SOURCE: "Baseball and Baseball Talk in The Old Man and the Sea," in Fitzgerald/Hemingway Annual, 1975, pp. 281-87.

In the following essay, Barbour and Sattelmeyer argue that baseball and baseball talk in The Old Man and the Sea serve as the boy Manolin's initiation into adulthood and establish a course of heroic action in the novella, as the struggles of baseball player Joe DiMaggio and Santiago are shown to be emblematic of humanity.

Since the education and range of reference of so many of Hemingway's characters seem to come chiefly from the newspaper, he presents us with the curious problem of a modern novelist who increasingly requires historical annotation. This is especially true of his references to the world of sport, where the names of yesterday's heroes may evoke only bewilderment. For foreign readers and for Americans whose minds are uncluttered with old earned-run and batting averages, Hemingway's...