“I would prefer not to.”
If you’ve ever tried to slog out a degree in English Literature from any university in the United States of America, you had a deja vu experience a few days ago in the person of one Phillip Joseph Nevin. Ostensibly the San Diego Padres’ first baseman, Nevin was slated to be dealt to the Baltimore Orioles for all-world hurler Sidney Ponson; all-world, in this case, more a description of Ponson’s general shape and size rather than any kind of qualitative estimate. This trade fell into a slow-news-week gap, and it threatened to become the first salvo in a frenzy of baseball bartering centered around the July 31 deadline, which isn’t really the deadline anyway, but anon.
But Nevin turned himself into the very model of a modern version of the anti-hero of Herman Melville’s 1853 novella “Bartleby the Scrivener, A Story of Wall-Street.” Bartleby, the proto-ur-slacker clerk who refused to work, has been the character that has launched a hundred thousand “I’m going to take a year off and find myself”s. And Nevin donned that Johnny Bravo suit with his obstinate invocation of his limited no-trade clause caused a trade-deadline trade to be, in the word of countless sports wire-service headlines, “nixed.” Sure, he said that he wanted to spend more time with his family, an excuse that Melville’s sesquicentennial clerk did not have. But the metaphor seems apt to me anyway, even if it is mostly because “Nevin” kind of sounds like “Scrivener.”
Was this trade going to help either squad? Of course not. Certainly, both are expensive, and slated to move on soon; the Orioles wanted to move Ponson’s considerable girth out of the locker room, and the Padres needed to clear some room for young firebrand Xavier Nady, but neither team was expecting more than that out of this trade. In a better, more stable world, Nevin’s refusal to be dealt would be met with, at best, a Latin kind of shrug, as if to say, “Honestly, who gives a rodent’s patoot about this trade of never-weres? Let us move on to the good trades!”
And yet we have seen that this trading deadline season maintains an eerie hush, a funereal silence with intermittent crackles of static that never pan out. I can’t help but feel that Nevin has cursed the entire realm of Major League Baseball with his Fiedler-esque “No! in Thunder.” Clearly, had this trade gone through, more trades would have followed in quick succession, the way machine-gun fire always follows the first opening salvo in a battle. But when that first salvo hangs fire, no bursts of deadly bullets echo across a wind-swept and bloody battlefield; the war itself slows to cold hard entropy; the cameramen go home; nothing is resolved; the mobile spins to its collision; Clara puts her head between her paws.
All because of one man, and his unwillingness to bow to the timeless rhythm of the Grand Pastime. I’m not sure whether to salute him or to castigate him. I am a rather elderly man. I’m bereft, anchorless in a world I never made, a world of kings and councillors, a rocky land where my seed can find no purchase. The oars have slipped off the moorings. The rough beast slouches into Bethlehem. There is no joy in Mudville.
Ah Nevin! Ah humanity!
Roger Angell is the fiction editor of the “New Yorker,” and the author and editor of more books about baseball than you have ever heard about in your philosophy, Horatio.