McCurdle's Arm is a visceral reimagining of Peterborough's early baseball history

Andrew Forbes at the East City Bowl. Forbes’ recent novella is partly inspired by the history of baseball in Peterborough. (Photo: Will Pearson)

This story is adapted from an audio story that originally aired on Trent Radio. If you prefer to listen rather than read, use the audio player below.

When you travel into East City by way of the Hunter Street Bridge, there’s no way to miss the East City Bowl. Located in James Stevenson Park, the natural turf diamond sits on the very edge of the Otonabee, visible from the bridge. If you pass by the diamond on a good day, usually in the summer, there will be a baseball game.

For local author Andrew Forbes, the Bowl is alive, brimming with a history that he hearkens back to in his new novella McCurdle’s Arm, which was released in July 2024. The Bowl is one of many local places that inspired Forbes’ book, a historical fiction following the story of Robert James McCurdle, a semi-professional baseball player in the Southern Ontario of the 1890s playing for the Ashburnham Pine Groves.

“I like this period of baseball history, because there have been some really great books written about it,” Forbes said.

As a work of fiction, McCurdle’s Arm is a deviation for Forbes, who has previously written two non-fiction collections of essays about baseball: The Only Way is The Steady Way and The Utility of Boredom. A third collection, Field Work, is forthcoming.

“I’ve avoided writing sports fiction so far,” Forbes said. “But I’m drawn to subjects that sit right on the line between what we can know and what we can’t.”

“We have a pretty good idea of what the game looked and felt like [in the 1890s],” he continued. “But we don’t have video of this, right? We don’t know exactly what it looked like.”

Approaching the story of the Ashburnham Pine Groves through the lens of fiction allowed Forbes to experiment.

“The idea was to break some of my own personal rules to do things a little differently, to come away with something that could not be mistaken for the things that I’ve already published,” he said.

“I could do a ton of research and probably write a true account or fairly true account — a non-fiction account — of what semi-professional baseball in small-town Ontario was like in the early 1890s, but that wasn’t the idea here.”

*McCurdle’s Arm* was published by Invisible Publishing in July 2024.

While McCurdle’s Arm is a work of fiction, the Pine Groves were a real team. They played in Peterborough and featured a figure similar to the fictional McCurdle. According to the Peterborough and District Sports Hall of Fame, the first recorded mention of a baseball game in Peterborough dates back to 1876 in the Peterborough Examiner, when the local nine-man roster called the “Pine Groves” faced off against the Cavanville team at the Circus Grounds near Little Lake in September of that year.

Archived Examiner microfilm from 1885 describes a pitcher by the name of P.J. Sullivan being a fulcrum member of the Pine Groves club. According to the Peterborough and District Sports Hall of Fame, Sullivan is described as having thrown “twisters,” which are similar to a pitch that Forbes describes McCurdle throwing.

Other details in McCurdle’s Arm are also taken from Canadian baseball history. The whole book is based on “real towns, real teams, real ballparks,” Forbes said.

“I change a few things here and there just to make it easier for me, but this is all in deference to the real history of semi-professional and amateur baseball in Canada, which is a very deep, very rich history.”

McCurdle’s Arm is also explicitly grounded in the physical locale of Peterborough, with multiple locations in the novella that are based on real places. “You would have to be somebody in Peterborough to recognize it,” Forbes said. “But I wanted it to be recognizable to people in the know.”

Forbes said McCurdle’s Arm came quickly to him — the first draft took just three weeks to write. He stressed how fun the project was for him, not only because of its grounding in reality and the ability to play with history, but also the license to explore other themes latent to baseball, like violence, decay, and human physicality.

“It’s a very visceral book and that was intentional,” Forbes said. “He’s completely fictional, but I wanted to sit right on that edge of plausibility and legend, and to do that, I amped everything up, including the violence and the language of these outlandish characters.”

McCurdle’s Arm serves as a loving homage to not only Peterborough’s history as an incubator for athletic talent, but Southern Ontario’s trove of hidden stories, waiting to be unearthed.