You Could Look It Up by James Thurber
"You Could Look It Up" by James Thurber is a short story that presents a humorous and engaging narrative through the eyes of an illiterate trainer for a major league baseball team. The story is set in a time when professional baseball players often had limited education, which adds depth to the characters and their interactions. The plot centers around Manager Squawks Magrew, whose team has fallen into a slump despite leading the league earlier in the season. In a twist of fate, Magrew befriends a quirky midget named Pearl du Monville and decides to bring him into the dugout as a mascot. When the team faces a critical moment in a game, Magrew calls upon Pearl as a pinch-hitter, expecting him to draw a walk due to his small strike zone. However, Pearl surprises everyone by swinging at a pitch and grounding out, leading to an unexpected outcome that ultimately revitalizes the team's spirit. The story, while humorous, reflects on themes of ambition, hope, and the unpredictability of sports. Thurber's use of a fractured narrative style adds to the comedic effect, making the story a unique contribution to the genre of sports literature.
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You Could Look It Up by James Thurber
Excerpted from an article in Magill’s Survey of American Literature, Revised Edition
First published: 1941 (collected in Writings and Drawings, 1996)
Type of work: Short story
The Work
“You Could Look It Up” is an unusual Thurber short story in point of view: that of an illiterate trainer employed by a major league baseball team. Thurber thereby adopts a technique already made famous by Ring Lardner, in which much of the humor derives from the way the speaker fractures the English language. Unlike the typical Lardner story, Thurber’s also has a strong plot. The narrator recounts a story thirty years old, which prepares the reader for an old-fashioned “yarn.” It also makes more plausible the lowbrow characteristics of the trainer and the team members by placing them in an era when the men of professional baseball were usually little educated.
Manager Squawks Magrew’s team has been leading the league all season but has fallen into a slump that has melted its lead almost entirely away. In a bar Magrew meets an eccentric, fifty-four-year-old midget named Pearl du Monville. Magrew comes to enjoy his company and introduces him into the dugout as a kind of mascot. As Magrew grows more and more displeased with the performance of his players, he decides to sign and outfit Pearl as a player. In the ninth inning of a crucial game, with two outs, the bases loaded, and the team needing one run to tie and two to win the game, he calls upon the midget as a pinch-hitter with instructions to wait for the inevitable base on balls that any batter with such a tiny strike zone might reasonably expect.
The midget, however, does the unthinkable. He swings at a pitch and grounds out, ending the game. Magrew is so agitated that he picks up the midget by the ankles, whirls him around, and hurls him into the outfield, where the opposing center fielder catches him. Pearl disappears into the crowd and is never seen again, but the incident somehow gives the team a new spirit, and they go on to win the pennant.
Stories seldom make specific things happen, but this one inspired Bill Veeck, the owner of the real-life St. Louis Browns, to emulate the fictional Magrew’s tactic in a 1951 American League game. The midget obeyed his manager and drew a walk, after which baseball outlawed the employment of midgets as players.
Bibliography
Fensch, Thomas, ed. Conversations with James Thurber. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1989.
Grauer, Neil A. Remember Laughter: A Life of James Thurber. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994.
Holmes, Charles S. The Clocks of Columbus: The Literary Career of James Thurber. New York: Atheneum, 1972.
Kinney, Harrison. James Thurber: His Life and Times. New York: Henry Holt, 1995.
Kinney, Harrison, and Rosemary A. Thurber, eds. The Thurber Letters: The Wit, Wisdom, and Surprising Life of James Thurber. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2003.
Rosen, Michael J., ed. Collecting Himself: James Thurber on Writing and Writers, Humor, and Himself. New York: Harper & Row, 1989.
Tobias, Richard C. The Art of James Thurber. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1970.