Short Story Sunday: "The Last Pennant Before Armageddon" by W.P. Kinsella

Months later, after the cycle of dreams began their nightly invasion of his body, Al Tiller recalled the night the archangel had telephoned the radio station, and he realized that then, and not on the evening of the first dream, was when his troubles had started.

Opening line from "The Last Pennant Before Armageddon."

Al Tiller is not a bad team manager. Through his long career in baseball he has managed all levels of players, from bush league minors to big time professionals. By big time professional I mean the Chicago Cubs, a team notorious for losing season after season. It's hardly Al Tiller's fault that he gets his job with the Cubs years before they finally made it to the series ending a 100 year title drought, the longest of any team in professional baseball.

When the Cubs start to do well, when it looks like they might make it to the playoffs, might actually win the pennant, Al begins to have dreams and to encounter odd interviews on the late-night sports radio call-in shows. These dreams and signs lead Al to a disturbing conclusion-- if the Cubs win the pennant, Armageddon will arrive. Just when Al should be enjoying what looks like a sure shot at the World Series, he begins to wonder if he should start throwing games in order to save the world.

In 1984, when W.P. Kinsella's collection of stories about baseball, The Thrill of the Grass, was first published, this was probably a delicious old joke. Many a Cub fan, many a Cub foe had probably made just such a remark after a brief winning streak. Maybe will win the pennant this year. Sure, but if that happens won't the world end. Today, Mr. Kinsella's stories offer a kind of nostalgia, a vision of what baseball used to be like when professional sports still had a kind of innocence about them. It's easy to like his characters, to root for them even when they are bound to fail.

There's something about baseball, or at least about baseball stories, that looks backward to a simpler time, a lost age before we all had to face reality. I suspect this is, at heart, a form of escapism. If so, just take me out to the ball game.

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