Literary Fiction / Slipstream Surrealist
Sparrows Beneath the Grandstand
Combining Denis Johnson + Samuel Beckett | Jesus' Son + Endgame
Synopsis
Two old men in the press box of an abandoned minor league stadium broadcast a game to no one. One calls phantom at-bats with frightening specificity. The other provides color commentary that drifts into philosophy and ruin. Over nine innings, the line between invention and memory dissolves.
Johnson's hallucinatory attention meets Beckett's tragicomic endurance in an abandoned press box where two old men broadcast a baseball game that isn't happening
Behind the Story
A discussion between Denis Johnson and Samuel Beckett
The bar was in Phoenix, one of those places near the spring training complexes that hasn't updated its decor since 1994 — pennants from teams that have moved or folded, a jukebox loaded with discs nobody plays because the speakers blew out in 2011 and the owner just left the machine plugged in as furniture. It was two in the afternoon. The air conditioning was losing a war against the parking lot heat that came in every time someone opened the door. Johnson was already in the back booth when I…
Read the full discussionThe Formula
- Hallucinatory specificity — the play-by-play man sees pitches with an intensity that blurs invention and perception
- Raw, percussive sentences alongside sudden lyric flights; narrators in altered states where real and imagined blur
- Spiritual yearning amid degradation — the booth as a place where broken men glimpse something almost holy
- Two-character dialogue of waiting; tragicomic speech rhythm filling emptiness between innings
- Continuation without purpose — they broadcast because stopping would be worse
- Repetition and variation as structure; the ritual of innings as a Beckettian loop that accumulates weight
- Linked-vignette structure with dream logic — each inning a discrete unit arriving like a hallucination
- Unreliable narration where specificity makes the unreal feel remembered rather than invented
- Scenes that accumulate emotional weight without conventional narrative arc
- The press box as the last room; two people bound by the absence of anything else
- Performance as the last human act available — the broadcast continues because the architecture demands it
- The shelter and the game both ending, neither man willing to name what comes after
Reader Reviews
Well-made but slightly too aware of its own sadness. The prose is controlled and often beautiful — the description of 1610 AM reaching 'about as far as a man could throw a rock, assuming the man had an arm, which Howie did not, not anymore' is the kind of sentence that justifies a story's existence. And the dialogue has a genuine rhythm, each man completing the other's pattern without finishing the other's thought. But I wanted more disruption. The innings structure is elegant and also a cage — everything stays at the same emotional register, and by the ninth inning the accumulation feels designed rather than inevitable. The sparrows are doing a lot of symbolic work that the story doesn't quite need them to do.
66 found this helpful
A two-hander in nine movements, and the structural discipline is admirable — each inning functions as a discrete unit whilst contributing to a cumulative emotional argument. The dialogue achieves something genuinely difficult: it sounds like speech without merely transcribing it. Lyle's thermocline metaphor is the sort of observation that reveals character through intellection rather than sentiment, which I always prefer. The fifth inning — essentially a blank, three sentences of silence — demonstrates considerable authorial restraint. Where the piece falters slightly is in its final innings: the Aguirre/finch digression and the foul balls passage both reach for profundity in ways the earlier innings wisely avoided. The best moments here trust the image over the interpretation. But the closing — the red light going dark, the unheard final words — is structurally impeccable.
66 found this helpful
The conceit is so good it could have been ruined by a lesser writer. Two men broadcasting a phantom game — you can see how that becomes a workshop exercise, all metaphor and no guts. But this has guts. The moment Lyle starts seeing the batter's hands and Howie looks at him like he's crossed a line — that's the turn where the story goes from clever to unsettling. And the line 'You can't hit what you can't believe' lands with actual force. I'd cut the foul balls monologue, which overexplains what the rest of the story already demonstrates. But the ending — 'nobody was listening' — that's how you close.
60 found this helpful
I keep returning to the moment Howie walks onto the field during the seventh-inning stretch and Lyle narrates him from the booth — 'He may be having a moment. We'll see if it develops into a play.' The tenderness in that line, the way Lyle uses the language of broadcasting to say what he can't say directly. And then: 'Lyle's voice caught. He let it.' Five words that contain an entire friendship. This story made me homesick for something I've never experienced — a desert evening, an empty stadium, the sound of sparrows settling. The light going copper, then violet. I read it twice and cried the second time, at the same place.
43 found this helpful
I am not a baseball person, and I wondered at first if this story would leave me outside. It did not. What these two men are doing in that press box has almost nothing to do with the sport and everything to do with the terror of stopping. Lyle's speech about thermoclines — the layer where warm water meets cold — I had to set the piece down for a moment. At seventy-eight years old I know exactly what he means. The fifth inning, where nothing happens and neither man speaks, felt more honest to me than all the invented play-by-play. Shorter than I usually prefer, but it earns its brevity.
35 found this helpful
There is a line here — 'A good memory and a good invention use the same muscles' — that stopped me cold. The whole story lives inside that sentence. Two men in a ruined stadium conjuring a game from nothing, and the conjuring becoming indistinguishable from devotion. The Pecos Valley setting feels completely lived-in: Chávez Irrigation, the churro woman named Dolores, Route 285. I wanted more from Lyle's marriage disclosures — the Sandra passage felt like it was reaching toward something it didn't quite grasp — but the ending, with the microphone click and the light going dark, is devastating in its quietness.
33 found this helpful
Competent piece. The dialogue is sharp — these two sound like actual men who have spent too many hours together. 'Between the two of us we've got most of the useless human functions covered' made me laugh out loud. But I don't fully buy the premise holding for nine innings. By the eighth, I was aware of the trick: each inning introduces a philosophical aside, Howie calls some phantom plays, repeat. The seventh-inning stretch scene where Howie walks onto the field nearly saves it. Lyle narrating him from the booth is the best writing here. The rest is clever without quite being necessary.
28 found this helpful