The Natural: Batter Up! Part 2 Summary & Analysis

The next morning in the locker room, the Knights are glum and fighting among themselves. When Hobbs enters, though, they look up at him with interest. Hobbs discovers that his teammates have scattered his belongings: his uniform is knotted up, soaking wet, his stockings and socks are slashed, and his other things are smeared with shoe polish; his jock strap, with two red apples in it, is hanging from the ceiling, where his shoes have also been nailed. Hobbs’s teammates start laughing, and he smacks Bump in the face with his wet pants. Bump dries himself off and gives Hobbs a cigarette that explodes in his face. The Knights howl with laughter. Allie Stubbs, the second baseman, dances around the room, imitating a “naked nature dancer” playing the trombone. Hobbs then realizes that his bassoon case is missing.

Hobbs spies Bump with a hacksaw, about to attack his bat, called “Wonderboy.” Hobbs retrieves the bat, and he and Bump scuffle. Hobbs tells Bump that he doesn’t like being pranked, especially after Bump asked him for a favor the night before; Bump says he heard Hobbs “had a swell time.” Pop and Doc Casey, the trainer, break up the fight, and Pop tells Hobbs that fighting between players will be punished. Hobbs feels sorry for making trouble because he wanted to ask Bump if he was expecting the redheaded woman in his room.

Hobbs goes outside with Wonderboy and into the batting cage. The players, including Earl Wilson, Allie Stubbs, Cal Baker, Hank Benz, Emil Lajong, Hinkle, Hill, and McGee, are practicing without much energy, but they perk up when they see Hobbs enter the cage. Fowler, a southpaw Pop has ordered to throw batting practice “for not bearing down in the clutches” the day before, is in a “nasty mood” and throws a ball at Hobbs’s head in spite; Roy hits his next three pitches spectacularly well.

Pop asks Hobbs about his bat, and Hobbs tells him that as a child, he carved it out of wood from a tree that was struck by lightning near the river where he lived; he branded the name “Wonderboy” on it himself and keeps its pale white wood “oiled with sweet oil.” When Pop asks Hobbs why he didn’t get into the game as a teenager, Hobbs is elusive, noting that he “got sidetracked.” Pop says that Red will measure and weigh the bat to make sure it meets specifications. Red then asks Pop if they can start Hobbs in the line-up soon.

Pop sends Hobbs out to left field, where he proves to be a good field player, and Bump—as well as the other players—begin to play with more gusto, encouraged by Hobbs’s performance. Though Bump does not typically “exert” himself in practice, he hits Fowler’s pitches hard; he runs for and catches long fly balls, including some that end up close to the outfield wall, though he doesn’t like to run near the wall as a rule. Pop is pleased with the team’s work and tears up.

Before Hobbs’s first game that day, the team sits around in the locker room, trying to hide their nerves but looking up whenever someone enters the room. Red introduces Hobbs to players Dave Olson, Juan Flores, and Gabby Laslow, and they walk past Bump anxiously performing his pre-game ritual: he is sewing a red thread into a sanitary sock, which Red tells Hobbs is a superstitious practice that Bump believes “keeps him hitting.” Pop gives the team a pep talk, reading notes from an old, worn-in notebook, but he doesn’t insult the players—like he did in his last pep talk.

A short man in a green suit enters the room. The players arrange their chairs and benches in rows in front of the man, who the catcher, Olson, tells Hobbs is named Doc Knobb. The players seem less nervous around Doc, who begins to give a prolonged, hypnotic oration about relinquishing weakness and visualizing their own success: “If you think you are winners, you will be,” he tells the team, asking them to imagine the Pirates, their opponents, as “mortals,” “not supermen,” to envision themselves as “the sun shining calmly on a blue lake” instead of “a flock of bats flying around in a coffin.” Finally, he entreats the team to relax and “sleep.”

The Knights begin to look less nervous and are lulled into a sleepy state as Knobb raises his arms and makes wave-like motions with them. Hobbs begins to dream that he is swimming in deep water, searching for a mermaid; there isn’t enough light underwater to find her, and he panics and wakes up abruptly. Jarred, Hobbs decides to leave the room, damning Knobb’s hypnosis, but Pop tells him that he is supposed to attend the doctor’s sessions, per his contract.

After Hobbs walks out on Doc Knobb’s speech, Pop benches Hobbs as punishment, but Hobbs remains steadfast, refusing to attend subsequent hypnosis sessions. Hobbs tells Red that he has “been a long time getting here” and “wants to do it,” playing baseball, on his own terms, without Knobb’s help; he never joins his team except for batting practice.

Hobbs begins to feel weakened while he waits to play, some days feeling so fragile “he could hardly lift Wonderboy,” but whenever he goes into the batting cage to practice, he performs well, in contrast to his teammates, who are often clumsy and overly reliant on superstition. The Knights become sloppier when they are already losing a game and when they have not been hypnotized by Doc Knobb. Even Red and Pop have rituals: Pop has a rabbit’s foot, and Red never changes his clothes during a “winning streak.”

Certain players have superstitious rituals about their fans, too: Emil Lajong does a “flip” whenever he sees “a cross-eyed fan” in the stands, and Olson spits when he spots a woman in a “drab brown-feathered hat.” Hobbs is put off by the Knights’ fans, who resemble a “zoo full of oddballs,” including gamblers, prostitutes, and physically grotesque people, all obsessed with certain players—including Otto Zipp, a dwarf who roots for Bump using a loud horn. One fan, however, stands out to Hobbs: Memo Paris, Pop’s niece and Bump’s on-again-off-again girlfriend, who has treated him coldly ever since she accidentally got into his bed during his first night at the Midtown Hotel.

Hobbs has tried to apologize to Memo, but she blames him for the incident, ignoring his letters and phone calls. Bump finds the situation humorous—he tells Memo that he let Hobbs have his room out of pity, because he was going to spend the night “at the apartment of [his] he cousin from Mobile,” and that he wasn’t trying to play a prank on her—but Memo refuses to speak to either Bump or Hobbs. Nonetheless, Hobbs’s infatuation with Memo deepens, and he resolves to “wait” for her.

Pop informs Hobbs that because of his refusal to attend Knobb’s sessions, he is going to be sent to a Class B (minor league) team in the Great Lakes. Knobb offers to hypnotize Pop in order to rid him of his abrasive behavior, but Pop takes offense and fires him. Without Knobb’s monologues, the Knights perform well, up until a point: Bump fails to make a routine catch, and Pop decides to put Hobbs in as a pinch-hitter for Bump, asking Hobbs to “hit the cover off of the ball.” Hobbs faces a pitch and reflects that he is “sick to death of waiting.” Using Wonderboy, Hobbs hits a homerun, literally knocking the cover off of the ball pitched to him; the bat flashes in the sun.

As soon as Hobbs makes it to home base, the Knights and their opponents, the Phils, contest the umpire’s calling Hobbs safe; it also begins to rain heavily. The game is recorded as a tie, and Pop asks Hobbs to explain why the cover came off of the ball. Hobbs replies that that was what Pop asked him to do. Pop withdraws Hobbs’s release, and the next day, during practice for a game against the Redbirds, Hobbs looks “tremendous;” so, too, does Bump, who warns Hobbs to “get out of [his] way.” Pop puts Bump back in his usual position—fourth slot in the batting order—but tells him to start hustling or risk resting on the bench.

In the next game, Bump performs admirably but is not satisfied by his own well-executed catches; he chases a hard-hit ball and runs full tilt toward the outfield wall. Bump feels his legs slowing down, then envisions himself as the league’s best outfielder, adored by fans, players, and Pop. He catches the ball between his fingers but does not hear Otto Zipp’s horn, nor Memo’s shrieking, and collides with the wall, severely injuring himself and ending up on the critical list at the hospital.

After Bump is hospitalized, the newspapers speculate that Hobbs may have conspired with Pop to tear the cover off of the ball during his spectacular homerun. Max Mercy suggests that Wonderboy is “suspicious,” but Red Blow insists that the bat is legitimate and quashes Mercy’s rumors. Hobbs keeps Wonderboy hidden away when Mercy comes to search the clubhouse.

Hobbs plays the next game against the Redbirds for Bump. In the stands, Otto Zipp looks “worn and aged,” his face “like a pancake with a cherry nose;” Hobbs passes him by without giving him Bump’s customary kiss on the head (another one of his superstitions). Hobbs bats and fields successfully; he is adept at judging the way a ball might carry on the wind or bounce on different places on the field, and the fans in the bleachers enjoy his acrobatics. The Redbirds’ pitchers try to trip him up with different types of difficult pitches, but Hobbs is unflappable.

Red says to Pop that Hobbs is a “natural,” but Pop says that he mistrusts “bad ball hitters;” Hobbs sometimes swings at poorly-pitched balls, and Pop remarks that hitters like Hobbs often make “some harmful mistakes.” Nonetheless, Hobbs earns a record for the number of triples hit in a major league debut, and everyone agrees that the Knights have found “something special.” At the end of the game, Hobbs accidentally kills a bird that flies out of a window of an apartment overlooking the stadium by mistaking it for a ball.