ROCK 'N FIRE

In this novel, a baseball historian tracks down an old player with ties to the sport’s segregated past.

Cooperstown, New York, 1963. Frank Aldridge is an archivist—the term is less scientific than it sounds—at the Baseball Hall of Fame, combing through the yearly ephemera and memorabilia that get sent for inclusion and authentication. On this particular morning, he finds a letter in the mail pile with an unusual request. Lita Lawson of St. Louis is hoping for any information in the hall about a mostly forgotten pitcher. “It is important that I find Ray Cavanaugh,” writes Lita, “because I think he is my father. I have been looking for him a long time.” Frank wants to help Lita—he’s just learned his own wife may be pregnant, and paternity is on his mind—but there isn’t a ton of information in the archive. As Frank tells a co-worker, Cavanaugh was a powerful pitcher, earning the moniker Rock ’n Fire Ray, but he mostly played on terrible teams. Yet as Frank digs, a portrait emerges of a White baseball journeyman with a reputation for beaning batters and the Black sister of a Negro League player who find themselves in a forbidden affair. Still, a question remains: Can Frank track down the still-living Ray to connect him to his long-lost daughter? Stallard’s richly detailed prose displays a deep knowledge of the sport: “Ray was never a fan of the common pitching phrase his dad had been yelling at him for his entire baseball life….The funny thing was that Rock and Fire wasn’t even his style—his was more of a pure, steady motion with a low kick and lunge merged together as one.” With its two timelines—Ray’s career beginning in the pre-integration ’30s and Frank’s search for him in the ’60s—the book is able to explore two moments in baseball’s complex racial history, played out against the larger cultural upheavals of America. In terms of language and violence, Stallard does not shy away from the darkness of these time periods. Even so, the narrative is generally a neat one, landing in a place of reconciliation that feels perhaps slightly convenient. Still, the author weaves a believable tale that resurrects a remote era, warts and all.

An ambitious and engaging, if somewhat predictable, tale of interracial love and baseball.