the-natural - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights

"Will You Be The Best There Ever Was?" Asked The Naked Woman With A GunIn April, we brought you the real-life story of Eddie Waitkus , the ballplayer who was shot by a teenage girl. That incident is best known in its fictionalized form, in Bernard Malamud's The Natural, which we've excerpted below from the just-released collection Bernard Malamud: Novels and Stories...

Absurd Photo: A Ballplayer Sitting By The Girl Who Tried To Murder HimSee that guy in the middle, sitting down and looking like he'd rather be anywhere else? That's Eddie Waitkus, a first baseman for the Phillies. See the young lady on the left side of the frame? That's Ruth Steinhagen, the woman who on June 14, 1949, tried to kill Eddie Waitkus. ...

The Unnatural Shooting Of A Baseball Player By A Silly Teenage HoneyExcerpted from Eddie and the Gun Girl, a Kindle Single about the shooting of Eddie Waitkus, the real-life event that's best known as the fictional pivot of Bernard Malamud's The Natural. Annotations by the author appear throughout....

Woman Who Inspired Opening Sequence In <i>The Natural</i> Dies

In the novel, the woman who shot Roy Hobbs in a hotel room was named Harriet Bird, but on June 14, 1949 in an Edgewater Beach Hotel room in Chicago, Ruth Ann Steinhagen shot Philadelphia Phillies first baseman Eddie Waitkus....