Going, Going, Gone!

January 9, 2023
In this charming swing for the fences, Hermanos explores the ultimate fantasy-league puzzler: how would today’s highly professionalized baseball stars fare against the game’s scrappy earlier players? And what could they learn from each other? Going, Going, Gone opens with rousing recounts of a pair of (fictional) Giants/Yankees World Series games, with Hermanos nailing, in crackling prose, the action on the field and in the locker rooms as Giants players Johnny Blent, a rookie, clashes with star first baseman André Velez, a prima donna who, rather than fly with the team, favors a private jet, complete with masseuse. A post-game San Francisco earthquake upends everything, though, somehow flinging Blent, Velez, and manager Bucky Martin back to the era of another epochal S.F. catastrophe: 1906.
After failing to dig up the “wormhole” the trio believes they fell through, Martin gets the players to get back to what they do best: playing ball, in the “dead-ball” era, first for the St. Louis Cardinals and then for other, increasingly unexpected teams, as the novel playfully establishes witty alt-history surprises. Hermanos contrasts present and past in lively, exciting scenes, The novel’s heart—it’s got heaps—is in how the game changes these men, and how they change the game, as they subsist on meager wages, and face spitballs, scratchy underpants, and Ty Cobb himself. The history is rich and the pacing quick, with scenes driven by sharp dialogue that blends contemporary profanity with old-time decorum—and occasional reminders of the past's racial viciousness.
Hermanos wisely doesn’t shy away from issues of race—the mixed-race Velez pretends to be Native American to play—but the novel, as it charts the men’s new careers and relationships, tends toward the upbeat, the love of the game, and the learning of lessons about past and present, our ancestors and ourselves. The baseball action is clear enough for casual fans but sufficiently detailed to appeal to the Bill James set.
Takeaway: Today’s MLB players strive to make it in 1906 in this rousing sports time-travel epic.
Great for fans of: Michael Shaara’s For Love of the Game, Philip Roth’s The Great American Novel. .
Production grades
Cover: A
Design and typography: A
Illustrations: N/A
Editing: A
Marketing copy: A

Starred review from July 15, 2022
Baseball players travel back in time to the wild major leagues of the early 20th century in this fantasy. Hermanos' tale follows three modern-day San Francisco Giants teammates--prima-donna star Andr� Velez, who keeps hammering homers with the help of illicit steroids; struggling rookie second baseman Johnny Blent; and grizzled manager Bucky Martin. They get catapulted back to the year 1906 during an earthquake and wash up with the New York Giants. The trio takes in a barely recognizable sport where bats weigh 50 ounces; unkempt playing fields are studded with rocks and potholes; spitballs are legal; drunken fans routinely attack players on the diamond; and contracts pay $800 a year. Blent and Velez painfully adjust--the half Black Velez pretends to be a Native American to get into the segregated majors--to become top players. Martin, meanwhile, gets hired as manager thanks to his 21st-century sabermetrics; he gradually tames a team that likes liquor, vandalism, and gunplay better than practicing and leads the Giants from the cellar to the World Series. Unfortunately, the trio's new timeline is warped by the presence of New Glory, a Caribbean slave empire run by Confederates who escaped to Cuba after the Civil War and are forcing Albert Einstein to build them an atom bomb. When New Glory's baseball league challenges the Giants to a "Solar Series," the fate of the world hangs in the balance. Hermanos' novel mixes steampunk themes into a vivid baseball yarn that's full of colorful period details and piquant sketches of historical figures, from wily mound genius Christy Mathewson to a blustery Theodore Roosevelt and a mad Nikola Tesla. The author's portrait of old-time baseball steeps readers in intricate strategizing, punchy dialogue--"Phillippe, you fucking infant! Suck your thumb! Shake your rattle!" goes a typical on-field razzing--and play-by-play that's riveting and even lyrical. ("Head down, legs churning, he senses the white light of God is emanating from second base as he races for it, the ball crossing his field of vision as he slides, the ball ticking off the second baseman's glove, Blent popping up and zipping for third, McGraw's fist of a face staring at the ball coming in, 'Down! Down! Down!' ") Readers will stick with this riotous page-turner to the last out. A raucously entertaining, richly atmospheric SF sports fable.

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