I’M THE ONE WHO FINALLY TALKED TO MATT CHRISTOPHER’S SECRET MUSE: A TALKING BASEBALL BAT NAMED BATSO
The light in upstate New York this time of year is reticent, poking out from behind clouds like a demure woman only to retreat backwards, performing a delicate dance of back-and-forth that she has been doing since the dawn of the age of mankind. But when I drove up an unmarked muddy lane, she (the sun, I’m still talking about the sun) was hidden from view behind a veil of clouds like a bride being offered up to a horrible railroad baron in a strategically arranged railroad marriage. I walked, putting my feet in front of each other with a walking gait, until I found a small shed, the only thing around in an otherwise un-noteworthy field. Somewhere that was hidden. Out of the way. Not to be found. Much like the sun in upstate New York, this time of year.
I knocked on the door and cracked it open. Nothing. Then a rustling from the corner. After years of painstaking research and delicate correspondence, there he was: Batso, Matt Christopher’s talking baseball bat, the bat that made his career. “Close the door, you’ll let in the termites,” Batso says to me.
Christopher was not always a children’s book author. In the 1940s, he wrote hardboiled sports fiction such as “Knife Catcher” and “The Baseball Son of a Bitch” and unsuccessfully submitted them to the most hardboiled magazines under his pen name “Raff Mack.” Every day Christopher would toil at a day job and every night he would sit with his typewriter like a blacksmith at his forge pounding and shaping sentences and building worlds like a blacksmith does. Or perhaps he was a chef stirring together concoctions of words into phrases and phrases into universes evoking a tough place with tough men and tough dames and tough umpires. Here is a passage from an unpublished 1943 story called “The Ump’s a Mug.”
“Yaborrough was suddenly shrouded. The lights had not gone out. Wentworth, the catcher, had stepped in front of it. Yarborrough had thrown him out yesterday on a pitch Wentworth thought was outside. But that’s not what this was. He was in the room representing his boss, the bookmaker Cark Klagg. And Yarborrough was late. Yaborrough had thrown out Wentworth yesterday, but now Wentworth was throwing something at him: a slug right to the guts.
But if Christopher was a chef, his ingredients weren’t right. No magazine would publish his hardboiled stories, not Knuckleduster or Switchblade or even Youse. That is when Christopher found something while buying a lot of discarded bats from an underground occult sporting goods operation. He had them up in his room while he was pacing, writing and pacing, walking and talking, in the room but far off somewhere else, perhaps walking the foul lines at Ebbets Field or through the puddles in an alley behind a minor league baseball stadium where Sammy “Shotgun” Slocum was lying in wait for a nosy detective out of his depth, a wanderer, a pilgrim alighting at the shrine of his own imagination. That’s when he heard a voice. “You gotta stop having everyone get killed with bats,” the voice said.
At first, Christopher thought he was going insane. Bats, as far as he knew, and he knew a lot about bats, did not talk. They did not give literary advice. But after talking for fifteen minutes every night for a week, a week where everything else in his life was normal, he began to understand and accept Batso. I asked Batso where he came from. Batso is enigmatic. “I am Batso,” is all he will say.
Batso tells me that he eventually convinced Christopher to start writing for children. Christopher was reluctant, a mule kicking at his own literary genius. He liked the hardboiled world of guns and knives and fast-talkers far from his pleasant workaday life. But the rejections flurried in his mailbox like a bad edible arrangement. “One day I told him, look, you know how you have that story about how Jack Staggo was devastated because he was betrayed by his mistress who told Fists Caldwell that he was skimming off his numbers racket and then the Caldwell gang ‘met him in the alley behind the art gallery and turned his face from something classical to something abstract?’ Well what if Jack Staggo was really betrayed because his friend from the next town over moved to his school and took the last spot on the baseball team? Something clicked,” Batso told me.
But while Batso enjoys weaving tales of his writing sessions with Christopher like a castle tapestry in front of me, he prefers to think about his time with Christopher as a friend. “We used to go out to the old ballfield at the park and just talk about life and love and the world while he hit fly balls off of me,” Batso says. “He really was a beautiful soul.” Batso also tells me that he spent most of Christopher’s heyday hidden for fear that he would be captured by the government and subject to experiments or wielded as a weapon against the Soviet Union. “Matt protected me,” Batso says. “I wasn’t upset that I didn’t get credit as a coauthor or any royalties. I am a baseball bat,” he said.
Batso tells me he was willing to come out of the shadows after reading my article talking about my love of Matt Christopher called “The Elysian Fields of Baseball Dreams.” He was tired of being so elusive and hiding from legions of Matt Christopher scholars prowling around the estate trying to investigate rumors of a talking catcher’s mitt or a tennis racket that was really good at typing. I was honored and humbled to talk to Batso and finally bring his story to light, bringing it forth like a row of fluorescent light bulbs slowly flickering to life above a row of cubicles row by row, revelation by revelation.
It was dark now. The sun had retreated back to her hiding spot and the moon had emerged tonight all brassy and showy and nearly full, the full burlesque, shining down on the unlit path that my rental car took to slowly get back onto the highway and carry me home like a merchantman filled with exotic spices returning the Emperess of Spain, laden with the most valuable cargo in my hold: the stories about how Matt Christiopher’s talking bat Batso convinced him to write The Kid Who Only Hit Homers.
