The Might Have Been: A Novel

The release of the Might-Have-Been is timed to coincide with the opening of the 2012 MLB season. It is not about the big leagues. It is about life in the dozens of small towns that support professional baseball known as the minor leagues. Young men, locals and outsiders, descend upon these towns to show the world that they have what it takes to be heroes. And while it is about the game, Joseph Schuster's debut novel explores the bewildering, sometimes pitiless consequences of chance and the choices we make.

The central character, Edward Everett Yates, was made to be a baseball player. He has the right size and power to succeed but speed makes him exceptional. He can beat difficult throws to first, making them singles. He can steal bases. show more He can rundown balls in the outfield that seem destined to be hits. He was made to be a baseball player but he might have been other things, a loving husband, a doting father, a natural salesman, a success. But Yates abandons his best opportunities for these other roles to become a major leaguer.

Yates’ draw to baseball is compulsive. His inability to leave the game is almost a phobia. He is paralyzed, petrified in his resolve to make himself a success in the game. Others are able to move on when they fail to break through. Yates packs his bags for the next minor league town. He is frozen within an insular world populated mostly by young men who hardly are more than boys. Can a man progress, having committed himself to a child’s dream of being a hero? It seems unlikely without life affording some grace to those so afflicted.

Schuster’s connection between this kind of baseball mania and mental illness is overt and we see what can happen to men weaker than Yates. The game is cruel to anyone with less than extraordinary ability, extraordinary good fortune and a strong character. Most must find a way to live outside of sport after failing to grasp their dream. Some cannot accept being turned away by the thing they love.

All of his characters are flawed, yet, Schuster treats most of them quietly and with an esteem that makes even some of the more implausible events and coincidences seem real. Life is like that, filled with the mundane, the fantastical moments of chance, brutal punishments and even sublimity. The Might Have Been is written by a mature writer who loves his chosen world and should win a faithful audience of mature readers. show less

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: For Edward Everett Yates, split seconds matter: the precise timing of hitting a low outside pitch, of stealing a base, of running down a fly ball. After a decade playing in the minor leagues—years after most of his peers have given up—he’s still patiently waiting for his chance at the majors. Then one day he gets called up to the St. Louis Cardinals, and finally the future he wanted unfolds before him.

But one more split second changes everything: In what should have been the game of his life, he sustains a devastating knee injury, which destroys his professional career.

Thirty years later, after sacrificing so many opportunities—a lucrative job, relationships with women who loved him, show more even the chance for a family—Edward Everett is barely hanging on as the manager of a minor league baseball team, still grappling with regret over the choices he made and the life he almost had. Then he encounters two players—one brilliant but undisciplined, the other eager but unremarkable—who show him that his greatest contribution may come in the last place he ever expected.

Full of passion, ambition, and possibility, The Might-Have-Been maps the profound and unpredictable moments that change our lives forever, and the irresistible power of a second chance.

My Review: Is it a function of aging that one becomes more and more interested in stories about the roads not taken, the chances unchanced, the opportunities unseized? Maybe it is. Maybe there is nothing more interesting ahead in life than the other paths left behind.

That is the most depressing, miserable, sad, and most of all untrue, sentence I've ever written. And this novel explains why.

I'm a disabled fifty*mumble* year old who lives mostly in cyberworld because it hurts too much to do things like sit in chairs and ride in cars. Gawd...doesn't that sound horrible? But you know something...it's not. It's a road I'm traveling, and it's got wonderful rewards...how many busy, active people bustling around their "real" lives have the time or the ability to make good friends on every continent of the planet, maintain and grow those friendships, come to care a lot for those friends?...so I don't feel deprived, or "less than," or pitiable.

This book is about a man with functioning body parts and no cognitive impairments who can't break free of the deeply narcotic dream of his youth, to excel at one and only one thing. It is unbearably sad. No amount of proof to the contrary can fill the hole in him that's labeled "FailureMan." No amount of life lived feels real enough to round the stabbing edges of The Moment It Changed.

How deeply, deeply sad and pathetic it is to know that there are millions if not billions like him, people for whom the present is a shadowplay and The Past is the only real thing. It's not a question of moving on from past pain, a phrase I detest for its implicit judgment of the hearer. It's a case of building something from the rocks and bricks and dirt around you, something you want to look at and live in, even though the rocks and bricks and dirt around you are the ruins of something you once had, or dreamed of having.

That's not "moving on." That's moving in to the home you've made from the mess the world makes of all of our dreams. It's what Schuster, by anti-model, shows us is so vitally necessary.

I'd be remiss if I didn't mention that the baseball setting of the novel made me smile every page or two. The stakes, for my baseball-fan self, were so much sharper for being set in a world I love.

This book was a LibraryThing Early Reviewers win. show less

I've loved baseball ever since my father taught me to keep score in the upper deck bleachers of Tiger Stadium. I love it in all of its forms from the World Series to MLB Spring Training to the Minor Leagues to college ball and the Cap Cod League down to Little League. I've been there for it all but, as a little girl in the 1960's, never played an inning of organized ball. I can't imagine if the game were taken away. Joe Schuster's "The Might Have Been" imagines far worse for his main character, Edward Everett Yates - a single hitting, hungry outfielder, who is irreparably injured during his proverbial month-long 'cup of coffee' in the majors. After following his youthful struggles to deal (or not) with his foreshortened dreams, the show more story picks up some 33 years, 1000s of games and two marriages later, to find an aging minor league coach, still clutching mightily to his connection with The Game.

You don't really care for baseball, you say? Oh, but this is so much more! Like the best of stories, "The Might Have Been" transcends its diamond-shaped backdrop to reflect on universal themes of dedication (misplaced or not) to one's dreams, regret, ambition, and the helplessness of the little guy in the face of Big Business. Who hasn't faced disappointment and frustration at some point? As by necessity must, the numbers who excel at the highest level of any 'game' are tiny microcosm of the whole. What happens to the ones that can move on, and to those who cannot? Schuster answers with major and minor characters remrkably portrayed with the beautiful details that tell all with economy of descriptive space.

Schuster teaches writing at Webster University, has written many magazine articles (including on baseball) and multiple short stories. His facility with shorter fiction tells in his delightful set pieces throughout his book. To say this is a 'debut' novel in light of this body of work may be a misnomer. Schuster has certainly proven he can write well and entertainingly in the longer form. show less

Baseball might be America's game but it has always struck me as about as exciting as watching the grass grow. So it might seem odd that I do, in fact, cheerfully read books set in the baseball world. I don't think the game is a metaphor for life or anything so deep like others before me do. I am just fascinated by the fact that so many young boys will spend countless years of their lives chasing the dream of professional baseball, weathering disappointment after disappointment, coming close but missing that brass ring time after time. And baseball seems a crueler mistress than other professional sports, at least from my outsider's perspective with all the farm teams and different levels. Yet these boys (and they generally are show more boys)persevere.

Edward Everett Yates, the main character in Joseph Schuster's debut novel is one such boy. He has dreamed all his life of playing in The Show and he has the talent to keep plugging along through the minors, waiting for his moment, that moment when he gets the call. And unlike for so many, it does eventually come. He gets called up to play for the St. Louis Cardinals. And it seems that his brass ring is well in hand. His first game he hits a sacrifice bunt to advance runners. But in his second game, he is having the game of his life despite terrible weather threatening to end the game when in one split second, his decision to climb the fence to catch a ball tears asunder everything for which he's worked so hard. Edward Everett destroys his knee and his future in the big leagues. But he can't quite let go of the game that was to have determined the arc of his entire life even though no team is interested in him anymore. And really, even though 30 years on he is a minor league manager rather than a player retired from the majors, baseball has in fact defined his lonely life.

Told from three very different times in Edward Everett's life, this novel highlights the role that chance and luck play in everyone's life. But it also shows the ways in which our own choices play every bit as big a role. Edward Everett allows his dream to overshadow everything else in his life. His relationships with women, up to an including marriage, have all failed. He has no family beyond his epileptic dog. He not only had no career as a major league ball player, but even as a coach/manager, he is languishing in the minors, Single A even, trying to groom kids who have some talent but are unlikable or kids who are nice in every way but fall short talent-wise, to succeed in the game that has caused Edward Everett himself to turn away from anyone or anything that might have offered him another path or a different, perhaps more fulfilling and certainly less lonely, life.

The lack of connection between Edward Everett and any of the other characters is actually rather sad. His character in his later years is a portrait of a pitiful, might-have-been, just as the title suggests. He is so overwhelmed with regret for the life that he never had a chance to live that he hasn't bothered to live the life he has either. While the tone throughout the novel is melancholic thanks to Edward Everett's numerous lost opportunities, there's also a stultifying air that slows the book down. This stultifying sense is apropos given Edward Everett's downward life trajectory but it can bog the reader down as well. For a reader uninterested or unfamiliar with baseball, there are also quite a few game and player statistics thrown into the novel too. While these numbers are certainly important for a manager looking to keep working at his career, they can overwhelm the point those numbers are intended to make in the text.

As a cautionary tale about the importance of human connection and the need to sometimes temper dreams, this novel works. It is depressing and slow and makes me glad that my boys have never much liked baseball, not to play and not to watch. As a late middle-aged failure, there's not much to root for in Edward Everett who has thoughtlessly thrown out every chance he's ever had for happiness since his career ending injury. A decent enough story, this definitely took longer than it should have to engage my interest and make me invest the time in it to finish it. Baseball fans certainly might appreciate it more than I did. show less

I'm not sure I've ever read a book with a more apt title than The Might Have Been. The novel revolves around baseball, but is actually about the paths that lives take, the almosts, the woulda coulda shouldas, the divergent roads in the yellow wood, and the decisions that lead down one or the other, irrevocably changing lives.

Edward Everett Yates has been in the minor leagues for almost ten years, never quite good enough to move up to the Show, and running out of chances the closer he gets to thirty. Every year, his teammates get disgustingly younger as he only ages. And then, one day, everything starts clicking in a way it never had before. Edward Everett starts wowing the crowds (and himself) with his abilities and soon gets a ticket show more to the big leagues. A lifelong dream come true.

His first game up, he rides the bench until the final inning, when he gets to pinch hit - a sac bunt to move the runner to third. It helps his team win the game, but shows up as just a line of zeroes in Yates' personal statistics. Disappointing, but at least he's shown the coaches that he's a team player.

His next shot comes a couple of months later in a road game in Montreal. Edward Everett is starting in the outfield. By the fourth inning, he's hit for the cycle (that is, four hits: a single, a double, a triple, and a home run all in the same game) despite the deplorable weather conditions. As long as the game gets to the fifth inning before it's called it will count as an official game, Yates' stats will reflect his impressive playing time, and he will be launched into a successful major league career. One more out. Edward Everett reaches for a long fly ball, climbing up the outfield fence:

"He locked his fingers into the chain link to give himself balance for his leap and then he jumped, reaching for the ball, knowing he had gauged the flight of it impeccably, but then he was twisting, falling away from it, one of his spikes caught in the fence, and he was flailing, still reaching for the ball, although the knew it was beyond him, out of the park, and he was falling to the ground, his cleat still caught in the fence, his right knee twisting in a direction he never thought it could go, and still the fence held him, dangling, his shoulder on the wet track, gravity pulling him against his own body, until the fence finally let him go, and he lay there, pain slicing his knee" (pg. 21).
Game's called. Edward Everett's season and perhaps major league career are over with just a line of zeros as the only proof he'd ever been there.

When the team releases him before the next season, Edward Everett seeks advice from his long-time minor league coach. "Go sell straw or whatever" (pg. 85) he tells him. In other words, forget about baseball and join the real world. Edward Everett does for a while, successfully selling flour with his uncle and blocking baseball completely from his mind. But he can't break the habit - baseball calls to him and he must answer, no matter the cost:

"Hoppel had said he was one-in-ten for getting as far as he had; most of the men down on the field would say they'd be satisfied with that: a chance to step to the plate just one time in Pittsburgh or Kansas City in a uniform, under the lights, in front of twenty thousand fans. They were wrong, he thought. Nothing would ever be enough. If he played five years, he'd want six. If he made it ten, he'd want fifteen" (pg. 132).

Flash forward thirty years and it's evident how the choices he's made have affected Edward Everett's life in the long term. What if he'd never met Estelle? What if he'd married Julie? What if he'd married Connie and stayed out of baseball? What if he'd never reached for that ball, never broke his leg? What if he hadn't gotten on that plane to St. Louis?

Without Schuster overtly pointing to it, the reader can see Edward Everett's life laid out - the divergent paths and where they might have led him. Similarly, we see secondary characters making the same type of impactful decisions all around Edward Everett.

At the same time, we see how baseball is the love and obsession (almost to the point of addiction) of Edward Everett's life (and the lives of other characters he encounters, like Ross Nelson). Without this driving force, his life would have surely turned out much differently - but for better or for worse? Edward Everett's love of the game is what sustains and fulfills him. When his turn to play is finished, he thrives helping the rookies gain confidence and develop their skills. His soon-to-be ex-wife doesn't understand that what she sees as a weakness in him - he can't let go, he never evolved to a "grown-up" job - is actually the main crux of his entire being, what makes Edward Everett himself:

"Out on the field, the players were warming up again, loosening their arms before fielding drills. He could hear the slap of so many balls hitting so many gloves, a rapid pop pop pop, and he began walking down toward it.... He went back to where he'd been sitting in the stands, picked up his glove: should he stay or should he go? Slipping the glove on, working his fingers into it, he realized he had forgotten how much he once had the sense that it was an extension of himself; not a piece of leater tied up with cowhide that he wore, but part of himself.
"He walked the rest of the way toward the field, passing from the shadow over the grandstand and out into full sun. The sky was blue and opportunity beckoned" (pg. 134).

Read this book if you love baseball. Read this book if you enjoy literary fiction. And if you love baseball and reading literary fiction, like me, you won't regret picking up Joseph M. Schuster's debut novel The Might Have Been. show less

Baseball is special. The number of novels about the game, both in quality - and certainly in quantity - probably exceeds that of all other sports combined. The length of the baseball season, the pace of an individual game, and the potential for any player (regardless of size, position, or past performance) to be a hero for at least one day all lend themselves to good storytelling. And, because good storytellers seem particularly drawn to the sport, baseball fans who read novels are a lucky bunch.

Joseph M. Schuster is one of those good storytellers, and the good news is that he has chosen organized baseball as the centerpiece of his debut novel, What Might Have Been. As the book’s title implies, the hero of this story, however, is only show more a baseball hero if one considers perseverance to be the stuff from which heroes are made. At age 27, Edward Everett Yates (who prefers being called by both his first and middle names) does make it all the way to the show with the St. Louis Cardinals, but what happens to him there is the very definition of tragedy. He experiences the kind of nightmare in Montreal that often crosses the mind of anyone who sees getting his name in the baseball record books as his only chance of making a mark on the world before he leaves it. No one, though, will ever be able to call Edward Everett a quitter.

Now, fast approaching 60 years of age, he is managing a team barely perched on baseball’s bottom rung, A-ball in the middle of nowhere. What Might Have Been is the story of how he ended up there despite all the baseball promise he showed as a young man. But it is also the story of countless other young men that Edward Everett coached and managed over a lifetime in the game – all of them, just like him, the best athletes to come out of their high schools and little towns in a decade and considered to be sure things when they left home. Way too soon, they all learn that everyone in A-Ball left home with the same reputation and high expectations, that suddenly they are competing against equals and the game has become a whole lot tougher than it has ever been.

What Might Have Been is a book about choices made and not made. It is about lost dreams, the story of one man’s regrets and disappointment as he looks back at his life, wondering how he ended up where he did, but coming to the realization that a series of little spur-of-the-moment decisions combined to make him who he is today. As in the tradition of the best baseball novels, this one is about the game of life as much as it is about the game of baseball. Baseball fans will certainly be intrigued by this frank look at life in the minor leagues, but even non-fans can appreciate this one as the excellently written dramatic novel it is.

Rated at: 5.0 show less

Anyone who says that this novel isn't really about baseball is being a bit disingenuous. Sure, someone who doesn't know baseball can (and many will) enjoy this great novel with an incredibly well developed protagonist. But if you live in St. Louis, and today is opening day (as I write this, today is opening day and, yep, I'm wearing my Ozzie Smith number 1 jersey, the powder blue vintage one) and you DO understand baseball, then this will be a very special work for you. The worst case scenario for everyone else is that this will merely be an excellent read.

Three books came to mind while I was reading this: A Single Man by Christopher Isherwood for the attention to detail in the day to day world of Edward Everett Yates; The Natural by show more Bernard Malamud for the bittersweet tragedy of youthful potential stolen; and the relatively unknown book, The Universal Baseball Association, Inc. J. Henry Waugh, Prop.: A Novel by Robert Coover for the unabashed love of the game of baseball, and its potential for human tragedy and triumph.

Webster University professor Joseph M. Schuster debuts with a novel that is full of melancholy, loss, wrong turns, and boyish stupidity. And baseball. I was listening to the Angels game the night of May 17, 1973 when an up and coming young player named Bobby Valentine suffered the same injury as Yates. I remember my English teacher talking about all the years he wasted in the minor leagues until finally realizing he just wasn't good enough for a career in baseball. I remember a little league coach teaching a bunch of 7 year olds, including myself, to use Willie Mays basket catch - after an hour of having baseballs bounce off of our faces, half the kids quit, I'm sure, never to play baseball again. Schuster's exquisite book brought back all of these memories.

Note: I received a free copy of this book for review purposes via the Amazon Vine Program. show less