Author Jonathan Lethem’s beloved New York Mets couldn’t help but find their way, in however brief a mention, into his acclaimed novels Fortress of Solitude and Motherless Brooklyn and now the upcoming Dissident Gardens. A few years back, the Brooklyn-born Lethem, today a creative writing professor at Pomona, went so far as to co-author the “very eccentric” Believeniks!: 2005: The Year We Wrote a Book About the Mets, for which he and Christopher Sorrentino, writing under pseudonyms, watched every game of the season and immersed themselves in Mets minutiae. “It was really a book,” Lethem says, “about the disproportion of attention that fandom represents.”

During Occupy Wall Street in 2011, Lethem makes a personal protest against the newly announced name of Citi Field, which replaced the Mets’ Shea Stadium.
Photo by David Shankbone

When it comes to the writing of books, baseball has long benefitted from a disproportion of attention. Visit just about any American bookstore, and you’ll find tomes about the old ball game invariably make up the largest share of the sports books section, and baseball is at the center of a surprising number of novels as well. Within this vast field, Sagehen writers of late have been holding down more than their share of the shelf space.

Among our scribes, Sports Illustrated writer Chris Ballard ’95 is master of the mass market. His well-reviewed One Shot at Forever: A Small Town, an Unlikely Coach and a Magical Baseball Season is the story of a quirky teacher leading a team from tiny Macon, Ill. to the state championships. As Booklist puts it: “Ballard writes very well and avoids the usual pitfalls of the ‘inspirational’ story, the cloying platitudes and rah-rah nonsense. These kids were simply good ballplayers coached by a guy with an open mind, a lot of common sense and a zest for fun.”

Just released in paperback, One Shot is slated to become a movie from the same company that did the hit Jackie Robinson film, 42.

Ballard, one-time sports editor of the Claremont Collage, credits Pomona as a “great incubator” for his writing. “Lynn Sweet, the English-teacher-turned- coach in the book, was a huge believer in
questioning the status quo, seeing the bigger picture and relating to students as human beings,” says Ballard. “That’s a lot of what I loved about Pomona, especially coming from a place like UCSB [Ballard had transferred] where I used to register for classes by telephone.”

And then there’s the relative rookie, Kyle Beachy ’01. His well-received 2009 debut novel, The Slide, is set in the summer after college when 22- year-old Potter Mays moves back into his parents’ St. Louis home and “even his passion for baseball fails to halt his slide into the morass,” as Booklist notes. The sport’s key role in The Slide is not surprising for a writer who grew up as a devout Cardinals fan, but Beachy says his next novel will not get quite so involved with the game he loves.

“I’m watching this season from a nice distance, currently, and I’d like to keep it [there],” says Beachy, now living in Chicago, where he teaches English and creative writing at Roosevelt University. “Writing about baseball for me means having to look really hard and then probably not enjoying it in the way I am now.”

Garrett Harker ’89 at his Fenway-adjacent bistro the Eastern Standard.

Technically, the restaurant Eastern Standard is located a few blocks away from Fenway Park in Boston’s Kenmore Square neighborhood. But as owner Garrett Harker ’89 will attest, the legendary ballpark’s shadow looms large on his brasserie-style eatery, literally and otherwise.

Red Sox fans walking to Fenway from the closest stop on “the T”—Boston’s subway line—can’t get there without passing Eastern Standard’s big red awning. For an upscale bistro in a sea of beer-soaked baseball bars, the location can be both a blessing and a curse (to use a phrase with unfortunate connotations for Red Sox Nation).

Since he opened shop in 2005, though, Harker has deftly straddled the line in appealing to a diverse clientele of foodies and foam-fingered Fenway faithful. GQ magazine even gave his establishment, decked out in dark wood and leather, the unusual designation of “most elegant sports bar in the country.”

When he was first scouting Boston properties, Harker was intrigued by the track record of the Sox’s then-new President and CEO Larry Lucchino. In the early ’90s Lucchino oversaw the creation of Camden Yards in Harker’s hometown of Baltimore—another example of an urban ballpark situated in a less-than urbane neighborhood. The executive’s efforts to build ties with local institutions helped revitalize the downtown area, and Harker thought that Lucchino could work similar magic in Kenmore Square.

“The Red Sox’ old ownership had this insular idea that what happened outside the green walls didn’t apply to them,” Harker says. “I could tell that Larry understood that a rising tide lifts all boats. He wanted to enhance the whole experience of going out to a game.”

To prepare his staff for Kenmore Square’s hodge-podge of customers, Harker has instituted his own form of spring training every year. In special weekly meetings, everyone from the general managers to the busboys present reports on topics ranging from the importance of cocktail bitters to the neuroscience of body language. He even sends employees on trips to Maine and Cape Cod to study different areas’ cultural vibes and then report back on their findings.

“Garrett is all about giving us the chance to share knowledge,” says manager Deena Marlette, who has a master’s degree in education and runs a book club for staff. “It’s his philosophy that you ultimately learn the most by teaching others.”

Harker, who majored in English, says the approach goes back to his liberal arts training at Pomona. But if he hopes to “spark a little passion” and spur intellect, there is business sense at work as well. Cultivating conversationalists is another way to connect with customers, something more than a garnish to his menu of surf, turf and the occasional braised lamb shank.

Baseball, of course, is a key part of an Eastern Standard education. Before every home game the managers brief their servers on the visiting team and slip one-page cheat sheets into all of the billfolds. At this spring’s staff kick-off meeting, held at Fenway, Red Sox “fast facts” were passed out, former Boston Globe sportswriter Jackie MacMullan offered some motivational remarks, and Lucchino even said a few words about the restaurant’s important role in Kenmore Square. (Harker is on a first-name basis with several of the Red Sox’ top brass.)

Just like on the diamond, spring training has paid off during the regular season, in the form of Eastern Standard’s above-average employee retention and, most notably, one of the city’s strongest reputations for service. Eastern Standard regular T. Barton Carter draws a parallel between bistro and baseball. “You must be able to handle any situation with that same consistency and attention to detail,” says Carter, a Boston University communications professor who holds season tickets to weekend games at Fenway. “The only difference is that the Sox unfortunately aren’t as consistent as Eastern Standard.”

In recent years, the spot’s success has spurred further culinary growth in Kenmore Square, including Harker’s own Island Creek Oyster Bar and the Hawthorne cocktail bar, which he opened in 2010 and 2011, respectively. “There’s a neighborhood here,” he says. “A decade ago, nobody would have thought it possible.”

Life as a Fenway-area restaurateur does force you to always have an eye on the standings, and even the day’s box score. During our interview Harker kept glancing at one of Eastern Standard’s TVs to monitor a rain delay that ultimately sent thousands of fans onto the streets and back into his establishments. (Worse still, it happened in the sixth inning, after the ballpark stops serving alcohol.) “When the Red Sox are in first, it’s rib-eyes and red wine,” he says. “When they’re struggling, like last year [Boston’s first losing season since 1997], it’s burgers and beers.”

It’s a time-honored American tradition, fathers and sons going out to a ballgame, cheering for the home team, buying some peanuts and Cracker Jack. But few dads are as adventurous and driven as Mike Luery ’77, who undertook a 16-year odyssey to visit every Major League Baseball stadium in North America with his son, Matt. During that baseball pilgrimage, Luery would see his son go from boyhood to adulthood, passing through the turbulence of adolescence on the main part of the journey. It was a rite of passage that sorely tested their relationship and could have easily ended in disaster.

“You know, it can be difficult being trapped in a hotel room for a week with a teenager,” says Luery, with stunning understatement. “I just thought as he got older, what better way for a father and son to bond than to be on the road, and have baseball as our map?”

Luery, an award-winning TV news investigative journalist who has taken on the Ku Klux Klan and exposed cocaine abuse, retells the father-son saga in his recent book, Baseball Between Us. In honest but sometimes unsparing detail, Luery lays bare the generational tensions and personality clashes between two opinionated travelers, one a compulsive and fastidious planner who dreaded being late for the first pitch, the other a free spirit who would risk missing a flight if he could just sleep in a little longer. Most parents with teenagers might have balked at the idea from the start. In the words of the great Yogi Berra: “You’ve got to be very careful if you don’t know where you are going because you might not get there.”

But Luery can be a “stubborn cuss,” as a friend bluntly puts it. For him, love of family and love of baseball are inextricably linked. Baseball is not just a pastime, it’s a legacy—one that he inherited from his own father and “baseball buddy,” Robert Luery, who took him to the World Series at Yankee Stadium in 1963 when he was 8. Sure, the Dodgers with Sandy Koufax on the mound swept the Yankees that year, and little Mike cried all the way home, but baseball had gotten in his blood.

Once he became a father, he wanted his boy to share the passion, but the conversion would not be so magical. The first time he took his family to a ballgame was an admitted flop. It was 1994, to see the St. Louis Cardinals at Busch Stadium. The kids, Matt, 5, and his older sister Sarah, 8, were tired and hungry; his wife, Carol, was bored. Yet, the irrepressible Mr. Luery vowed to take his reluctant brood to a ballgame in every city they visited.

Luery became Matt’s Little League coach and continued taking him to games as a boy. In 2005, when Matt was 16, they embarked on their baseball expedition in earnest. Their mission: to visit parks and places they had never been to before. That year, the duo started out from their hometown in Sacramento, where Luery is a reporter for the NBC affiliate KCRA-TV, and flew to Detroit to watch the Tigers trounce the San Francisco Giants on a warm night at Comerica Park. There was no turning back.

To no parents’ surprise, the trip confirmed that teenagers excel at sulking, sleeping and scoffing at their elders. (Informed that Wrigley Field was built in 1914, Matt says, “Wow, Dad, that’s even older than you are.”) Luery and his son argued over almost everything: politics, history and especially what music to play on long car rides, classic rock versus rap. (“Dad, I’m tired of listening to all those dead guys.”) All along the way, Matt chafed at being used as a “prop” for another in his father’s endless series of snapshots. “By taking a picture,” the teen declared, “you are altering the authenticity of the moment.”

The pair also managed to share some good times. Matt, who graduated last year from USC with a degree in architecture, appreciated the design and urban planning of the stadiums. (Target Field in Minnesota gets high marks because “you don’t need a car to get there.”) And the teenager was thoroughly charmed by a chance meeting with former Dodger great Maury Wills.

In the end, father and son grew closer, and wiser. Matt learned to savor the slow pace of baseball games and really admire Jimi Hendrix. (“Dad, you may be a dinosaur but you rock.”) And Mike learned to be more flexible as a father, less quick to condemn, more willing to accept the differences between generations. From his son, he learned the “value of serendipity,” of going places without a compass, doing things without a blueprint: “Dad, the beauty of the trip is sometimes you get lost and you end up in a better place.”

The final stats: 16 years, 32 ballparks, 43,000 miles. Matt Luery, now 24, is grateful for all the time he and his dad spent together, even if they had disagreements “every now and then.” That’s what he wrote in a loving epilogue to his father’s book which, in the end, earned its positive subtitle: “A Roadmap to a Winning Father/Son Relationship.”

One of the most moving moments of the trip had nothing to do with baseball, directly. Luery was anxious for his son to see his childhood haunts in Stamford, Conn., a prosperous suburb about 30 miles from Manhattan. He was devastated to find his old home turned into a “foreclosure rat-trap,” boarded up and vandalized.

Later, his dismay deepened when visiting the gravesite of his sister, who had died at age 20 in a car crash. It was overgrown with weeds and crusted with dirt. The hard-charging, fast-talking reporter was reduced to tears, down on his knees, trying vainly to restore his sister’s nameplate. Matt instinctively moved to comfort his father, with reassuring words and a gentle hand on the shoulder. For once, the child was father to the man. Then they got back on the road to Shea Stadium, where that night the father and son watched the Mets shut out the Marlins, 3-0.

“For me, baseball has always been the fabric that holds us together,” says Mike, who got his start in broadcasting as a deejay at KSPC. “No matter how bad of a day you had, no matter what happened in the world, no matter how many losses, you always had comfort in baseball.”

Mike Luery’s Top 10 Ballparks

1) AT&T Park, San Francisco Giants Splash hits into the beautiful bay.

2) PNC Park, Pittsburgh Pirates Take a water taxi to the game.

3) Fenway Park, Boston Red Sox Tradition runs deep.

4) Oriole Park, Baltimore Orioles Enjoy barbecue at ex-player Boog Powell’s eatery.

5) Comerica Park, Detroit Tigers Life-size outfield replicas of Cobb, Kaline and Horton.

6) Target Field, Minnesota Twins Take light rail from airport to the park.

7) Coors Field (Denver), Colorado Rockies Great view of the Rocky Mountains.

8)Busch Stadium, St. Louis Cardinals The Gateway Arch makes an awesome backdrop.

9) Citizens Bank Park, Philadelphia Phillies Take the subway with the fanatic fans.

10) Progressive Field, Cleveland Indians Park filled with monuments to legendary players.