Hobbs does just that, much to everyone's surprise and The Whammer's humiliation. The train makes a quick stop at a carnival along the rail where The Whammer challenges Hobbs to strike him out. Other passengers include sportswriter Max Mercy, Walter 'The Whammer' Whambold, the leading hitter in the American League and three-time American League Most Valuable Player (based on Babe Ruth), and Harriet Bird, a beautiful but mysterious woman. Nineteen-year-old Roy Hobbs is traveling by train to Chicago with his manager Sam to try out for the Chicago Cubs. ( August 2021) ( Learn how and when to remove this template message) Please help improve it by removing unnecessary details and making it more concise. This article's plot summary may be too long or excessively detailed. It has been alternately suggested by historian Thomas Wolf that the shooting incident might have been inspired by Chicago Cubs shortstop Billy Jurges, who was shot by a showgirl with whom he was romantically linked, but there has been no evidence to support this claim.Ī film adaptation, The Natural, starring Robert Redford as Roy Hobbs, was released in 1984. Apart from the fact that both Waitkus and fictional Hobbs were shot by women, there are few if any other similarities. The story mostly concerns his attempts to return to baseball later in life, when he plays for the fictional New York Knights with his self-made bat 'Wonderboy'.īased upon the bizarre shooting incident and subsequent comeback of Philadelphia Phillies player Eddie Waitkus, the story of Roy Hobbs takes some poetic license and embellishes what was truly a strange, but memorable, account of a career lost too soon. The story follows Roy Hobbs, a baseball prodigy whose career is sidetracked after being shot by a woman whose motivation remains mysterious. The Natural is a 1952 novel about baseball by Bernard Malamud, and is his debut novel.

The natural bernard