Matt Baker's Ode to the Dixie Association

I was looking for a sign, a direction, a clue. I'd been a religious skeptic since the age of seven when I was admonished by my Sunday-school teacher for saying, "You've got to be kidding me," when she told us the resurrection story. So, needless to say, I wasn't looking upward for my nudge. I was nineteen and I'd dropped out of college, moved back home, and united with other dropouts. We gathered nightly at various bars and goofed off most of the time but eventually we would circle back around to our predicament: What do we do now?

Go to most any bar near closing time on a Tuesday night and you'll find yourself a grouchy bunch waiting for a sign. Some have already given up and let alcohol fill in the answers for them. We weren't quite there yet. But more than the drinking, a bar is a great hideout. That's what we were doing, hiding out from a life that we'd already rejected in some way though we couldn't figure out any alternatives.

I hopped from one retail job to the next. Restaurant jobs lasted a little longer. My employment hit rock bottom when after one hour of work on the first day of my job at a pet store, I told the manager, "I just can't do this." She asked why. "I'm allergic to cats, rabbits, dogs, and actually most anything that grows hair." She was furious. How come you didn't tell me about this in our interview? "I forgot."

One day, I came out of a local library and snatched a couple of books that were in the donation bin near the front door. The one that stood out was a baseball novel, The Dixie Association, by Donald Hays.

After firing up my car in the parking lot, a rumbling '87 Camaro that sounded as content as a kitty's purr, I started to read and—what do you know?—the first line hooked me: "I was in my cell packing my shit in a cardboard box." Ah. The guy's leaving prison. This should be good.

I'm a skimmer, I admit. So I did just that, until I got to the end of Chapter Two and read this life-altering line, "A man that believes in signs is going to spend most of his time lost."

I don't think a digression is required here. I had found it.

I began quoting it. Telling everybody. I was a suburban bar prophet.

It's been twenty-four years since The Dixie Association first knuckleballed its way into the literary world. I occasionally muse that if Hays had died after or, even better, before the release of the novel, news of this compelling tragedy would have caused the widespread fame and following a book like The Dixie Association deserves. Even though the novel was nominated for the PEN/Faulkner Award in 1985, it is no longer recognized beyond a small crowd of baseball-lit fans and graduates of English programs in the Southeastern Conference. Whatever its reputation, The Dixie Association, with its rapid-fire one-liners, social satire, and observational finesse, is easily classifiable as a comic masterpiece. The details of the story are not all that important. In fact, I always found myself saying, "It's about a wacky baseball team," when asked for a synopsis. This, of course, does the novel no justice. It's certainly not wacky in the way of Johnny Bench's 1980s Saturday-morning baseball-celebration show, The Baseball Bunch, in which corny boys and girls of all sizes, shapes, and ethnicities played along with the then-stars of Major League Baseball. Who can forget Ken Singleton instructing The Bunch how to effectively coordinate the intricate workings of flip-down sunglasses in catching a fly ball against the sun? Or Tommy Lasorda's forgotten role as "The Dugout Wizard"? Well, I haven't. However, it is wacky that the team, the Arkansas Reds, is full of memorable outcasts: Hog Durham, the narrator, is a straight-shooting ex-con; Lefty Marks is a one-armed ex-major leaguer who made the bigs during World War II, when all the pros were overseas; Genghis Mohammed Jr., a devout Muslim from Texarkana, Arkansas, throws two variations of his trusty screwball; Bullet Bob Turner is a junk-pitch specialist with a daily hangover problem. And what is better than a female first baseman and other female characters who pull off cons with the best of them? And get this, the bad guys win! Or, maybe they're not really the bad guys.

Hays makes us relearn that the dregs, the convicts, the undesirables are often on to something everyone else is blindly unaware of. That something is plain and potent truth.

Ten years later, I met Donald Hays and I told him my conversion story in person. He listened, nodded, and couldn't rid himself of this grin. It was the look of someone who recognizes the joke you're telling, already aware of the punch line, and waiting, impatiently, but politely, for you to finish. I realized then that my rehashing of how The Dixie Association was a life-altering moment for me was something he'd heard many times before.

Art: "Play Ball" by Augusta Oelschig. Courtesy of the Morris Museum of Art, Augusta, Georgia.