There’s not a lot of magic in pro baseball in 2020. 

Major League Baseball returned last week after nearly nine months in hibernation. It could have returned sooner, even despite the pandemic, but the league was mired in labor disputes. Players didn’t want to come back, risking COVID-19, for anything less than 100% of their prorated salaries; owners countered that they stand to lose hundreds of millions of dollars by playing games without fans in the ballparks. Multiple return plans were proposed and rejected. None of this was very romantic to witness. 

Now baseball is back, for an anemic 60-game season (barely one third the length of a normal season). Even though MLB is back, Minor League Baseball is canceled. The iconic Cape Cod Baseball League is canceled. In South Korea, pro baseball returned back in May, a bitter reminder of America’s failure to contain its outbreak. 

In The Natural, Bernard Malamud’s 1952 novel, pro baseball still has some magic—dark magic. While waiting for real baseball, I picked up the book. 

Many people have seen the movie version of The Natural—the smarmy 1984 Robert Redford vehicle that unforgivably betrays the book’s ending, wrapping a pretty bow around Malamud’s pessimism—without reading the book. 

Purists once held up The Natural as the ultimate baseball novel, but these days, its legacy has rusted. Lovers of baseball books are now likelier to recommend Chad Harbach’s The Art of Fielding, an excellent campus novel that revolves around baseball, or nonfiction like The Boys of Summer, Roger Kahn’s love note to the Brooklyn Dodgers, or Moneyball, Michael Lewis’s examination of Billy Beane’s use of sabermetrics with the Oakland A’s. (More recently, there’s Emily Nemens’ terrific debut novel, The Cactus League, which captures one season of spring training in Arizona, and Gish Jen’s The Resisters, which uses baseball as the backdrop for a political dystopia.) 

If MLB’s return plan still gets side-tracked due to the virus (which is very possible), at least you can revisit The Natural to put yourself at the ballpark, in one sense. And even though the writing style has aged, there’s a pleasure in Malamud that’s hard to get from televised sports in 2020.

The novel’s hero is Roy Hobbs, a pitching phenom on a train to Chicago to try out for the Cubs when the book opens. He’s very protective of the bassoon case he carries. Accompanying him is his manager, Sam Simpson, a kindhearted old drunk. We don’t know exactly where Roy is from, how Sam found him, how he got the tryout, or what’s in the bassoon case, and we don’t need to know. The entire book is like that—dancing around details, leaving things unsaid. The third-person narrator functions like a play-by-play announcer, delivering the call without much commentary.

On the train, Roy and Sam encounter Walter “The Whammer” Wambold, a beefy slugger with obvious shades of Babe Ruth, and the snobby sportswriter Max Mercy. When the train stops at a carnival, Whammer challenges Roy to pitch to him (“Pitch it here, busher, and I will knock it into the moon”). Roy strikes him out, but Sam, who catches for Roy, takes one of the stud’s pitches hard to his gut and later dies on the train before they reach Chicago. The death is conveyed with brutal simplicity: “The trainmen came in with a stretcher and they lifted the catcher and handed him down the steps, and overhead the stars were bright but he knew he was dead.” 

Roy also meets Harriet Bird on the train, a striking girl in a black dress, toting a black hat box, whom Roy sees as a “silver-eyed mermaid.” She’s the garden variety femme fatale—the other two women in the book are admittedly flat character types as well—but Malamud gives her the weight of symbolism, if not much dialogue.

Once Roy reaches his Chicago hotel room, alone now, Harriet calls him up. Surprise: She’s in the same hotel. He heads down to her room to say hello. When he walks in, she asks him, “Will you be the best there ever was in the game?” He says yes; she pulls out a gun and shoots him. 

I gasped out loud when I read it. 

None of that is really much of a spoiler. The shooting happens on page 34; the book is everything that follows. But the surreal shooting scene, in which Roy “sought with his bare hands to catch” the bullet, “but it eluded him and, to his horror, bounced into his gut,” is the first hint of the magical realism that Malamud employs more overtly in his other books, like the story collection The Magic Barrel. 

In the next part of the book, Roy is suddenly 34, and shows up to play for the hapless New York Knights, a stand-in for the Mets. More whispers of magic: While Pop Fisher, the team’s weary manager, is sizing up Roy, the narrator tells us Roy “was traveling (on the train that never stopped). His self, his mind, raced on and he felt he hadn’t stopped going wherever he was going because he hadn’t yet arrived. Where hadn’t he arrived? Here.” Huh? 

There’s a lot of train imagery in the book. A surreal, hazy feeling permeates the writing. The best comparison I can make is to the two-episode stretch of The Sopranos when Tony is in a coma and dreams that he switches briefcases with a salesman named Kevin Finnerty. 

We don’t know what the hell happened since the hotel-room shooting; we have to just go along. We do find out what was in the bassoon case: Wonderboy, Roy’s magical bat, fashioned from the bark of a tree outside his childhood house that was split in two by lightning. 

Pop doesn’t want to play Roy (he’s 34 years old, after all), and doesn’t play him for a long time, until the team’s star outfielder, Bump Bailey, dies by running through a wall to lay out for a catch (the book’s second absurd death). What happens next is a long stretch that could amount to a movie montage: the Knights win a lot of games, powered by Roy, powered by Wonderboy. 

Roy goes on to pursue Bump’s bereaved girlfriend, Memo, who is Pop’s niece. Memo hangs out with Gus Sands, a bookie with one fake eye who becomes an immediate antagonist for Roy. 

When Roy agrees to go out to dinner one night with Memo, Gus, and Max Mercy (who has zero recollection of meeting Roy on the train years earlier), we get one of the book’s strangest scenes: Roy “grabbed the bookie’s nose and yanked. A stream of silver dollars clattered into his plate… Roy rippled the green cloth in front of Max’s face and dragged out of his astonished mouth a dead herring… From Memo’s bosom, he plucked a duck egg… From the glum Mercy’s pocket he extracted a long salami… A whirl of the cloth and a white bunny hopped out of Memo’s purse.” The chapter ends with Gus and Max befuddled, Memo crying in laughter. We are left to either believe that at some point in life Roy learned a bevvy of magic tricks, or to chalk the scene up to Malamud magic.

It dawns on you pretty early that there’s not much to Roy. His big goal is to break all the baseball records, and that’s about it. There are events and circumstances around Roy that are mythical, but Roy isn’t. He’s not even a perfect player. Pop complains that Roy chases too many bad pitches: “I mistrust a bad ball hitter.” None of this detracts from the reading experience; The Natural has a pleasant way of carrying you along.

Like Thomas Hardy, Malamud is interested in fate. But apart from the hotel shooting, Roy’s misfortunes are self-inflicted. There’s nothing much redeeming about the mythical slugger. He’s self-pitying. He takes his natural talent for granted. He pursues multiple women, stays out late, isolates himself from his teammates. In the end, his own moral failings cause his suffering. 

For Malamud, the son of two Russian Jewish immigrants, the suffering is the point. (Roy Hobbs is the most Jewish fictional ballplayer who isn’t overtly described as Jewish.) Baseball, too, is about suffering—especially this year. The Natural is flawed and flat at times, but the book also casts a spell that professional sports rarely achieves these days.

Daniel Roberts is a business journalist at Yahoo Finance and has written about books for The Paris Review Daily, Air Mail, Salon, NPR, the Daily Beast, the Morning News, and others.