Shoeless Joe

Ray finishes building the entire field in three baseball seasons. The eight Black Sox baseball players appear one by one, clearer images of themselves except for the right fielder and the catcher, who are still shadowy. Ray’s daughter, Karin, also has the ability to see the baseball games being played on the field. She and Ray watch every game, munching hot dogs and sharing sodas, while Ray realizes that translating these games into reality would be like “trying to stuff a cloud in a suitcase” (29).

Next, Ray hears another mysterious message, "Ease his pain" (27). Ray tells his wife that this message is about the reclusive writer J.D.Salinger. Based on an interview that Ray read in a literary magazine years ago, Ray believes that Salinger is a devout baseball fan who has not seen a live baseball game for the past twenty-five years. He decides to pay a visit to Salinger, who lives in New Hampshire, and take him to a baseball game at Fenway Park, in Boston. Ray believes that even if he doesn’t know Salinger, Salinger knows him. In one of his stories, “A Young Girl in 1941 With No Waist at All”, Salinger created a character named Ray Kinsella. Similarly, in his novel,The Catcher in the Rye, Salinger has a character named Richard Kinsella and Ray has a twin brother by the same name.

On his drive to New Hampshire, Ray attends ball games in Chicago, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, and at Yankee Stadium, in New York. When he reaches New Hampshire, he waylays Salinger outside his home and persuades the shocked writer to accompany him to Fenway Park to watch a baseball game.

On the way, Ray tells the writer his story, and they talk about writing. At this point, the narrator also tells us about his brother-in-law, Mark, who has become obsessive in the past few months about buying Ray’s farm. He also tells the reader about his twin brother, Richard, whom he has not seen for a long time.

At the Boston Red Sox game, Ray tries to get Salinger to talk about the pain that he had mentioned in his interview. However, Salinger says, “it is not a big deal” (89.) During the game, Ray receives yet another message, this time from the scoreboard, about a baseball player named Moonlight Graham who played a single game for the New York Giants in 1905. Ray knows that he has another assignment to fulfill, and he receives a message telling him to "go the distance." (96). Salinger says that he heard it too and he and Ray agree to travel to Chisholm, Minnesota, to discover more about Archie Moonlight Graham.