Ring Lardner was the first baseball writer to get down on the page the words of a player expanding upon his experiences on and off the diamond, and You Know Me Al (1914) established most of the conventions for the genre, beginning with the “busher” as narrator and hero (with a proper degree of false modesty) and running through the basic human elements — the tyrannical and long-suffering coaches, the eccentric players, the girl you pine for, the fickle fans, the arrogant and envious sportswriters, plus a few others. There is an inevitability to the plot structures of narratives about baseball, since it is a self-enclosed universe.
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