Sport: Lowbrow Highbrow

For four weary seasons Cincinnati’s Jim Brosnan trudged through the National League as a journeyman pitcher. This year, Brosnan has become a star. Against San Francisco last week, he sauntered to the mound in the eleventh inning, gave up no runs in two innings, and was credited with the 3-2 victory. That gave Brosnan a record of 6-2 (he has saved a dozen other games), lowered his e.r.a. to 2.33, second in the league only to the 2.30 of the Cardinals’ Lindy McDaniel, and proved again that he has developed into one of the best relief pitchers in the league. The reason for the new Brosnan: he wrote a book.

The fact that Brosnan wrote a book surprises no National Leaguer. Though he chews tobacco with the rest of the boys, Brosnan is one of the game’s rarer types: he reads Rousseau and Nietzsche, puffs on a pipe, studies his fellows through owlish spectacles, and naturally is nicknamed “the Professor.” He is fond of recalling how he once dumfounded a batter by declaring from the mound: “Us ne passeront pas!”

The Rule Breaker. But no one expected even Brosnan to write a book like The Long Season, a deft, wry account of his struggles as a pitcher last year. Traditionally, a baseball book is a sludge of cold porridge turned out by a ghostwriter for some superstar and dedicated to the notion that pro baseball is just good, clean American fun. Brosnan’s book breaks all such rules. Not only did he write every word himself, but he strongly suggests that baseball players are something less than choir boys. He intimates that players like girls (and even do something about it in their off hours). He talks of the art of breaking up a double play by breaking up the shortstop. He admits to throwing an occasional beanball. He discusses the batting weaknesses of leading sluggers. He says the illegal spitball is “quite popular in the National League,” laments only the fact that “I need a good stiff wind blowing straight out from the plate to get anything on the pitch.”

When the lodge secrets were published in July, National Leaguers could not wait to see Black Sheep Brosnan trip over his big mouth and fall right out of baseball. “You think this book was funny?” chortled Cardinals’ Manager Solly Hemus, Brosnan’s pet hate and the man who traded him to Cincinnati. “Wait until you see him pitch.”

The Baffle. But the challenge of pitching as well as he talks has settled Brosnan down. When the bench jockeys sharpen their gibes, the intent Brosnan professes to catch not a word: “I probably have a subconscious baffle to keep from hearing anything.” A man who has spent eight months in analysis. Brosnan easily spots the main reason for his new success: he no longer relies on outthinking the batter. “Writing about pitching forced me to recognize how simple it is,” he says. “Before, I thought it couldn’t possibly be that simple. If I ever get back to thinking instead of pitching, I’m in trouble.”

To keep his mind off his work, Brosnan is now in the early stages of writing a series of short stories about baseball (his favorite plot: a pitcher is ordered to throw a beanball and kills a batter). He whiles away time by wandering through book shops and inquiring hopefully if they are sold out of The Long Season (total national sales: 10,000, enough to make the New York Herald Tribune’s bestseller list). Then he scoops up armfuls of volumes ranging from Moss Hart to William James and strolls back to his hotel to forget about the problem of pitching to the likes of Willie Mays. “There’s nothing like a book,” he says, “to keep your mind from thinking.”