Book Review: The Cactus League by Emily Nemens
By Emily Nemens
Farar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN 978-0-374-11794-8
Let me start with a confession: I am not a fan of baseball stories.
You might assume I knew this about myself before I chose to read and review The Cactus League, the debut novel from Emily Nemens. I first learned of the book during my conversation with novelist Holly M. Wendt, who referenced the author’s choice to tell a story set in 2011 around a fictional MLB team instead of an existing, real-life club. This move intrigued me and perhaps also distracted me from the truth about my relationship with baseball lit.
I carried the book around for days. I told myself I was saving it until I’d finished another novel I’d already begun, lest the fictional dream of that story bleed into this one. Once the deck was clear, I brought The Cactus League with me to my son’s baseball practice. What better way to take in a baseball story, I thought, than perched on metal bleachers in the sunshine? What better ambient soundtrack than the clink, snap, and chatter from ten year-olds just learning the game? I settled in for a very pleasant reading experience.
Except I didn’t crack the book at all that afternoon. I admired the simple yet evocative cover design. I thought about Nemens, who was at the time of the book’s publication in 2020 the editor of The Paris Review, and tried to imagine all that comes with that role, the power and the pressure. I watched the ten year-olds whiff at the pitching machine and overthrow the first baseman. I went for a walk. I witnessed my young daughter’s exploits on the monkeybars and made conversation with all humans within speaking distance of the playground. I eventually went back to the bleachers and tried again with the book, but it was like it had a magnetic clasp—apparently the strong kind—and I just couldn’t prise the thing open.
It would take a few more days of this strange resistance for me to see that it was neither the enticements of a late spring day nor garden variety procrastination that was keeping me from reading the book. It was, I realized, two things: a long-simmering bias against baseball literature and a wet-blanket dread that this would be one of those baseball stories—precious to the point of fetishization and nostalgic to the point of somnolence or cavities, depending.
If you write sports lit or read any of it, you know there is no shortage of baseball work out there. There are special issues in journals and whole lit mags devoted to the subject of baseball, not to mention shelves of anthologies and regular releases of hardcover fiction. That is a fine thing. Indeed, with each submission cycle, the Under Review receives digital stacks of baseball poems, stories, and personal essays, some of which are beautiful, captivating pieces of writing. Look through this issue (#12) and our back issues and you’ll see some first-ballot HoF material. Which is all to say, there is nothing wrong with baseball literature, except that I find much of it mostly the same as everything else written about baseball: commentary on the elegance of the game and its symbology; wistful reflections on personally significant moments related or adjacent to watching a game; full-throated hero worship; detailed recaps of the ups and downs of the writers’ relationships with their beloved pro teams. Yes, baseball can be a glorious torch for illuminating the human experience, but it can also be so familiar as to be trite, as tidy and predictable as the dimensions of the diamond itself, as comfortable and well trod as sandlot dirt, with endless opportunities for figurative language and cliché.
To be clear, it’s not baseball I’m against. I’ve played it. I’ve followed it as a fan, and at certain times I have loved it. I’m not against baseball literature as a category, either. What I am against is being bored by the same old baseball story, told in the same way, trotting out themes as consistent and worn as an old catcher’s mitt (see?)
When I finally started reading The Cactus League, I ruminated my wariness of same-oldness like a cheekful of seeds. I was not happy to see that the book was organized into nine chapters, as in nine innings. I was even less happy to see that a crusty beat reporter would be providing voice-over commentary at the beginning of each inning-chapter. “Here’s the thing about baseball, and all else,” he tells us, “everything changes.” Great, I thought. We have ourselves a philosopher. My resistance was peaking by this point and it was only the second page.
I read on.
What I found in the first chapter was a story that stood alone as a world unto itself. Michael, a long-ago major leaguer, now a long-time hitting coach for his club, the Los Angeles Lions, returns to Scottsdale to find his home trashed by squatters. An aging ball player doing everything he can to stay in the game is a familiar trope in the larger baseball storytelling universe, but where Nemens takes us with Michael’s story—and the other eight stories—is richer and more particular than any baseball literature I have read in a long time.
After we leave Michael’s story, we are launched into Tami’s. She is a character who defies easy description, but she is one of the more complicated and fully developed characters I have encountered not just in baseball lit, but in sports lit more broadly. Her motivations and tribulations reveal the social dynamics swirling around and through the MLB preseason circuit in Arizona (“The Cactus League” of the book’s title), and her story builds on the Scottsdale that we first glimpsed in Michael’s story. Not since Nanci Kincaid’s novel, Balls, which centers on the religion that is Southern college football as experienced by the family of a head coach, have I seen the familiar male archetypal characters scrutinized and exploded by intelligent, canny female characters who are traditionally in the background of sports stories, if they are present at all.
There is little baseball action in the book—another hallmark of good sports literature, if you ask me; relentless play-by-play is for sports reporting—but many of the on-field moments early on are told from Tami’s perspective. She is more than a lifelong fan and former baseball wife, however. She is a hawk-eyed observer and student of the game. But her keen knowledge is not wonkery for wonkery’s sake, or purely from her love of baseball. Tami has an agenda, and it’s more nuanced than it first appears.
There are sentences throughout the book that are heart-stoppers. It is both the notes they strike within the context of the story and in the notes’ deeper resonance. Tami’s narrative sensibility delivers one of them:
Most people, whether they’re living in small towns or big cities or sprawl, spend their lives dealing with crying babies and stupid jobs, whatever life throws at them. Baseball players, they do the throwing. (57-58)
She is both right about this and also wrong, as the novel shows us both thematically and situationally. In Tami’s life, it’s the ball players who seem to have some amount of control and power that she does not have. But every baseball player in The Cactus League shows that they are struggling with agency, too. Beginning with Michael and including several other professional ballplayers we encounter in subsequent stories, we get the close-up experience of what it’s like to not be a megastar. In real life, this is the experience that the vast majority of professional athletes in baseball and in every other sport end up having. They each are on the cusp of not making it, or not making it anymore. “Making it” doesn’t mean becoming a household name or being the franchise player. It means getting to continue to play the game you have devoted your whole life to up to that point. This way of making a living, this way of being, is hardly glamorous. It’s often painfully humbling.
No one in this book is unequivocally winning. Quite the opposite. The story is, in some ways, a clear-eyed full-hearted chronicle of the forces that humble us. (I am purposely invoking Friday Night Lights here; the emotional tenor of the storytelling in the TV series and in The Cactus League is pleasingly similar.) Every character we encounter in these stories is not where they thought they would be. After several stories, the words of the voice-over character, himself recently replaced by “some dot-commer who looked younger than [his] son,” which I had scoffed at initially, were starting to sound like thematic truth: everything changes.
No one’s status quo is changing faster or more precipitously than Jason Goodyear’s. Perhaps to tug the book firmly into the realm of novel for marketing purposes, much of the promotional copy about The Cactus League puts Goodyear, the Lions’ star player, at the center of the story. Goodyear, who cuts the figure of a classical hero with a doozy of a tragic flaw, appears in all nine stories, and his character arc drives the plot. Granted, it is Goodyear’s story that is the thread that ties all the stories together. However, the star of this story isn’t Goodyear.
For me, the MVP ends up being the sportswriter—that voice, disembodied and dislocated in the early innings, that I didn’t much want to hear. Though he says he’s telling Goodyear’s story, he ends up describing something much grander, fresher, and more unexpected than the story of one ball player, one team, or even one sport. It is indeed the story of change: the changing landscape of Scottsdale and evolving geology of the Arizona desert; and the inescapable reality that individual lives and whole civilizations are changing spectacularly yet imperceptibly, all the time. It’s a magnificent frame that offers us a perspective at once heady and humbling. I like this from a contemporary baseball story. Given the current iteration of professional baseball, which often obsesses over superhuman performance and contracts that make men richer than god, zooming out to this great distance puts us back in touch with the relative brevity of all human lives and their limited significance, even when we believe we’re witnessing something—or someone—extraordinary. This isn’t killjoy stuff; it’s the opposite. Whether we’re on pace for Cooperstown or not, our lives are short and therefore precious. And! We are part of something larger, wilder, and more wondrous than the finitude of our bodies and the numbered nature of our days.
Despite my self-professed crankiness about baseball literature’s penchant for metaphor and symbolism, I have to mention a crucial one here: home. The concept is marvelously, breathtakingly loaded in The Cactus League. Besides planet Earth as our greater geological home, physical structures serving as homes of one kind or another appear throughout the nine stories. There are houses inhabited and houses abandoned; temporary homes filled floor to ceiling with lack and the longing for permanence; buildings that shelter and buildings that expose. There is also the presence of home in the intangible sense, as in the feeling of belonging. The players in each story are trying to make the team or reassert their place on it. Other characters long for relationships that will last. We may thrill at and valorize the loneliness of the pitcher on the mound and the batter on his own in the box, but the objective of the game is always the same: to try to get back home.
As I read Nemens’ stories, I couldn’t stop thinking about Take Time for Paradise, a compilation of former MLB commissioner (and professor of English Renaissance literature) A. Bartlett “Bart” Giamatti’s philosophical musings on the game of baseball, which I read (and yes, enjoyed) years ago. I couldn’t shake the sense that Giamatti’s understanding of baseball and Nemens’ were in harmony in a particular way. They both see the narrative possibilities of a game that is at once deeply collective and excruciatingly personal for all involved. “[Baseball is] an oft-told tale,” Giamatti wrote, “repeated in every game in every season, season after season.
If this is the tale told, who tells it? Clearly, the players who enact it thereby also tell it. But the other true tellers of the narrative are those for whom it is played. If baseball is a narrative, an epic of exile and return, a vast, communal poem about separation, loss, and the hope for reunion—if baseball is a Romance Epic—it is finally told by the audience. It is the Romance Epic of homecoming America sings to itself. (85)
This is what The Cactus League gets exactly right: the story of baseball is told in part by the players, but it’s told by everyone else, too—the fans, the sportswriters, the owners and managers; the girlfriends and personal assistants and the guy who plays the organ during games. This baseball story starts out at the ballpark and we end up there, too, but along the way we are changed. That isn’t the mark of good baseball literature. That’s the mark of good literature, period. Above all else, The Cactus League is most definitely that.
