Baseball's Fun House

Slouching Toward Fargo
By Neal Karlen Spike, $23

In his two-season look at life with the St. Paul Saints of the independent Northern League, author Karlen encountered enough oddballs to make Alice's Adventures in Wonderland seem like a straightforward account of a schoolgirl's visit to a theme park. Among the more prominent of Karlen's dramatis personae are Bill Murray, the comic actor and Saints co-owner; Mike Veeck, the team president, son of the great Bill Veeck and himself a promoter of mad invention; Ha Borders, the first woman to play in a men's professional league; and J.D. Drew, the college phenom who rejected major league millions to play for the Saints in hopes of later gaining even more millions in the majors (which he did).

On a somewhat lesser but no less captivating level we find a legless outfielder ("You'd be surprised how much ground a man with no legs can cover," says the outfielder, Dave Stevens), a Benedictine nun moonlighting as a ballpark masseuse, the game's first blind color announcer and a thousand-pound pig that, often dressed in a ballerina's tutu, delivered balls to the home plate umpire.

Karlen is himself a character in this op�ra bouffe, though not, at least initially, as appealing as his fellow cast members. We see him here as an impoverished and self-pitying freelance writer who, out of desperation, accepts an assignment from Rolling Stone magazine to do a hatchet job on Murray and, in anticipation of yet another fall from grace, on Darryl Strawberry. That once-feared slugger and notorious substance-abuser was, in 1996, attempting one last comeback, this time in the fathomless depths of the lower bush leagues. He made it that year—only, as we know now, to come a cropper once more, though Karlen couldn't have known it then.

Karlen came to his assignment with the preconceived notion that Murray was a misanthrope and Strawberry' a jerk. He discovered, much to his professional dismay, that he liked both men immensely. In fact he liked almost everything about the lowly Saints, whose motto was FUN IS GOOD.

With that in mind, Karlen abandoned the magazine assignment and wrote instead this fun-is-good book. Good for him.