By Stuart Mitchner

You can no longer trust what you are watching.

—Andy Martino, from Cheated

Bring Franz Kafka into a discussion of sign stealing in baseball and the game’s over, all bets are off. Put the Student of Prague on the metaphorical mound with his killer stuff, and it’s pointless to talk about the morality of  an elaborate cheating system like the one infamously employed by the Houston Astros in their 2017 championship season.

The author of the novel-length slow curve called The Castle is here because I neglected his 140th birthday on July 3 to write about the late Cormac McCarthy. After a brief appearance on the same stage with J. Robert Oppenheimer later that month (“Quantum Kafka”), he was here in spirit last week with his devoted fan David Lynch. I’m speaking now as a fan myself, living through the summer of my discontent with the St. Louis Cardinals. This is a team that’s won the National League’s Central Division 11 times since the year 2000, along with three pennants and two World Championships. In 2021 the won-lost record was 91-71, last year it was 93-69. As I write, the numbers are 53-66 and the Cards are in last place, 12 games out. Something is definitely wrong with this picture. And it’s got nothing to do with cheating, stolen signals, or the Georgia indictments. It’s because a front office playing fantasy baseball bet $87 million on a be-careful-what-you-wish-for All-Star catcher without taking into account problems that drastically disoriented and demoralized the pitching staff.

Possibilities Do Exist

From Franz Kafka’s diary, July 21, 1913: “Don’t despair, not even over the fact that you don’t despair. Just when everything seems over with, new forces come marching up, and precisely that means you are alive. And if they don’t then everything is over with here, once and for all.”

Nothing’s over with as long as I can flip ahead to February 26, 1922, an entry I’ve turned to so often that this portion of the Diaries (pages 223-343) has become detached from the body of my bedside copy. Written two years before Kafka’s death, the passage begins “possibilities exist in me, possibilities close at hand that I don’t yet know of “ and ends “This signifies a great many things: that possibilities do exist; it even signifies that a scoundrel can become an honest man, a man happy in his honesty.”

Crisis of Faith

I find a hint of what happened to the 2023 Cardinals in Andy Martino’s introduction to Cheated: The Inside Story of the Astros Scandal and a Colorful History of Sign Stealing (Doubleday 2021): When fans learned of the Astros’ misdeeds, it led to a crisis of faith in the legitimacy of baseball itself. Once the competition isn’t happening on the field of play, but in a tunnel or computer monitor out of sight, the air goes out of the fan experience. You can no longer trust what you are watching.”

That last sentence resonates, whether you’re talking about cheating on the grand MAGA scale or in the use of a mechanical device to steal a catcher’s signs or the consequences of a catastrophic move by the Cardinal front office. Back when “cheater” was a playground term and the absolute worst thing you could call anybody, the owners had already violated my 12-year-old trust by merely discussing the possibility of trading away my idol Stan Musial. I should admit that over the years the front office rebuilt my faith with a procession of great players from Bob Gibson to Albert Pujols and Yadier Molina, both of whom retired last season.

Who’s Catching Kafka?

There’s the rub. If you’re going to play games of metaphorical make-believe, you have to ask yourself who but Kafka could catch Kafka? What would the prose equivalent of his most unhittable pitch look like? If he threw you the first sentence of The Metamorphoses, could you catch it, hold it, pound your imaginary mitt and throw it back? Fortunately for future generations of readers, Franz had a catcher for the ages in his best friend Max Brod, who ignored his final, burn-everything call and saved his unpublished work, including the irreplaceable diaries, wherein he fires this high hard one on his “repugnance” for antitheses, from November 20, 1911:

“They are unexpected, but do not surprise, for they have always been there; if they were unconscious, it was at the very edge of consciousness. They make for thoroughness, fullness, completeness, but only like a figure on the ‘wheel of life,’ we have chased our little idea around the circle. They are as undifferentiated as they are different, they grow under one’s hand as though bloated by water, beginning with the prospect of infinity, they always end up in the same medium size. They curl up, cannot be straightened out, are mere clues, are holes in wood, are immobile assaults, draw antitheses to themselves, as I have shown. If they would only draw all of them, and forever.”

Try putting your bat on that one. As a catcher, try keeping your eye on it as it zigs and zags toward you like the mother of all knuckleballs. As a reader, give your full attention to words that would have been lost had Brod obeyed the author’s dying wish. Is there any doubt that this convoluted passage was worth catching and saving and translating into English? Back in the real world of baseball, even pitchers who can call their own game need someone behind the plate they can trust, someone so attuned to their moods that it makes no difference whether the language is German or Czech or pidgin English, or Spanish, the first language of Yadier Molina.

A Dream Deal

Like most other Cardinals fans, I was delighted when the Cubs’ Willson Contreras signed a five-year contract with St. Louis last December. What a coup! Almost before you can mourn the loss of Molina, you’re landing an All-Star catcher, a proven slugger who has hit 20-plus home runs each of the past four years. And what a thrill for Contreras, to step into the shoes of his hero, the Hall of Fame-bound Molina. A clutch hitter with power and a powerful arm who led all catchers in picking off baserunners, Molina was above all an inspired and inspirational handler of pitchers. Even as baseball statistics have become like coinage priced to put a value on seemingly every aspect of performance, I have yet to see a number that measures Molina’s greatness.

Thirty-four games into the 2023 season the Cardinals were already in trouble, with a 10-24 record, the worst in the National League, plus they were enduring an eight-game losing streak. The pitching staff, ordinarily rated near the top, was 21st out of 25 in Major League baseball. Because Cardinal pitchers were uncomfortable pitching to Contreras, he was forthwith diplomatically relieved of his catching duties to be used as a designated hitter or in the outfield. In effect, the owners had offered a fat, five-year contract to an individual whose story they had wishfully misread. Still, there’s every reason to hope that so gifted and exciting a player will make the necessary adjustments in time to lead the 2024 Cardinals back to the playoffs.

Coming to Amerika

It may be that the closest Kafka ever came to playing baseball was around 1912 when he was working on the unfinished novel that was eventually published as Amerika (New Directions 1946), a title chosen by Max Brod. In his preface, Klaus Mann suggests that while Kafka’s description of American life is “quite inaccurate,” the “picture as a whole has poetical truth.” To friends questioning his knowledge of America, he would say “I know the autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, and I always admired Walt Whitman, and I like the Americans because they are healthy and optimistic.”

According to Brod’s afterword, Kafka “worked at the novel with unending delight, mostly in the evening and late into the night.” He was especially fond of the concluding chapter, “The Nature Theatre of Oklahoma,” which he used to read aloud to friends “with great effect.”

Brod recalls that the work was meant to “end on a note of reconciliation,” and that Kafka “used to hint smilingly, that within this ‘almost limitless’ theatre his young hero was going to find a profession, a stand-by, his freedom, even his old home and his parents, as if by some celestial witchery.”

“The Strikeout Artist”

At first I thought I was seeing things. I’d been fantasizing Kafka as a pitcher and here for sale on Amazon was The Strikeout Artist (BlazeVox 2022), a novel by Joseph Bates with a flatteringly tweaked cover image of Kafka as a ballplayer. According to the preview, the narrator is Jerome “Stile” Jergens, “lifelong backstop of the New York Knight Errants,” the year is 1912, and his team is in the middle of a 61 game losing streak. The Knight Errants are part of a “Wild West … traveling variety show” that seems to have elements in common with Kafka’s “Nature Theatre of Oklahoma.” Described as “a pallid, gangly youth from Prague,” Kafka speaks “immigrant’s English,” telling everyone he meets, “I am from the Kingdom of Bohemia. I am drafted here as a pitcher, though I am in fact a writer. I do not understand what I am doing here.” Carrying a briefcase full of papers “from bullpen to bullpen,” he was working on the novel that became Amerika.