May. 26, 2004 - Issue #449: Super Size Me

Buy me some pizza and Cracker Jack

Dave Bidini goes down swinging with Italian sports saga Baseballissimo

I could go into extra innings pointing out just how many reasons I had to love this book. As soon as I read the opening of the adapted excerpt that appeared in the October 2003 issue of Toro, I was salivating. And not just because Italian ballplayers eat cornetti and brioche in the dugout during games. Baseballissimo: My Summer in the Italian Minor Leagues, by Rheostatics rhythm guitarist and globetrotting sports curiosity-seeker Dave Bidini, was truly my type of tale. It had everything: the fish-out-of-water anecdotes of a Canadian in an exotic foreign land; the absurdity of Italian baseball, in a place where the sport has a fascinating history featuring Joe DiMaggio and home runs hit into the ocean; the added depth of the author coming to terms with his Italian heritage; the drama of following a team for an entire season; even the fact that Bidini is from Toronto, like me, so his trips into the furthest reaches of vintage Blue Jays nostalgia summoned firsthand memories from my youth as well. Plus there’s the small matter of him being in one of favourite bands, that his hockey writing is really quite insightful, that we have mutual friends.... You get the point. I really wanted to like this book. But it’s not my fault that I can’t echo all the other critics I’ve read and say bravo to Baseballissimo. I blame Tony Horwitz. I know it’s not fair to compare authors, but I happened to pick up Bidini’s book right after completing a masterful nonfiction book by Horwitz called Blue Latitudes: Boldly Going Where Captain Cook Has Gone Before. In Blue Latitudes, Horwitz, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and a former Wall Street Journal foreign correspondent, traces Cook’s 18th-century voyages of discovery in this, our new millennium. Brilliantly weaving together scenes from Cook’s nautical explorations with his own vivid anthropological investigations (usually alongside his trusty Aussie drinking buddy Roger), Horwitz writes beautifully about cultural imperialism, class, science and charisma, coming up with stirring, downright inspiring conclusions about human connectiveness and our ability to interact peacefully even without shared vocabularies. There’s nothing wrong with Bidini’s vocabulary in Baseballissimo, although some of his turns of phrase sound forced or rushed. The words he uses are generally fine; it’s how he uses them that’s the problem for me. With a story like this, one that has so many strong elements lined up in a row, the trick is really in the telling. Balancing personal reflections about growing up Italian in Canada with expository writing about his unique experiences with the Nettuno Peones takes an artful sense of transition and comedic timing, an ability to make subtle connections so the scenes flow and the jokes fly. Instead, Bidini hits us over the head with a baseball bat. Like I just did. When Bidini starts his chapter about World War II and how American soldiers brought baseball to Italy, for instance, he clubs us with a one-word paragraph: “War.” Later, describing a major military tactical blunder, Bidini writes that General John Lucas “could have sent his men marching on Rome. He didn’t. Four months later, thousands of men were dead” (with the last sentence another stand-alone paragraph). This is incredibly powerful material—spare us the melodrama. That said, there’s much that I did like about Baseballissimo. Bidini lived in Nettuno for a few months with his wife and children and tells us how much he enjoyed leaning out his apartment window and talking with people down in streets below. There’s also a nice passage about a crowded train trip with his infant daughter and a seated old woman insisting that a standing dad hand the stranger his child, who promptly falls asleep on the nonna’s bosom. And while I did appreciate much of the actual baseball writing, the minutiae of a minor league team’s activities on the field aren’t all that riveting, and Bidini’s habit of referring to a large cast of players only by their nicknames (Solid Gold, the Emperor) is very confusing, especially after the rapid-fire introduction he supplies at the start of the book. His habit of dropping Italian words and phrases into the narrative without translation is similarly distracting; both techniques provide colour, but if you’re not really sure who’s talking (or what they’re saying) your attention tends to wander. Perhaps this book was rushed off to the printer, or maybe Bidini’s editor was lazy. It’s a good story, and there are artful flourishes, but like a suicide squeeze bunt, you need perfect execution to pull it off. V Baseballissimo: My Summer in the Italian Minor Leagues By Dave Bidini • McClelland and Stewart • 160 pp. • $36.99

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