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Waiting for Teddy Williams

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The dust jacket describes Howard Frank Mosher as a "long-suffering Red Sox fan." It's this fact that is the key to the motivation for this book: namely, that Mosher couldn't be sure he'd actually ever see the Sox win a World Series, so he decided to create every Sox fan's dream.

The story is fairly simple. It revolves around E.A., an eight-year-old boy who is obsessed with two things: the Red Sox and identifying who his father is. He lives in a quirky town, Freedom Common, Vermont, that is populated with often strange, and at times a little unnecessarily silly, characters. My favorite being E.A.'s mother, Gypsy Lee, who spends her time home schooling her son and "entertaining" the local men to make ends meet. One day a drifter wanders into town named Teddy who takes E.A. under his wing. In teaching E.A. the many secrets of baseball, batting, fielding, and, ultimately, pitching, Teddy teaches E.A. much more. Through these lessons E.A. becomes a strong amateur player who lucks out in the greatest way when the desperate Red Sox manager just happens to stumble across him.

The story is not one of great depth or complexity, but there is beauty in its simplicity. Of course, Red Sox fans will love this book unconditionally, but it shouldn't be avoided simply because of the team involved. Most any baseball fan would find something to love in Mosher's moving tribute that isn't just about the Red Sox, but baseball as a whole.

A novel to warm the hearts of baseball lovers everywhere, and especially in the Red Sox Nation, this is the story of dreams and what it takes to make them come true. Grittier and less romantic than Shoeless Joe by W. P. Kinsella (and its film, Field of Dreams), this novel tells the story of Ethan Allen, known as E. A., the son of single mother Gypsy Lee. Eight years old when the novel opens, E. A. lives in Kingdom Common, a rural Vermont town which may be the most baseball-loving town in America.

E. A. is needier than many other local children because no one will tell him who his father is. His mother, Gypsy Lee, who left college after her freshman year, now works as a one-woman escort service and part-time singer/songwriter, living with her crotchety mother, who took to her wheelchair and refused ever to walk again after the Red Sox's 1978 pennant loss when Bucky Dent hit a home run for the Yankees. When E. A. needs someone to talk to, he goes not to the local minister, who is one of Gypsy Lee's kinkier clients, but to the statue of the Colonel in the square, where he pours out his heart--and gets answers.

When a stranger, thought to be a drifter, appears and gives him some baseball pointers, E. A. listens and soon comes to depend on the stranger's knowledge. In time, the drifter is identified as Edward "Teddy" Williams, who, over the next ten years, helps E. A. develop, not just as a baseball player, but as a human being, learning lessons for the real world at the same time that he is honing his skills in pitching, fielding, and hitting. Not surprisingly, a scout for the Red Sox eventually sees E. A., and he, by then seventeen, has the opportunity to help the team in the final push to a World Series.

Mosher tells a charming story of oddball characters who behave outrageously, united only in their love of the Red Sox and baseball. Though the characters are not fully rounded, they are winsome and often very funny. Gypsy Lee, Gran, and several other characters are over-the-top and "unrealistic," but in their love of the Red Sox they become "human" and believable, and the baseball scenes are full of excitement. Light, fun, and filled with lessons of life which can be learned from the game, this is a coming-of-age novel sure to gladden the hearts of baseball fans. Mary Whipple

A long, long time ago - when we still argued whether Babe Ruth or Roger Maris held the single-season home-run record - a little book circulated like a whisper among true fans of baseball and its prose.

By 1982, Roger Angell, Paul Gallico and Tom Boswell had already been dangled like stars in the twilight heavens of baseball literature, but this new little novel told us some-thing about baseball they hadn't. It slid head-first into the incalculable depth of memory and dreams about a sport defined too often by esoteric calculations. In short, "Shoeless Joe" by W.P. Kinsella captured the pure, lump-in-the-throat intimacy of fathers playing catch with sons.

In a very short time, it came pouring out, all the poetry, metaphor and sensuality of base-ball. It was like a literary tarp being dragged across the field of American letters by pa-tient, undaunted groundskeepers whose only job was to keep baseball fiction forever green and unmuddied. The life-imitates-baseball genre provided reading material for little-boy right-fielders who'd grown into love-handled ESPN addicts, as well as the scripts for several Kevin Costner movies.

But nobody captured Kinsella's original and literally fantastic brand of magical realism, where the ghosts of legendary players could play in an Iowa cornfield, or a 2,000-inning Cubs game of mythic proportions could go unrecorded by history.

Until now.

Howard Frank Mosher, one of the most versatile and funny American storytellers since Mark Twain, grew up playing Little League and town ball. On summer nights when the Red Sox played the Yankees, his father and uncle would drive him to a nearby mountaintop, where the play-by-play radio signal was clearer.

So it's probably as natural as outfield grass at Fenway Park that Mosher has written his ninth book about baseball. But as Mosher himself admits, "Waiting for Teddy Williams" is about baseball in the way that "A River Runs Through It" is about fly-fishing.

"Waiting" is more clear-eyed than Kinsella's gauzy and poetic "Shoeless Joe," but equally poignant. Both pluck the chords that resonate with lovers of old-time baseball, who see larger-than-life ballplayers like Ty Cobb, Joe DiMaggio and Ted Williams through the fun-house mirror of memory. That is, larger than larger-than-life.

But for all its echoes of Kinsella, Mosher's blend of quirky characters, contemporary mythology, and mischievous prose is utterly original and entertaining. One needn't be a die-hard baseball fan to enjoy this story, but if you know the difference between a "knuckler" and a "slider" - and the smell of new-mown outfield grass or the taste of sandlot dust - you'll probably read this book then tuck it safely on a shelf beside baseball classics such as "The Boys of Summer" and "The Pride of the Yankees." It's that good.

In "Waiting for Teddy Williams," Mosher has stolen home as a consummate humorist - proving his uproariously funny 2003 Lewis-and-Clark satire, "The True Account," wasn't just a checked-swing triple.

OK, enough baseball puns. But "Waiting" is not just a funny book. It's about faith, fam-ily, common happiness, persistence and the trick of dreaming out loud. As every long-suffering Red Sox fan knows: Ya gotta believe.

Mosher's novel feels like a starting pitcher who kind of runs out of gas in about the sixth inning. The first hundred pages are pure bliss - funny, moving, incisive - just about everything that the reader could ask for. E A is a modern day Huck Finn, living by his wits and his free-spirited mother's guidance and that of his namesake, a statue of Ethan Allen that stands in the middle of town, a cast iron Yoda, if you will. The townspeople, of course, eye him carefully, not knowing what to make of his behavior. Ya gotta love him (and his mother).
Sadly, the book bogs down after its wonderful start and moves into sentimentality. Dad shows up, as well as other gurus, to teach him the ways of the baseball field. By about page 125, you can tell which way the story is heading. This all culminates in The Big Game, a unimaginative cliche that every baseball novel, good, bad or otherwise, insists on having.
I really waited this to be special, a complete game shutout, but instead I was left with the feeling that the starting pitcher didn't have the strength to finish what he had started.

Howard Frank Mosher is a great writer but he struck out with this book. In a previous novel, A Stranger in the Kingdom, he captured the essence of the New England love affair with the Red Sox in just a few pages when father and son drove to a mountain top in the 1950's to listen to the Sox game on the car radio. I was hoping for more with Waiting for Teddy Williams; I got less.

Ironically, harking back to the 50's is one of the problems with this book. I felt like I was reading a Matt Christopher book from my childhood. I honestly thought for the first several pages of the book that the setting was 1960's Vermont. Red Sox games could only be listened to and not watched because there was no cable television in town (how about satellite?). Kids drank bottles of Hires root beer and, I kid you not, people traveled to and fro by hopping on freight trains. Mosher's baseball knowledge must have peaked in the 50's as well because all the great players he mentioned, with the exception of some Red Sox, were from that era.

There are a lot of baseball lessons pitched to the reader in this unoriginal story about a small town boy with major league dreams. Unfortunately, the "baseballese" he throws our way is often questionable and sometimes flat out wrong: a batter can attempt to reach first base on a third strike if the catcher doesn't catch the pitch even if there are runners on base - so long as there are two outs. A trivial point, however, Mosher makes a special point to tell the reader that a batter can't run to first so I'm making a special point to say that indeed he can.

Mosher, as usual, gets the Vermont town folk down pat. It's the main characters who are flawed. They're unrealistic, unbelievable and unlikable. Ethan's father is an alcoholic who one day decides to stop drinking with no effort whatsoever. Ethan's mother is a Julia Roberts "Pretty Woman" type and a genius to boot yet is unable to use her brains or body to work her way out of poverty. Ethan Allen is no Huck Finn. Huck is a clever, adventurous kid with a conscience. Ethan is a one-dimensional, baseball obsessed follower who apparently doesn't know right from wrong as he goes along with sales of protected wildlife and bootlegged liquor (OK, no harm done) but also participates in the destruction of property worth tens of thousands of dollars. Somehow, at age seven he has the maturity of a seventeen year old but at age seventeen has the maturity of a seven year old. I don't think so.

I stuck with this book through the end hoping Mosher would come up with a late inning miracle. Unfortunately, the conclusion is straight out of a Disney flick, complete with a lame gimmick used at a crucial point of the game that brought to mind the "Mighty Ducks" knuckle puck. I finished the book thinking of the Yankees, not the Red Sox. After a string of several great books, Howard Frank Mosher, like the New York Yankees, is big time loser in 2004.

I am a fan of "coming of age" stories, New England of past years, and a Red Sox fan so this book touched all three buttons and I found it thoroughly enjoyable. Since I spent ages 10-15 in a small NH town I could relate to the setting and the offbeat characters. I read the book sitting on the dock of a camp on Lake Winnepesaukee, having arrived in New Hampshire to attend the 40th reunion of the graduates of that small town school.

While the reviews below give some of the major plot outline, I enjoyed Mosher's ability to create the setting, the use of some fairly interesting plot twists and "red herrings" keep it interesting as it moves to an easily anticipated conclusion.

Still, it brought back some great memories for this member of the "Red Sox Nation".

Waiting for Teddy Williams is a baseball story that reads like a great modern myth. It involves a young protagonist and baseball phenomena Ethan Allen, a boy from northern Vermont, who lives, eats and sleeps baseball. Allen whose namesake was a leader-to-be of the 18th century Green Mountain Boys, fought against the New Yorkers for Vermont and for himself. The real Ethan Allen, proved to be an early "Yankee hater".

Mosher is a fabulous writer and creative storyteller, producing images that are clear and mentally pleasing. Writers can often over use oddities in characters, introducing traits just to cause a stir within the reader. The characters Mosher writes are just quirky enough to be believable, interesting and loveable, remaining true to themselves and to the readers.

In the novel, Allen is the son of Teddy Williams a baseball man, ex-convict and drifter, who appears unexpectedly into the life the young Allen. Williams, no relation to the famous Number 9, spends time with the boy, trains him and develops Ethan's baseball talents, the ones that Teddy himself could only use catching for a prison team in Texas.

Mosher fills the book with memorable and outrageous scenes, lined with character-based humor. Allen's mother, Gypsy Lee works as an escort and a honky-tonk singer in order to put food on the table. Her work is introduced and presented as matter-of-fact, and often leads to hilarious images and situations. She is a strong, likeable character, the backbone of young Allen, and the novel flourishes in nearly every scene she is involved in.

As strong myths go, things can be too good or too predictable to be true. Ethan's rise to the Red Sox and how the team uses him would never occur. Mosher's fictional Red Sox would never have won anything based on the season's scenario Mosher creates. This though is Mosher's point: the Red Sox will never ever win a championship. There is numerous mentions of 1918, Carlton Fisk, Bucky Dent, Bill Buckner, and the Red Sox as the loveable losers that they are. It will take a miraculous improbability for a championship to come to the City of Boston. It is rather unfortunate for the book, released the same year the team actually did win the World Series.

There are also a few minor factual inaccuracies found (i.e. World Series Game Seven would never be a day game), but generally these will be missed by most, except the scholars of the game. Despite this, the book is well written and interesting. It is a well-struck work that curves just foul. It is a one-run heartbreaking loss that can still be appreciated by the lovers of the game as well as the lovers of fine writing.

Tim Gager/ Ibbetson Update/Sept 2005.

*Tim Gager is the cofounder of "the Somerville News Writers Festival" [...]

Best novel by Mosher since where the rivers flow north. Anyone who loves baseball and a good story will love this. Those who have lusted for a place in the big leagues will love it even more.

Anyone with even a slight interest in baseball will love this story. Laughter rings out on every page, as this clever author fills the story with delightful characters, stereo types many, but also believable.
The mysterious coach appears to the boy at just the right time and the statue who advises the boy tells us much about human nature. And, considering the many sad and frightening endings abounding, it's a pleasure to read a (mnostly) happy one. This is a delightful read, and a plum for any reader.

This book follows the story of Ethan "E.A." Allen who grows up in Kingdom Common, Vermont, the unofficial capitol of the Red Sox Nation, a town with a baseball bat factory, a town where every radio is tuned to every Sox game.

E.A. is home schooled by his single mother, stripper, hooker, escort, wannabe country singer Gypsy Lee Allen, who teaches him much more than the average boy would learn in school. Her lessons also include batting practice. E.A. has two dreams, one to be a Red Sox hero and two, he wants to find his father, who his mother refers to as Mr. Gone and Long Forgotten.

Then one day during the summer when he is eight years old, a drifter named Teddy Williams shows up on his family's property and E.A., young man of the house, goes out to shoo the fellow off. But before the drifter leaves, he teaches E.A. a few things about baseball and about life.

The drifter will return throughout this humorous story full of quirky characters, always teaching E.A. and yes, the drifter is his dad. And yes, E.A. finally makes it to the majors, playing for the Sox. And yes this is a story about much more than just baseball, but if you are a reader who loves the game, then you're guaranteed to love this book. But you don't have to be a card-carrying baseball fanatic to be captured and captivated by this story. I know, because Mr. Mosher drew me right in and I've never played the game.