The Natural: Pre-Game Summary & Analysis

Roy Hobbs lights a match inside a train car and gazes out the window into darkness. He can’t sleep, so he watches the Western landscape streak past his window. As the train speeds past a farmhouse, Roy catches a glimpse of a boy in the yard throwing a “glowing ball” to another person in a game of catch.

Roy thinks he might be hallucinating, as the sight reminds him of a dream he has often. In the dream, he is standing in a field, clutching a “golden baseball.” As he agonizes over whether or not he should throw it, the ball becomes heavier and heavier. By the time he finally decides to throw it, the ball has become impossibly heavy, so Roy decides to hold on to it. However, as soon as he decides this, the ball becomes weightless—“a white rose break[s] out of its hide” and the ball “all but soar[s] off by itself,” but Roy can’t throw it, since he already decided to keep it.

Back on the train, Roy decides that he will have an early breakfast so as to “make his blunders of ordering and eating more or less in private”—it’s unlikely that Sam will be awake yet and thus he won’t be there “to tell [Roy] what to do.” However, getting dressed proves a challenge in such tight quarters, and it’s with great difficulty that Roy finally gets himself into his suit.

Roy fishes his bassoon case out from under his bunk and pries it open but snaps it shut when the porter, Eddie, strolls by. Roy explains to Eddie that the bassoon case doesn’t hold an instrument but instead contains “a practical thing” that Roy “made himself.” Eddie playfully makes a series of guesses as to the bassoon case’s contents, each one more ridiculous than the last. With a laugh, Roy asks how long until they get to Chicago—he is trying out for the Cubs.

Upon hearing this, Eddie bows to Roy in jest and addresses him as “My hero,” asking to kiss his hand. Roy is amused, but Eddie makes him a little nervous. He forgot to ask Sam the previous night about how and when he should tip the porter, so he has been trying to avoid Eddie as much as possible. Roy is also nervous about Chicago. He knows that without Sam’s help, he’ll struggle with “simple things” like riding the subway or asking a stranger for directions.

Later, Roy makes his way to the very last car, where sleeping people—including Sam—are strewn about in every direction. The night before, Roy had tried to get Sam to sleep in the nicer train car with the bunk, but Sam only said, “You take the bed, kiddo, you’re the one that has to show what you have got on the ball when we pull into the city.” Back in the present, Sam, who is a drunk, begins to cry in his sleep, so Roy leaves.

When the train pulls into a station, Roy watches as Eddie helps the new passenger aboard: a sumptuous woman whose “nyloned legs [make] Roy’s pulse dance.” Eddie collects the woman’s luggage to bring to her compartment, but she tells him that she can carry the hatbox herself. Noticing that the woman has dropped a white rose, Roy hands it to her. The woman’s face lights up in recognition, but then falls.

As the woman settles into a seat with a cigarette, Roy agonizes over how to strike up a conversation with her. When she leaves, Roy notices that she left behind the white rose again, so he pockets it and follows her into the dining car. Roy gets seated at a table next to the woman and her hatbox. However, he has no idea how to order and spills water all over the tablecloth, so he hastily tips the waiter and dashes out of the car.

The story flashes back to a time when Sam was traveling as a talent scout in search of a great baseball player for the Cubs. One day, Sam got lost on a country road and decided to stop and rest in a pile of hay near an old barn. As he drank deeply from his flask, he saw a baseball game being played by twelve blonde-bearded players. In the flashback, Sam can tell that they are fantastic players: one hits the ball so well the fielder has to run a mile to catch it with his bare hand. The hitters each bat the ball expertly, but the best is the player who executed the bare-handed catch.

Sam wonders if he can “ketch the whole twelve of them” and staggers out onto the field; the players run away immediately, and though Sam is able to hold on to the best one for a moment, he, too, escapes. Sam wakes up on the verge of tears but comforts himself by thinking that he “got someone just as good,” Roy, and that life awake is now better than dreaming.

Sam’s mouth feels dry and his underclothes are dirty. Surprising those around him who see him go that way, he heads to the shower stall in the bathroom a few cars ahead and begins to shower. A trainman tells him that the shower stalls are only for the train crew, and he then goes to the club car—also “out of bounds” for coach travelers like him, though he manages to finagle his way in by claiming that he has a family member on a more expensive sleeper car (actually Hobbs).

Sam doesn’t find Roy in the club car and decides to head to the bar: he is already in a “fluid state” since the train is “moving through wet territory.” He then changes his mind and sits down in the club car to observe the people around him, spotting two men reading a newspaper. Its headline shows that an “All-American Football Ace” and a “West Coast Olympic Athlete” have been shot by an unknown woman with silver bullets from a .22 caliber pistol, both within a 24-hour period.

Sam listens to two men discussing the shootings, one “short, somewhat popeyed,” the other “husky, massive-shouldered,” and wearing sunglasses. The husky man (named Whammer) asks the short man (named Max) why he thinks the woman is shooting athletes, and the short man playfully replies that “she may be heading for a baseball player for the third victim.” Sam looks up at them and realizes he recognizes them both, then introduces himself to Max, a sportswriter.

Max, “a nervous man” in a pinstriped suit, can sense that Sam is an alcoholic and is put off; Sam tells him that he once played for the St. Louis Browns, and Mercy carefully responds that he thinks he knows his name. Sam is cheerful, but mentioning his baseball career sets his insides “afry.” The other man is Walter “the Whammer” Whambold, the “leading hitter of the American League,” who is owed $75,000 and is headed East to get the money from his boss. Sam tells him he looks different in street clothes, and the Whammer, with yellow hair, a tie, and socks, grunts in reply; Sam laughs “embarrassedly.”

Sam tells the men that he is traveling with Hobbs and remarks that Mercy might want to “know about him,” given his success as a high school player; Hobbs learned to pitch from his father, who was once a semipro, and Sam has been helping him to improve. Mercy laughs and says that “Class D is as far down as I go.” Sam is taking Hobbs to Clarence Mulligan of the Cubs for a tryout, anticipating that the Cubs will pay Sam a few thousand dollars—on the condition that he can return to his former career as a “regular scout” signed to the team.

Sam spots Hobbs, who is looking around for the girl with the black hatbox (whose name, Eddie has told him, is Miss Harriet Bird), and goes to grab him. While Sam is gone, Max remarks that Sam was a “terrific” catcher, which he discovered while completing research on “drunks in baseball.” Settling with Sam next to Max and the Whammer, Hobbs takes an instant disliking to the sportswriter and the star ballplayer, who are openly rude to Hobbs and Sam. Max and the Whammer leave to play cards in another pair of seats, and Harriet, seated nearby, attracts the Whammer’s attention, making Hobbs jealous.

Later on, the Whammer is talking to Harriet about his career, slipping his hands around the back of her seat. Annoyed, Hobbs leaves the club car and goes back to the sleeper, where he feels a “kind of sadness” watching the landscape go by outside the train, realizing that he might never see home again. Watching the forest drift by, Hobbs reminisces on his experiences in nature and “the woodland,” a space where he feels free of anxiety—it “ease[s] the body-shaking beat of his ambitions”—and begins to wonder if he made the right decision by coming to Chicago, and whether Sam knows what he is doing or not. Hobbs remembers the white rose in his pockets and decides to get rid of it, but then a “beaten, gold, snow-capped mountain” with a city at its base appears out the window, distracting him.

The train comes to a stop and a dozen passengers get off for a half-hour break, including Hobbs, Sam, Harriet, the Whammer, and Max Mercy; Hobbs takes the bassoon case with him. Sam spots a carnival at the outskirts of the city they have stopped in, and the passengers head toward it: Hobbs plays a game throwing baseballs at wooden pins and wins a variety of prizes. A large-bosomed girl in yellow working the game offers to kiss him for every three pin he knocks down. At first, Hobbs works steadily, knocking down many of them, but then the Whammer appears—having won prizes of his own in the batting cage—and trips him up.

Sam makes a wager with the Whammer, claiming that Hobbs can strike him out with three pitched balls. Harriet, watching Hobbs and the Whammer (and clutching a kewpie doll the Whammer has won for her) exclaims that she loves “contests of skills.” The crowd moves across the train tracks; Sam, serving as the umpire, gets a local boy to bring him a fielder’s glove and a catcher’s mitt and buttons a washboard Roy won in the wooden pin game under his coat as protection. Sam advises Roy to “throw a couple of warm-ups,” but Roy claims that his arm is “loose.” Roy takes off his coat, and a local boy comes to grab it; Roy tells him not to “spill the pockets.” He then tells Sam that he wishes he hadn’t bet money on him. Sam, embarrassed, says they won’t take the money if they win, but they’ll let it stand if they lose.

The onlookers walk to the other side of the tracks as Roy and the Whammer gear up for play, though Harriet stands close by, her eyes shining at the sight of the two men. Roy pitches a ball to the Whammer, who looms “gigantic” to Roy, “impassive, unsmiling, dark.” The Whammer’s “exceptional eyesight” allows him to see the ball spin off of Roy’s fingertips as if in slow motion; it reminds him of a white bird. The Whammer strikes out and is surprised by himself: he feels bemused about entering into this strange competition by the “crazy carnival,” and the “queer dame” Harriet, though she had been congratulating him five minutes ago, is now “eyeing him coldly for letting one pitch go by.” Max, who has agreed to call the pitches, moves back from the scene, and Sam laughingly calls out that his “knees are knockin’,” as if he is fearful of Hobbs’s abilities.

Roy pitches again, and the ball looks like a “slow spinning planet looming toward the earth:” the Whammer strikes at it “ferociously” but strikes out again. Sam taunts the Whammer, who asks if Roy is cheating by throwing “spitters.” Secretly, though, the Whammer feels relieved, since stress helps him to focus; he then feels momentarily depressed, watching Roy move like a “veteran undertaker of the diamond.” For a moment, Sam pities the Whammer and hopes that he won’t be “tumbled.” As Roy raises his legs to throw the third pitch, he smells the Whammer’s blood, feeling angry for the way he insulted Sam. The Whammer lifts his bat to crush the pitch, but he realizes with sadness that the ball is “part of the past”—that he has struck out.

The crowd is silent in the “violet evening;” the Whammer shouts out that it is “customary” to turn on lights for night games. The ball Roy pitched has hit Sam in the stomach, and despite the washboard, the ball’s velocity injures him. Sam is pulled to his feet; the train whistles, and the passengers turn around to get back on the train. Before Hobbs boards, the girl in yellow tries to kiss him. He ducks, and she hits him on the right eye, watched closely by Harriet, whom he deems a “snappy goddess.”

Hobbs feels triumphant about his defeat of the Whammer and spends the next leg of the journey talking with Harriet, who, rambling excitedly, compares Hobbs and the Whammer to the myth of David and Goliath. Hobbs reveals that his father left him in orphan homes, though he did teach him “how to toss a ball.” Hobbs finds it difficult to talk to Harriet, who is more educated than he is, but eventually he gains confidence and tells her that he will one day “break every record in the book for throwing and hitting.” Harriet is disappointed to learn that Hobbs, unlike the Whammer, is not yet a professional player, but she brightens when Hobbs notes that the Whammer, already thirty-three, “won’t last much longer,” while he, Hobbs, has his whole career in front of him.

Harriet asks Hobbs if there is any “glorious meaning” to his ambitions with baseball—if he has a higher purpose in life—but Hobbs is unable to respond coherently. Haltingly, her eyes “sad,” Harriet says that “we are all terribly alone,” then trails off. Hobbs feels bad for her, as if she is his mother (whom he calls “that bird”); he is worried that he has bored her with his poor responses. Harriet then asks about his bassoon case, and he tells her that it is a baseball bat; she promises to come and see him play, and as the train goes around a bend, he fondles her breast. She screams and reacts strangely, contorting her body like a “twisted tree.”

Meanwhile, Max Mercy is asking Sam about Hobbs, his back turned to the Whammer, who is holding a newspaper “in front of his sullen eyes.” Sam escapes Mercy’s questions and tries to go to sleep in the coach car, where he has a nightmare about being pursued by various characters—Mercy, the conductor (who runs him off of the train into a bog) and a doctor who tells him that there is no bridge over the bog. Sam wrestles with the doctor, refusing to believe him, but soon discovers that the bridge is gone. He falls into the “whirling waters;” a “watchman” throws him a flare, but it is too late. Sam feels a pain in his side “where the knife had stabbed him.”

Eddie wakes up Hobbs in the midst of his own dreams and tells him that Sam has collapsed. They rush to the coach car, and before Sam succumbs to his injuries from the pitch that hit him during the contest, he tells Hobbs to go to the Stevens Hotel in Chicago and meet the Cubs agent, Clarence Mulligan. Then Sam gives Roy his wallet full of cash. Visibly upset, Roy agrees, and Sam dies.

After leaving the train, Roy takes a taxi to the hotel in Chicago. Watching the streets go by, Hobbs reflects on the crowded, unfamiliar city—wondering how it can possibly be so full of people, and how many of those strangers are dangerous—and feels homesick. Reaching his large, imposing hotel, he feels nervous about entering its “whirling doors” but does so anyway, following the bellhop who has “grabbed his things.” Hobbs pays five dollars for a room, though he knows he will give it up when he finds a boarding-house to stay in.

In his room on the seventeenth floor, Hobbs looks down on the city and begins to feel invincible: he knows he will go to the try-out and play well. The telephone rings; though he is scared to answer it, he picks it up on the second ring and discovers that it is Harriet, who invites him to her room in the same hotel. He takes his bassoon case with him and walks down to her room, where she greets him wearing a see-through negligée.

A “great weight” goes off of Hobbs’s mind when he sees Harriet. Hobbs watches her put on a black feathered hat with a veil, removing it from a hatbox next to a vase of white roses, and notices that she is holding a “squat, shining pistol”; confused, he asks her what’s wrong. She asks him if he will be “the best” player “there ever was in the game.” When he responds in the affirmative, she shoots him with the pistol, and the silver bullet lands in his gut. Hobbs tries to catch it but cannot, and he falls on his knees while Harriet dances “on her toes” around him, simultaneously triumphant and despairing; the “forest” around Hobbs flies upward.