The House of Daniel

The House of Daniel must be the product of authorial autism, senility or some kind of neurological insult, if not all of the above. In a novel that manages to be both rigidly formulaic and wildly picaresque, bestselling speculative fiction senior statesman Harry Turtledove doesn't just turn his attention to baseball, but rather fixates obsessively upon it. 

The House of Daniel follows a small-town roustabout named Jack "Snake" Spivey as he grabs a spot on a travelling team of bearded ballplayers (based on the real-life "House of David" of yore), all in an effort to evade an unsavory employer. Spivey goes from town to town with the team, seeing large swaths of the American southwest and Pacific coast along the way. In literally every town the House of Daniel plays in, our narrator Spivey (or, better yet, our author Turtledove) provides the same constellation of details about the stop: the layout of the town, the dimensions of the ballpark and its seating capacity, and the uniforms the home team wears. This culminates in about a page or two of description covering the gameplay, which frequently involves the eventual use of a "brushback" pitch and some subsequent hostilities, if not an all-out brawl. After virtually every game, the opposing team's manager either approaches or is approached by the House of Daniel's player-manager and, with Spivey always in earshot, makes a comment to the effect of "you really beat our boys" or "our boys really beat you." 

Dozens of descriptions following this precise template make up the bulk of the book. It's almost as if an aging Turtledove was contractually obligated to provide a novel-length composition, and so he leaned on this formula to pound out the pages. It makes for monumentally uninspired writing and (unintentionally) comically repetitive reading as Turtledove's mind loops back to the same observations and incidents from town to town. Perhaps it is all intended as a commentary on the repetitive life of a Depression-era barnstorming ballplayer. 

But this is not your granddaddy's Depression-era, as it also features, as per standard Turtledove, a robust population of zombies, vampires, and other fantastical creatures, all of which have been more or less integrated into American society. These beings don't have much bearing on the plot, with the exception being a zombie-related incident that happens about 220 pages in and diverts the team bus—really the only juncture in the book that breaks from the template detailed above. Sometimes these creatures enable apparent attempts at comic relief. In the Pacific Northwest, for instance, the main character meets a bigfoot, and rattles off the following observation: "In spite of the long hair all over, that bigfoot was definitely he. His feet weren't the only thing big about him." Beyond coruscating insights of this sort, the monsters serve no purpose; their inclusion may very well have been contractually obligated so as to shoehorn this baseball novel into the genre most accustomed for Turtledove's devotees. 

It strikes this reviewer that the monsters and crypto-hominids might have been able to serve as a point of departure for commenting on racial strife in past and present-day America—including the outright racism of the main character early on in the book—but Turtledove shows no interest in doing this. He just wants to tell you about ballparks and brushbacks with monsters in the backdrop, over and over  and over again. Let's hope that The House of Daniel was compelled by commercial concerns and not cognitive degeneration. In either case, the resultant composition makes for a terrible read.

Super Baseball 2020

Super Baseball 2020 is SNK's futuristic reimagining of baseball. Released in North America in 1993 for the Sega Genesis and Super Nintendo by way of EA Sports, the game features some crucial rule changes for the “distant” future that the year 2020 represented at the time.

First off, in an effort to curb out-of-control power hitting, the dons of Super Baseball 2020's in-game universe have decreed that the left and right field fences should be colossally high, ensuring that homeruns can only be hit to straightaway center. In a similar effort to facilitate at least some degree of small-ball, foul territory has been limited to the space in front of first base and third base. Balls landing in the foul territory behind third and first as we presently know them are considered fair. The field itself has also been modified. At the warning track, for instance, there are “jump zones,” within which an outfielder can leap with some extra spring in his, her, or their step to take a stab at a fly ball. The field also changes over the course of the game. From the fifth inning onward, the Super Baseball rule book mandates that the field must play host to “crackers”—proximity mines that explode whenever someone ventures into their vicinity. Crackers can seriously debilitate a heedless fielder. Even the players themselves can change within game. Various sorts of plays lead to monetary awards, and in-game earnings can be used to upgrade a player.

Super Baseball 2020 also includes some significant changes around the culture of the game of baseball and, presumably, the society alongside which it has evolved. In consonance with the overarching sci-fi sensibilities, robots are among the players on the field and the umpires calling the plays. Even more fantastically, women appear on these big league rosters; in fact, there are entire teams of females, all of whom are identically blond and buxom and clad in short-shorts to boot. The crowd, meanwhile, appears to be made up of scattered robot parts. On the whole, these changes in rules and culture give Super Baseball 2020 a unique aesthetic, and provide a refreshing alternative to baseball in our current continuity, both past and present.

Indeed, Super Baseball 2020 looks drastically different from baseball in 1993 or in 2020 as it stands. Of course, baseball in present-continuity 2020 looks drastically different from baseball as it did in 1993, or even 2019, for that matter. As Super Baseball predicted, the volume of homeruns has increased dramatically in real-life 2020. With that has come an increase in strike outs. In an era of a deeply polarized politics, and a wholly politicized America often dictated by the whims of its leftist and rightist extremes, isn't it fitting that America's pastime has become about feast or famine, strike out or home run? Baseball has certainly seen rule changes. In an effort to speed up pace-of-play, Major League Baseball has mandated for the 2020 season that any given relief pitcher must face a minimum of three batters. More radically, to expedite extra innings, the tenth inning starts with a designated runner placed on second. And yet the biggest changes in Regular Baseball 2020 have been shaped around culture—not so much that of baseball itself, but rather that of a society racked by a respiratory virus and an unsatisfactory response thereto. With the coronavirus out of control in America, and with a staggering proportion of the American populace unwilling to believe the virus is real, baseball games are played in empty parks. In the absence of fans, enterprising PA guys pipe in 70 different situation-based crowd reactions. To fill the void, some parks have equipped the bleachers with cardboard cut-outs of people, which look a bit like the fans in N64-era baseball games, and are probably preferable to used-up robot parts. All told, actual Baseball in 2020 feels far more dystopian than Super Baseball 2020. At present, watching baseball sometimes feels like watching a video game.

If you're going to play video-game baseball, though, Super Baseball 2020 isn't a bad option. Its visual style and gameplay distinguish it from conventional baseball fare of its era. By comparison, 90s realist simulations like EA’s Tony La Russa Baseball look and feel dated. Super Baseball's futurism affords it some degree of timelessness. However, Super Baseball 2020 is not without its flaws. Chiefly, the game is somewhat buggy. For instance, if a base runner has touched a base, they cannot go back to their original base to avoid a force out (though this anomaly could be explained away as another rule change of the future). More broadly, Super Baseball 2020 suffers from pace-of-play issues of its own. The amount of innings in a game is non-adjustable, and playing a complete game usually takes over 20 minutes. “Futuristic” does not, in this dispensation, mean “streamlined” or “speedy.” And when pitted against other futuristic baseball games, Super Baseball actually pales. Inevitably, Super Baseball prompts comparisons to Base Wars, Konami's 1991 NES release that features all-robot squads playing a fairly conventional version of baseball. There's one important difference, however: force plays in Base Wars occasion one-on-one duels between baseman and baserunner robots. On account of this innovation, as well as overall speedier gameplay, Base Wars is a more enjoyable experience than Super Baseball 2020. 

All that being said, Super Baseball 2020 is still a fine game, and it will endure beyond its eponymous year in the history of both video games and baseball. Truth be told, Major League Baseball in our present continuity could learn a thing or two from Super Baseball. Mandatory green monsters in left and right in every stadium would turn the focus back to something other than homeruns (and the strike-outs that unfettered fence-swinging makes commonplace). The MLB has already started looking into the use of robot umps. It still seems like it will be awhile before baseball culture, or the androcentric American culture that sustains it, will consider the possibility of female players. That said, the San Francisco Giants just recently hired Sacramento State's softball standout Alyssa Nakken as their first-base coach. This is an important first step for women in the MLB. Your correspondent would like to believe we’ll see women on a major-league baseball field before we see proximity mines. Of course, this is America we’re talking about, so you can never count out the tyranny of crackers.