The Palace Thief

Baseball is a prominent motif in “Accountant” and “City of Broken Hearts,” two stories that set up conventional portraits of heterosexual masculinity. In “Accountant,” baseball is the basis of the inequality between the otherwise “interchangeable” Abba Roth and Eugene Peters. In their youth, Roth “played third base and Eugene, whose father had gone to Notre Dame with our coach, played shortstop” (3). The latter is considered a more challenging position than the former, so Roth, as the better athlete, felt slighted. Here, Peters’s family connections, rather than his sporting qualities, automatically put him ahead. Perhaps later in the story when, at the fantasy baseball camp, Roth tries to “remember if our childhood contained some hint of our futures” (55), this is the clue that Peters would always have a natural advantage.

At the fantasy baseball camp, where the men can play with retired Giants and enact their boyhood dreams, Roth excels in his sporting activities, whereas Peters gives an average performance. However, Peters is awarded the accolade of Most Valuable Player because of his superior social skills and status; Willie Mays comments, “Seeing as he wants to be in my shoes so much […] these leggings are for him—Mr. Eugene Peters” (49). Arguably, Peters, who perennially wears a baseball cap, is already in Mays’s shoes, as he uses commercials to create a strong association between his auto-parts company and the popular hobby of baseball. Roth has the impression that Mays and Peters could become interchangeable themselves and that “no doubt” he “would soon be seeing [Mays] in a television commercial for automobile parts” (49).

In “City of Broken Hearts,” baseball is less about status than it is about nostalgia and a wish to return to a glorious past. While the story’s title relates to Wilson’s personal romantic heartbreak, more generally it references the terminally broken hearts of Boston’s baseball fans, given the decades of poor performance from their local team, the Red Sox. Wilson, who watches baseball from the sidelines, associates the quality of the game play with the two prominent periods in his life: when he was happy and stable in his young, nuclear family and when his family circumstances changed for the worse. Most notably, he conflates the Red Sox’s decline with his waning relationship with Brent:

At Fenway Park he’d watched the Red Sox since the days he had to carry his son, Brent, in his arms. Those were the days when Carl Yastrzemski was still making his day in the majors, a bird-legged lefty with a funny swing; now Yastrzemski […] had retired, and Brent was about to start his senior year in college (119).

The days of delicately built Yastrzemski’s ascendence, along with Brent’s infancy, give an impression of optimism and hopefulness in Wilson’s life. Conversely, the present, when the sportsman’s short career is over and Brent is independent, is a time of decline and hopelessness. Still, because going to Fenway Park is the only pastime that engages a lonely, depressed Wilson in his post-divorce life, he continues going to each “doomed” game, feeling the same “disappointment” every time the Red Sox lose (151). Arguably, Wilson’s compulsion to watch variants of the same losing game is symbolic of his inability to let go of the past.