Recommended reading - The Natural, by Bernard Malamud (1952):

The Natural

By Bernard Malamud.

Filmed as The Natural (1984), directed by Barry Levinson.

Paperback.

Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

First published 1952.

ISBN: 9780374502003

ISBN 10: 0374502005

ASIN: 0374502005

Description:

The Natural, Bernard Malamud's first novel, published in 1952, is also the first – and some would say still the best – novel ever written about baseball. In it, Malamud, usually appreciated for his unerring portrayals of postwar Jewish life, took on very different material – the story of a superbly gifted "natural" at play in the fields of the old daylight baseball era – and invested it with the hardscrabble poetry, at once grand and altogether believable, that runs through all his best work. Four decades later, Alfred Kazin's comment still holds true: "Malamud has done something which – now that he has done it! – looks as if we have been waiting for it all our lives. He has really raised the whole passion and craziness and fanaticism of baseball as a popular spectacle to its ordained place in mythology."