. "Now it will be killed by a strict interpretation." Below them, the Imperator and his entourage also watch the game, and the Imperator cannot wait for baseball to be snuffed out.

This sets the stage for what old sports fans like to do almost as much as watch games themselves: reminisce. By listening in on Rawson and Skomberg, the reader learns about interstellar baseball and all the rules created to preserve it. One ultra-important rule is mandating that for all eternity the ball have a "para-rubber core, gray wool yarn windings, and a stitched horsehide cover." This combats all kinds of cheating, "balls with armatures, gyroscopes, magnetic cores" and even the "wise-guy ham operator out in the bleachers making the ball do nip-ups." We learn about Moxie the Materializer who could miss a play and materialize another ball for the tag, an act deemed highly unfair. Moxie once made it "rain baseballs" a foot deep on the field.

The sports talk turns to the non-human players who prompted new regulations. There is the fondly remembered Gobbo, a giant toad who had a habit of swallowing the baseball. It was funny at first but had to be banned for slowing down the game. The men recall Sammy the Snake, a version of our friend from Space Chantey (1968), a ninety-four-foot-long annelid (they aren’t quite sure about this) who was a master of the bunt. On the base paths, he was murder, as there was no defense against a player whose body could span the distance from one base to the next. Snakes had to be banned from baseball.

This history of using strict rules to save the game gives the story its irony. A strict rule that will now be used to destroy it. There is only one horse left in the universe: an old mare named Nell. The Imperator has locked in the agreement that the baseball must be cased in sewn horsehide. With no more horses, there can be no more official baseballs. Out there in space, Nell quietly munches her oats worlds away.

Lafferty then switches to the official box. The Imperator confirms his reasoning to his Proconsul, calling baseball a barbarian rock-throwing contest and an abomination that must go. When the Proconsul points out that baseball is just fun, the Imperator dismisses the word as a nonsense term used by children. The band begins to play, and the Imperator is handed a baseball for the ceremonial first pitch. With a grimace on his little green face, he cradles the ball awkwardly in his flipper and heaves it onto the field.

This is just a fun story, with part its joke being that baseball has a long tradition of changing its rules, alongside its reinventing origin myths. Lafferty was a big fan of baseball and baseball pitches, using the trope several times in his short stories, so I wonder if the infamous spitball controversy of the 1920s inspired the parade of regulations around aliens. His great ode to pitches like the spitball appears in Cowpath Daylight’s conversation in “Fall of Pebble Stones" (1977):

“Cow-Path, they tell me that you maintain that the direction of the spin has nothing to do with the direction of the curve of a ball. And you say that there isn't a gnat’s leg's difference in the pressure on the top and the bottom of a ball.” “Not a millionth of a gnat’s leg’s difference,” Cow-Path Daylight said.“A pitcher’s mustache with one more hair on one side than on the other would have more effect on the ball than any such difference in pressure. The reason I understand the physics of the situation is that I spent two years in the sixth grade, which is why I learned that book General Science for the Primary Student so well. There was a paragraph in there about how a gyroscope top spins and leans and holds. I applied it to baseball and became a great pitcher.”

The two sets of conversations in "The All-Star Series” are like two halves of a dialectic, with Rawson and Skomberg emphasizing baseball’s willingness to change the rules to preserve its spirit and fun, and the Imperator insisting on juridical inflexibility.

In the real world, spirit in sport usually wins. Sixteen years after Lafferty wrote “The All-Star Series,” Major League Baseball did abandon horsehide. The old balls were prized for their durability, tight grain, and ability to maintain consistent performance even after repeated use, the leather coming from the horse’s hindquarters, producing a smoother, tougher surface than cowhide. Lafferty’s story plays with the historical reality of horsehide growing scarcer and more expensive due to changes in the leather industry and the decline of horse populations. This scarcity led manufacturers (for example, Rawlings) to switch to cowhide, which has since become the standard covering for all official MLB baseballs. Because the story is, on one level, about nostalgia, centering it on horsehide was a lovely touch. Horsehide balls have become one of the great symbols of baseball’s early craftsmanship and its golden age of equipment.

The All-Star Series Notes.pdf

Download PDF • 344KB