Vladimir Nabokov’s Mysterious Baseball Game

Famous for writing standing up, but he could do it all. Photo: Cornell.

In 1962, Vladimir Nabokov — author of Lolita — published a book called Pale Fire, which presents a long poem written by a fictional author, with another fictional character chatting to you about the poem along the way, and it’s all riddled with complicated allusions and things. Since my descriptions so often fall short, I will just report that it is considered a masterpiece.

What’s more, there’s a baseball angle! The poem within Pale Fire references a newspaper headline about a Red Sox-Yankees game, presumably a game from before 1962, since that’s when Pale Fire was published. But significant questions remain, namely: Was that Red Sox-Yankees game ever played in real life? And did Tim McCarver ruin it for everyone?

If I’ve piqued your interest,* I can’t take credit for the payoff. Brian Cronin over at the L.A. Times’ “Fabulous Forum” blog did not-inconsiderable legwork and posted a very enjoyable writeup exploring whether the game referenced by Nabokov was a real game. If you just want the answer, one Michael Donohue also discussed this question back in 2004, albeit succinctly.

And just on the off chance that any of our NotGraphs readers are also the kind of people who like to waste their time reading about sports on the Internet, I should point out Brian Cronin’s “Legends Revealed” website, which has lots of sports-myth-debunkery content, and his book, which leaves no comic book legend un-revealed.

* If I haven’t piqued your interest: Come on! This is like literary/baseball-historical Indiana Jones! It’s like if Harrison Ford got cast in Field of Dreams, but Dan Brown did a rewrite on the screenplay, and Umberto Eco was his writing partner. And Christopher Nolan directed it. And Harrison Ford’s wife in the movie was Salma Hayek. Interested yet? Need I point out that in 1989, when Field of Dreams was released, Salma Hayek was 23? Changed your answer?