You Know Me Al Paperback – September 11, 1991

Bottom Line FirstMy Review is about the Kindle $0.79 version of Ring Lardner’s You Know Me AL. I have read and enjoyed other titles by Ring Lardner and found this one disappointing. The title is a joke, in that this is not Al speaking, but the narrator and protagonist Jack Keefe writing to his friend Al. as in You know me (signed) Al; Hilarious, or maybe not. The book is highly of its time, filled with the slang peculiar to 1900’s baseball and the mid -west. In this book Lardner lacks the ear for language of much better American writers like Mark Twain or Damon Runyon. You Know Me can be tedious, repetitious and predictable. It has is charm. It lacks violence and sex and may be better for a young adult reader and in particular a young baseball fan. The notion of a Big League Ppayer being happy on $200 a month may make the entire book worth reading-to someone else.Ring Lardner had been a sports columnist and knew exactly what a pitcher, newly arrived in the big leagues might look and sound like. In his character, Jack Keefe we have a believable, consistent lunk. He is the kind of athlete that a great team owner like Chicago White Socks owner Charles Comiskey might hire then jack around on salary. This was a time period where coaches had the barest understanding of the proper way to keep a player in shape. The business/science of coaching and controlling players who may be long on confidence an short on experience or common sense was decades after this time period.So Jack bumbles his way with his team mates, who are always the reason for his losses.Jack ignores his coaches and has no judgement about women. To Lardner’s credit, Jack is a very good pitcher. He may not win every game, but he saves more than a few and rarely fails to perform. That is, he is credible as a major league pitcher, and being a good pitcher we can believe that he has so much freedom to work against himself.Otherwise the book is repetitions of play for play game action and mostly the same kinds misadventures away from the field. A running gag will be how many times he cannot get back home to visit Al and how many ways he fails with women. He will almost or think about or otherwise have the urge to bust some one’s jaw about every 5 pages. No one ever gets a busted jaw. More like every page he is complaining about how much something costs. To the modern reader the recitations of what can be bought for a few dollars or even a few nickels may be the only surprises in the book.I like Ring Lardner. Some will enjoy You Know me Al as a view into early professional baseball and may find humor in the misadventures of a big league lunkhead. For me it just got old.

This review refers to the 99¢ Kindle edition. The entire text appears to be there, but there are what seem to have been titles for illustrations sitting around loose, with the illustrations themselves missing. Never mind that, however, what about the book?There is some clever observation here about human nature that transcends the baseball framework. Jack Keefe, who tells us his story through letters to his friend Al, is an aspiring pitcher starting out in the majors. He would probably be much the same person in any line of work, though, vain about his abilities, blaming his failures on other people or on pure chance, but never on himself, taking full credit for his successes without realizing how others have helped him. He is undisciplined, irresponsible, easily manipulated, and generally clueless. After a couple of near misses with female sports fans, he marries a young woman as irresponsible and unready for married life as himself. Their relationship is rocky, and her demands coupled with his foolishness nearly wreck his career. No doubt they will both mature and work things out, but Lardner never gives in to sentimentality in describing their marriage.On the positive side, Jack is genuinely talented as a pitcher, and will probably be okay in the long run. He means well, and it's obvious that Al, who never gets to speak for himself, sees something in him worthy of friendship. Jack's devotion to his infant son is touching, although as with everything else in his life, tinged with cluelessness.Still, apart from the human interest, there is that baseball framework. Well, of course there is. Lardner was a sports writer, writing fiction aimed at baseball fans. He knew the world of professional baseball, at least as it was in his time, and put that knowledge into this book. Unfortunately, at least for a non-fan such as myself, that makes long stretches of this rather short book very tedious. The baseball is inseparable from the story, but for me it was the least interesting part of it. There were lots of smiles here, but also plenty of yawns.

This is a good picture of an era in baseball. In essays by Mencken, he insists that generations to come will not understand Lardner, but honestly it is not like one has to learn a new vocabulary as they must for the great writings of Damon Runyon. It's helpful to know Chicago baseball history, like how pointless and clueless the main character was to negotiate with Comiskey, and the writing is in the form of letters to a minor league pal, Al. To me, this was a fun romp through the days of teams travelling by train and way before any reserve clause relief was introduced in terms of team ownership of contracts.

Ring Lardner tells of the humorous trials and tribulations of Jack, a ChiSox pitcher circa 1915 through letters written to his pal Al back home in Bedford, Indiana. Jack has a rather inflated view of himself and his abilities. Today he would be a bonus baby but back then not so much as owners had much greater control. Jack is constantly both outwitted and out maneuvered by Comiskey, his coaches, fellow players and later his wife. Always intending to come home during the off season to spend time with Al & Bertha he never quite makes it. But you know me Al...Lardner's journalistic style shines as he's able to write short, concise notes by Jack back to Al in an vernacular & idiom suited for ill-educated but well meaning athlete of the day. I've heard claim that Lardner had an ear for speech patterns and it certainly shows with Jack.