JAMES JOYCE COMES TO MAJOR LEAGUE BASEBALL. Below is a comment, based on the last paragraph of “The Dead”, which Nick and Collin Whitchurch wrote about the pitcher Mike Pelfrey, who is coming to the end of his long and successful career.
“Yes, the newspapers were right: runs were general all over Chicago. They were falling softly upon the Bog of Dick Allen and, farther eastward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Lake Michigan waves. They were falling, too, upon every part of the lonely bullpen where Michael Pelfrey lay buried. They lay thickly drifted in the crooked numbers and home runs, on the walls of the little outfield, in the barren gaps. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the runs falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.”