Baseball is a unique sport with an essential duality that no other team or individual sport can claim. Baseball is both a team sport and an individual sport—often simultaneously. When the batter steps into the plate, the power to earn a run out of that at-bat is upon his shoulders alone. Yet at the same that a single individual with no help at all from any of his teammates can turn a looming loss into a celebratory win, the defense must depend upon every member of the team at play in the field coming through and working as a collective unit. Baseball presents the dynamic of the rugged individual against the power of the cooperative in a way unlike any other team sport. What good is a quarterback without a line to protect him and receivers to catch the pass? A red-hot point guard can run up a 55 points by himself, but if his teammates don’t successfully stop their opponents from scoring less than 70, all those baskets will have been for nothing. Team sports are defined by the fact it takes a team effort to win even if the team has the single best player in the game. In the game of baseball, however, even Bucky “Bleeping” Dent can singlehandedly send an entire city into a depression for months.
Bernard Malamud’s debut novel The Natural has divided critics since it first appeared over its attempt to meld men playing a game in a field with mythic overtones harking back to King Arthur and his knights. Even the team that Roy Hobbs nearly takes all the way from the cellar to the championship are called the Knights. A piece of lumber Roy crafted himself into a bat is invested with apparently magical properties and, like the sword Arthur pulled from a stone, invested with a name: Wonderboy. The name of the manager of the Knights recalls the legend of the Fisher King. Malamud even reaches back to a more recent mythic figure from the game itself to introduce the epic qualities of Roy’s story: the Sultan of Swat, Babe Ruth, becomes in this version the equally larger than life man hero for our time whose name is Walt, but—like George Herman Ruth—is more familiar as simply “Whammer.”
Critics who don’t see a way to buy into the book’s seemingly incompatible mixture of realistic sports story and mythic allegory would do well to better understand the unique duality of baseball as a sport and spend less time looking for ways that a baseball player can become a latter day Sir Gawain squaring off against the Green Knight. (That ground is pretty much covered by Bucky “Bleeping” Dent’s ball flying just barely an inch over the Green Monster in Fenway.)
Charges that Malamud tries too hard to establish a link between the Round Table and baseball diamond and so winds up making too many “obvious” choices may be missing the larger implication here. The Round Table is perhaps the iconic legendary symbol of teamwork and cooperation. And yet Camelot crumbles because of the hubris of individuals acting out of concert with the spirit of the Round Table. The knights are all individuals and have their own adventures that usually pit them one on one against an antagonist with only peripheral help from the other knights if any. The knights represent chivalric codes of honor, but the loss of Arthur’s kingdom stems from the fact they don’t all live up to it. The mythic properties of knights and damsels and wicked women (sorceresses) all manage to make sense within the realistic setting and narrative, but the real key to making it work is that the dreams of glory shared and worked toward by the New York Knights crumble just like the dream of Camelot thanks to individuals not recognizing that they bear the full weight of responsibility only when on the offensive. Forsaking that spirit of equality and assuming that their power as an individual extends to all situations equally is exactly the tragic flaw that brought the Round Table crashing down into pieces.
When Roy Hobbes arrives to try out for the Knights, he is down and out and nearly broken and eager to take on the dualistic roles mandated by baseball dualistic rules. Too many individual victories over opponents at the hands of Wonderboy makes him susceptible to his own individual tragic flaw that appears to be a recurring motif in his odd journey stardom. Roy, like many of the knights serving King Arthur, is given to the dangerous quality of believing his own hype. His ambition to be recognized as the best there was ever was is continually thwarted by his own persistent belief that he already is that very thing and in the process, he forgets his own individual accomplishments actually are ultimately dependent on the contribution of the other 24 guys on the team. Even when they aren’t doing anything but sitting in the dugout watching Roy swing for the bleachers with Wonderboy.
What Roy must continually learn over and over again is that even a "natural" is simply swinging in the breeze if he doesn't have anybody on the bases to bring home.
