Frenchy Astarte

Port Ruppert, N.J.

The Mundys are the most recent literary team to join the Irrational League. More along the lines of the Pioneers of Robert Coover's The Universal Baseball Association than the Blue Sox of Duane Decker's series, the Mundys are drawn from Philip Roth's The Great American Novel. Roth offers this history of the team:

"The Mundy brothers had inherited the Port Ruppert franchise from their illustrious dad, the legendary Glorious Mundy, without inheriting any of that titan's profound reverence for the game. Right down to the old man's ninety-second year, sportswriters who in his opinion hadn't sufficient love and loyalty for the sport were wise to keep their distance, for Glorious Mundy was known on occasion to take a swing at a man for treating baseball as less than the national religion. He was a big man, with bushy black eyebrows that the cartoonists adored, and he could just glare you into agreement, if not downright obedience. When he died, the buried him according to his own instructions in deep center field, four hundred eighty-five feet from home plate, beneath a simple headstone whose inscription gave silent testimony to the humility of a man whose eyebrows alone would have earned him the reputation of a giant.

"It was clear from the outset that to his heirs baseball was a business, to be run like the Mundy confectionery plant, the Mundy peanut plantations, the Mundy cattle ranches, and the Mundy citrus farms, all of which had been their domain while Glorious was living and devoting himself entirely in his later years to the baseball team. The morning after their father died of old age in his box behind first, the two sons began to sell off, one after another, the great stars of the championship teams of the late twenties--for straight cash, like so many slaves, to the highest bidder. The Depression, don't you know ... they were feeling the pinch, don't you know ... between excursions with their socialite wives to Palm Beach and Biarritz!

"In 1932, when they took one hundred thousand dollars from the Terra Incognita Rustlers for the greatest Mundy of them all, Luke "the Loner" Gofannon, a tide of anger and resentment swept through Port Ruppert that culminated in a march all the way down Broad Street, by thousands of schoolkids wearing black armbands that had been issued to them at City Hall. The Mundys A.G. (After Gofannon) promptly dropped fromt he first division and for the remaining prewar years labored to finish as high as fifth."

As we join the team in Roth's novel, it is 1941 and the teams fortunes have only continued to drop. They are about to take a permanent road trip, or at least until the second world war is over. The team played what was to be its final season at Mundy Park in this its inaugural year with the Irrational League. However, we have granted them a reprieve.

Text excerpted from Philip Roth, The Great American Novel ©1973.