Ring Lardner was a Chicago sportswriter who covered the White Sox, and he brought an insider's knowledge of clubhouse life together with his biting wit and gift for the vernacular to create a comic gem in You Know Me Al. The six Jack Keefe stories that compose this volume were originally written as individual magazine articles, but the epistolary format made it easy to collect them into a single running narrative covering Jack's first two years in the Big Leagues.
It isn't necessary to know baseball history to enjoy the book, which is as much about Jack's troubles with girlfriends, wives and babies as it is about the Chicago White Sox. For the baseball fan, however, this glimpse into a bygone era adds an extra layer of fascination. In any case, Lardner's portrait of the professional ballplayer as a dumb, drunken narcissist is as funny today as the day it was written.
By : Ring Lardner (1885 - 1933)
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Jack Keefe is a headstrong, gullible, cheap, naive, self-centred, egotistical and uneducated rube—but he has a strong pitching arm. He begins the book as a minor leaguer in Terre Haute, Indiana who gets accepted by the big leagues to pitch for the Chicago White Sox, circa 1913. In his barely literate letters home to his friend Al, he details his first experiences in the big leagues, which ends in disaster as he pitches poorly and gets sent back down to the minors again. Later, he is accepted again by the majors where he gains some success as a pitcher, but is taken advantage of by nearly everyone he meets.
Much of the humour of the book is from Jack's boastful, oblivious nature, and his utter inability to recognize when he is being manipulated or cheated. In one of the book's many examples of this, White Sox owner Charles Comiskey repeatedly dupes Keefe during contract negotiations, but still convinces Keefe he's getting a good deal. Other characters also routinely manipulate Keefe into doing what they want—amongst the major characters, only Al, who is always offstage, seems to be completely aboveboard and loyal to Jack. (Coach Kid Gleason also seems to be honourable to Jack, though he is not above deceiving Jack when it's ultimately for Jack's own good.)
Almost all the baseball characters with whom Jack interacts, be they team owners, managers, or players, were real-life people. Well-known baseball figures who appear in the novel include Comiskey, Gleason (who constantly teases Jack about his weight and lack of baseball smarts), opposing players Christy Mathewson and Ty Cobb, and many of Jack's White Sox teammates. The only major completely fictional baseball character is the left-handed pitcher Allen. Allen is a teammate who Jack doesn't especially like. Allen eventually introduces Jack to his sister-in-law Florence ("Florrie").
After brief, semi-disastrous engagements to two other women (Hazel and Violet), Jack eventually marries Florrie. Florence enjoys living in style on Jack's salary in Chicago, and refuses to move back to Bedford during the off season, which causes tension between the two. For a while, to save money, Allen and his wife move in with Jack and Florrie, which makes things even worse. Jack and Florrie separate for a while, but eventually reconcile months later, and soon after have a child named Allen, who Jack calls Little Al; Florrie assumes the child is named for her brother-in-law, but Jack writes that he is really named after his old friend Al in Bedford. Jack and Florrie's marriage continues to be tense even after Little Al's birth. Jack seems oblivious that his parentage of Little Al is potentially ambiguous.
Jack actually does fairly well as a major league pitcher; at one point his record is 10-6. (Typically, Jack assumes full credit for the ten wins, but blames his teammates for the six losses.) However, Jack's gullibility and almost complete self-absorption lead him in and out of a number of scrapes and comical situations throughout the six linked stories in the novel. The book ends with Jack and his teammates about to embark on a trip to Japan for a baseball exhibition.
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