He returned to the Cubs in 1946 and, with Hank Borowy, was traded to the Phillies for Dutch Leonard and Monk Dubiel after the 1948 campaign. After debuting with the Chicago Cubs in 1941, he earned four Bronze Stars while serving with the U.S. Edward Stephen Waitkus was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on September 4, 1919. In relation to the real-life Eddie Waitkus and the fictional Roy Hobbs, the two on the surface have little in common. In public he said even less.” So determining the genesis of the Hobbs shooting, not to mention other actual baseball influences in The Natural, is purely speculative, the equivalent of piecing together a giant puzzle that keeps changing shape. As reported in an editor’s note in Talking Horse: Bernard Malamud on Life and Work, “…during his lifetime as an artist and writer, said little in private about his own work. Malamud (1914–86) was loath to discuss his literary sources. To what extent was he influenced by baseball history and baseball lore? Even more specifically, what was Malamud’s inspiration for one of the novel’s crucial episodes: the near-fatal shooting in a Chicago hotel room of Roy Hobbs, the story’s principal character, by a black-garbed mystery woman? Was it in fact a direct reference to the blast from a rifle wielded by an overwrought fan which almost snuffed out the life of Waitkus, also in a Chicago hotel room, on the night of June 14, 1949? However, a question that has long intrigued aficionados and scholars involves how much of Malamud’s story has been culled from real life. One might imagine that The Natural-written by Bernard Malamud and published in 1952-is unadulterated fiction, while the 1984 screen adaptation is a baseball fantasy with a literary origin. Instead, his name is inexorably linked to the plight and fate of the central character in an all-time classic baseball novel. 284 average on the 1950 National League pennant-winners and not for any other on-field accomplishment. Eddie Waitkus, the Fightin’ Phillies first-sacker, is best remembered not for his 182 hits and.

The natural malamud