As the Phillies gathered at their ancestral spring home of Clearwater in the late 1940s, they were followed by a writer. That wasn’t unusual in the slightest: sportswriters flock to spring training like monarch butterflies to Mexico. But this writer, a scribe by the name Frank O’Rourke, was not a sportswriter. He was a novelist. Unlike the journalists, who were stuck merely guessing at what would happen in the season they would soon observe, O’Rourke could decide what would happen in his. His novel, The Team, appeared in 1949. The team he wrote about would find their degree of immortality, but The Team is almost entirely forgotten now, with mentions of it online consisting mostly of listings on secondhand book and memorabilia sites (If you’d like, you can purchase the copy O’Rourke inscribed to Dick Sisler).
The 1940s Novel Starring the Phillies
