The Natural: Batter Up! Part 1 Summary & Analysis

The novel cuts to a scene in the New York Knights’ dugout, where Pop Fisher is reflecting on his love for farming while watching the Knights play: he decides that he should have been a farmer instead of a “wet nurse to a last place” baseball team. Pop notes to Red Blow that it has been a “dry season” for the Knights, in both senses of the term: the weather has been hot and dry, and the Knights are failing to win games. Pop and Red discuss their players’ poor performances, including Bump’s, who has been thrown out of the game. They also mention Pop’s “bastard partner,” who is tight with money, and Pop’s physical ailments—he has “athlete’s foot” on his hands, which he wears bandaged.

Someone in street clothes lugging a valise and a bassoon case enters the dugout and asks for Fisher. The two look at each other: Pop is sixty-five with blue eyes and resembles a “lost banana” in his oversized baseball outfit, while the stranger is “tall, husky” and “dark-bearded,” large but “lithe.” His mind is racing, and he feels that he hasn’t yet “arrived”—that he is still working toward some unspecified goal. The stranger introduces himself as the new left fielder, Roy Hobbs, and hands a letter to Pop describing his contract.

The letter informs Pop that Hobbs is thirty-four, which Pop claims is too old for baseball; Hobbs tells Pop that he played semipro with the Oomoo Oilers, having recently got back in the game. Pop—lacking confidence in Hobbs’s abilities—is upset about Hobbs’s presence, and he tells Hobbs that he’s been cheated: he should have been paid more than three thousand dollars for his starting pay by Judge Banner, Pop’s co-manager.

Pop says that he doesn’t need a “fielder old enough to be [his] son;” frustrated, Hobbs gets up to leave, but Red takes Pop aside and convinces him to give Hobbs a chance, noting that if the Knights’ best scout found him, Hobbs must be worth something. Pop apologizes to Hobbs, but tells him that “thirty-four years for a rookie is starting with one foot in the grave.” As Hobbs walks away to go get his uniform, Pop mutters that he “shoulda bought a farm.”

Hobbs goes into the clubhouse to get a uniform from the prop man, Dizzy, directed there by the trainer. Dizzy tells Hobbs that they’ve been one man short on the roster ever since one of their players was paralyzed from a fly ball; additionally, another player snapped his spine after stepping on a bat. Dizzy gives Hobbs a hat that is too small and remarks that Hobbs has “some size noggin there.” Hobbs tells him that he wears a seven and a half, and Dizzy comes back with a size that fits. As Hobbs tries on the hat, Dizzy asks him why he’s crying. Hobbs says he has a cold; Dizzy then asks him to sign for his gear, since Judge Banner insists. He helps Hobbs carry it to his locker, where he warns him not to store booze, since Pop gets upset if players drink. Dizzy also tells Hobbs that no one locks their locker doors.

As Hobbs changes in the “tomblike quiet” of the locker room, which is empty of other players, he reflects that his first day in the major league is different from what he expected—so different that he feels an urge to walk out and return to one of the towns he lived in as a child, where he had a dog and could wander through the woods in peace. Hobbs is caught in the reverie until the dog’s yapping wakes him; he realizes that he has actually heard the sound of voices through the door to the trainer’s room.

Hobbs overhears players speaking with each other in the trainer’s room and hears one “greedy, penetrating, ass-kissing” voice that he recognizes; another voice is telling a story about a prank he pulled on Pop Fisher. The second voice belongs to a player named Bump, who is playing pranks on Pop in an attempt to be released from the failing team. Bump tells another story about arranging to drop a ball from an airplane, which Pop, bragging about his talents as a former player, claimed he would be able to catch; the ball hit him on his head instead. The other voice asks Bump if he is engaged to Pop’s niece, Memo, but Bump denies it; the door to the trainer’s room opens and Bump and Max Mercy walk out. Hobbs is embarrassed to see Mercy, but Mercy doesn’t seem to recognize him; Bump welcomes him to the team crudely.

Pop gathers the players for a speech in which he sharply criticizes the team, their behavior, and their poor performances on the field, while Bump hurls insults back at him; Pop leaves the room in tears, sobbing, “Sometimes I could cut my own throat.” Hobbs feels ashamed after the speech, and when he meets Pop later, he admits that he has no place to spend the night, having forfeited his bonus cash on outstanding debts. Pop gives him a loan to stay in a hotel and encourages him to ask the married players if they have a spare room, or to look into staying at a boarding-house. Roy gets a room at the Midtown Hotel, where the bellhop tells him that previous Knights players who stayed at the hotel were known for their cruel jokes—including one in which a player died by falling off of the hotel roof.

Before leaving him for the night, Pop urges Hobbs to “behave and give the game all you have got.” Red Blow phones Hobbs and invites him to dinner; before he goes to eat, Bump comes to Hobbs’s door and asks to trade rooms, since he is inviting a “lady friend” over and feels that there are “too many nosy people” on his floor. Hobbs agrees to exchange rooms, but when he goes to see the room, he encounters a redheaded girl in her underwear who screams and slams the door when she sees him. Hobbs has a splitting headache. Bump’s room turns out to be next door to this room. Roy lies down in Bump’s bed to soothe his headache.

After Hobbs and Red have dinner, the two men head to a movie about a love affair between a “city guy” and a “country girl;” Hobbs enjoys it, and as they walk back to the hotel, he thinks about the girl in the black brassiere in the next room. Red tells Hobbs about the team’s troubles, noting that Bump is “lazy,” though Pop hopes that he will “reform.” He also asks Hobbs why he didn’t start playing when he was younger. Hobbs is evasive, saying simply that he “flopped;” Red cringes at the term and tells Hobbs about “Fisher’s Flop,” an incident from the end of Pop’s playing career in which he failed to make a crucial home run for his team, the Sox, during the last game of the World Series.

Red tells Hobbs that Pop became infamous for his “flop” and left the game for a time, though he was able to use money from an inheritance to buy a half share of the Knights. Pop believes he has been jinxed since the “flop” and that if he can lead the Knights to victory, he might break the curse—but Judge Banner, who hopes to push Pop out of his job, has been making things difficult for his co-owner, making bad trades that hurt the team but prompt financial gain for Banner.

Red asks Hobbs to try his best to redeem the team, and Hobbs promises to do so; Red also warns Hobbs that baseball is a notoriously difficult game, and that he should try to save his money in case something goes wrong. However, Hobbs confidently replies that he plans to be in the game “a long time.”

Back in his room at night, Hobbs feels as if his bed is “in motion,” going around in circles. He lies still and lets the “trees, mountains, states” go by, but he feels as if he is headed somewhere he does not want to go; he cannot stop the bed from moving, like a roaring locomotive, and he sees himself walking down a corridor with the bassoon case, knocking on a door, and encountering Harriet, who seems “less and more than human,” with her pistol. Harriet cuts him down “in the very flower of his youth,” and he sobs into his pillow.

Hobbs finally quiets down, and the noise of the train fades away. He begins to have a pleasant dream about the girl he saw in the movie with Red, and he imagines her with him in a country field. At one point, a door opens and a naked redheaded woman gets into bed with him. Hobbs thinks he is still dreaming, but he almost screams out in pain when her icy hands and feet touch him, “slashing” his body; in the country field he imagines, he finds “what he wanted and had it.”