The Cactus League by Emily Nemens

Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux on February 4, 2020

Cross Bull Durham with Desperate Housewives and you’ll get the flavor of The Cactus League. The story is filled with characters who have the kinds of problems that fuel melodrama. Players gamble or party or cheat on their wives. Employers boost their sense of power by treating employees with disrespect. Cougars prey on young talent. Wives complain about their husbands, the cougars, and the burdens that accompany marriage to an athlete who won’t be making Major League money forever.

The chapters have the feel of related stories rather than the building blocks of a cohesive novel. The musings of a retired sportswriter tie the chapters together. He used to write a sports column, “half human interest, half old man opining,” in the belief that his was the kind of writing a big-market paper needed, right up until he was fired. Now he’s hanging around a newly built stadium, enjoying the swirl of spring training.

The sportswriter eventually tells the reader that the book is about Jason Goodyear. The reader will figure that out long before the sportswriter announces that the book’s purpose is to recount “all the improbable things” that brought Goodyear to his destination, simply because Goodyear is the only character who is common to nearly every chapter. Goodyear is a star, a stud, a clean-living MVP who graces magazine covers, but his gambling (poker and craps, not sports betting) has gotten out of control. His wife, a first-grade teacher named Liana, can’t deal with it, but when she gives him a choice between gambling or her, addiction drives his choice.

Many of the players have two homes, one in Los Angeles (the home city of the Major League team for which they play), another in Scottsdale that is convenient to spring training. Their wives and ex-wives tend to renew bonds in the spring “like friends from summer camp — rambunctious, beautiful girls who were briefly the most important people in the world but now remembered in dull colors and with vague edges.”

An early chapter spotlights a cougar who, much like the Susan Sarandon character in Bull Durham, latches onto ball players in the belief that she can improve their game while getting laid. She spends a fateful evening with Goodyear after his separation, resulting in a criminal charge that could lead to the loss of an endorsement contract.

One chapter focuses on the housewives, only some of whom are desperate. One focuses on an aging batting coach whose Arizona house was trashed while he was with the team’s Triple-A club in Salt Lake. One focuses on Goodyear’s agent and the agent’s troubled assistant. One focuses on a team owner who befriends and betrays one of the team’s established players. A pitcher whose Tommy John surgery isn’t working out stars in a chapter, while a rookie who won’t make the cut stars in another. Even the new stadium’s organ player gets a chapter.

All of this is interesting as sort of a gossipy version of Inside Baseball. It’s disappointing that with so much attention given to characterization, nearly every character but Goodyear disappears (save for occasional cameos) after the chapters in which they are featured. If the point is to show us all the factors that shaped a year in Goodyear’s life, I can’t say the novel succeeds. The organ player waves at him. Other characters have a bit more interaction with him, but a majority of the chapters seem less than formative. The disappearance of those characters is even more disappointing because they are more interesting than Goodyear.

The story sort of fizzles away at the end, reinforcing that Goodyear is a decent man at heart while resolving nothing. Most of the chapters end the same way, with no real resolution of the problems that develop in the supporting characters’ lives. I guess that’s a microcosm of life — a bunch of intersecting people who lurch from one trouble to the next — but I can’t say it’s a satisfying approach to a novel. Still, the characterization is so strong and the scenes of life at spring training are so sharp that I feel compelled to recommend The Cactus League, even if it left me wanting more.

RECOMMENDED