F. Scott Fitzgerald was apparently not much of a baseball fan, as evidenced by this quote about the unfulfilled promise of Ring Lardner. From the essay "Ring" in the posthumously released The Crack-Up, 1945:
. . . whatever Ring's achievement was, it fell far short of the achievement he was capable of, and this because of a cynical attitude toward his work. How far back did that attitude go? -- back to his youth in a Michigan village? Certainly back to his days with the Cubs. During those years, when most men of promise achieve an adult education, if only in the school of war, Ring moved in the company of a few dozen illiterates playing a boy's game. A boy's game, with no more possibilities than a boy would master, a game bounded by walls which kept out novelty or danger, change or adventure.
This material, the observation of it under such circumstances, was the text of Ring's schooling during the most formative period of the mind. A writer can spin on about his adventures after forty, after fifty, but the criteria by which these adventures are weighed and valued are irrevocably settled at the age of twenty-five. However deeply Ring might cut into it, his cake had exactly the diameter of Frank Chance's diamond.
Tags: F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Crack-Up, Ring Lardner
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