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Talented author taps baseball history

Some baseball seasons can be recalled to memory by simply naming a year -- 1919 or 1984, for example. Not many people would include 1946 in that category. However, Mark Winegardner's new novel, "The Veracruz Blues" (Viking, $23), recounts the '46 "season of gold," when numerous American baseball players joined the Mexican League. It provides a fascinating story, and a look at a surprisingly little-known historical event.

"This was the biggest sports story of 1946, but it kind of got lost to history," Winegardner said, in an interview before his reading at Borders on Thursday. "It was the first fully integrated season in the history of professional sports, but at that time, that wasn't seen as an important thing."

Rediscovering this forgotten piece of history wasn't a simple task. Winegardner was talking baseball with a director on a movie set, when he originally heard the story of the Mexican League. "It turned out he told it way wrong, but it stuck in my head, I don't know why. Several months later I thought, well, I haven't been to Cooperstown in a while, I'll go to the research library there. And what really happened down there was so weird and wonderful and rich -- a day into it I knew there was a book there."

That wasn't the end of Winegardner's efforts; he spent a summer in Mexico researching the book. "I talked to a lot of the people who were there, who were still living -- many of them were dead, of course. And as it says in the acknowledgments for the book, I really did read every single page of every issue of five different Mexican newspapers.

"But I was really just trying to understand the culture. A lot of things I was learning about weren't done in interviews, but in just hanging out. Going bowling with the media relations director of the Monterrey Sultans was as useful as anything I did."

Winegardner said he was often asked why he didn't write a non-fiction book, given the amount of research he did. "I understand that question intellectually, but I don't understand it emotionally. ... A novel allows you to get inside the heads of these people, allows you to be these people. A nonfiction book would keep this kind of respectful distance, but wouldn't get inside the skin and the head and the emotions, and that was always what the story was about."

Certainly, the characters are the most striking thing about "The Veracruz Blues." Although they are nearly all real people, here they are united with a fictional common bond. As Winegardner described it, "The common denominator of all these characters is, everybody in this book wanted everything big to happen to them, and nobody has it happen, really. But it causes them to lose sight of the fact that they were all people who aimed for the moon and stars, and got to the top of a very tall building."

Winegardner's narrative technique allows the reader extensive insight into his characters. Five different narrators relate the events of the 1946 season, and each one fills in another side of the story. Their conflicting voices, all vividly differentiated, reflect the piecing together of the historical truth from a variety of competing versions. Even the characters who don't narrate the book -- in particular, Jorge Pasquel, owner of the Mexican League -- are seen from multiple perspectives.

Winegardner acknowledged the difficulties of this technique. Citing one chapter narrated by María Félix, Pasquel's mistress, he commented, "You can imagine what it's like for a 32-year-old white guy to try to project himself into the body of a 70-something Mexican diva. Nothing one does lightly. But it was also the fun of the book, and the challenge."

Winegardner also said that he used this technique because it was one he enjoyed as a reader. "I just love those moments in novels when a character says, `Everything you know is wrong -- here's what I think.' You' re halfway through the book, you think, I know everything, and all of a sudden -- I know nothing ! I love that!"

However, the characters are not the only interesting thing about this novel. Winegardner discussed the book's context in 1946 America: "There are all these social-upheaval things you can see in the book that are gonna take until the 1960s to explode. There were more race riots in '46 than any year in American history, more labor strikes -- things that you wouldn't stop and think about."

The book also sheds light on recent sports history. Winegardner discussed one character, Danny Gardella, who attempted to sue major-league owners in the U.S. "If Danny Gardella would've pushed his lawsuit, there's a fairly broad consensus that he would have won; we would have had free agency in baseball in 1950. It should have had a broader effect than it did, but you can see in this book the seeds of what's gone wrong in baseball in the last couple years."

Given a reality-based novel that encompasses such a variety of characters and social events, readers will no doubt wonder how much is truth and how much fiction.

"The frame of the story is all essentially accurate," Winegardner said. "I tried whenever possible to make the story accurate -- all the baseball stuff is very close -- but I was also never gonna let the facts get in the way of a good story."

One such story is the tale of Babe Ruth's last at-bat, for the Mexico City Red Devils, which seems too much like fiction to be an actual event. Winegardner explained, "That one, nobody ever told the same version of that story. So I had to say, nobody's ever going to agree on this -- here's what should have happened."