“A Season on the Drink”
Pat Harris, Adventure Publications (2025)
370 pages, $28
“The game of baseball is filled with metaphors, and some of them are even true.”
In 1986, while the Minnesota Twins were still a year out from their appearance in the World Series, another team was soaring to unexpected heights. That year, the recreational softball team of the St. Anthony Residence in St. Paul took to the diamond in a season that would scandalize and inspire their opponents and neighbors.
The St. Anthony Residence is a wet house for men run by Catholic Charities Twin Cities – a home for those with alcohol use disorders who are unable to quit drinking. Pat Harris’ “A Season on the Drink,” a brilliant novelization of that fateful softball season in 1986, details an interlude in the lives of several real people who lived in, or worked at, the St. Anthony Residence during that time: Marty Peterson, a former baseball prodigy with alcohol use disorder who lived at the residence; Harry Opus, in recovery from alcoholism and the residence’s day manager; Terry Thomas, another resident and Marty’s fast-talking co-captain; The Queen, i.e. Allison Boisvert, the then-director of housing for Catholic Charities and herself in recovery from addiction; a nameless caseworker hearing the story many years later; and the rest of the St. Anthony softball team.
Wet houses are controversial. In “A Season on the Drink,” Harris cuts through the controversy to demonstrate their necessity. The St. Anthony Residence, the novel tells us, is the last stop on the line for many of these men; these are individuals who will likely never recover from their addiction, no matter how much the government or their neighbors might want them to do so, and whose alcoholism is likely terminal. The St. Anthony Residence serves as the final barrier between them and homelessness in a hard Minnesota winter, with the philosophy that everyone deserves, at the very least, “a bed and three squares.”
But man cannot live on three squares alone; community and a sense of purpose are necessary for a dignified life. In “A Season on the Drink,” softball provides a locus for precisely those things. Characters for whom “community” is a tenuous thing – and not merely those struggling with alcohol use disorder – find each other, and real human connection, on the diamond. The community around Raymond Field also finds an opportunity to lower their walls and challenge their narrow conception of who counts as one’s neighbor.
The tension in the novel is the tension of the wet house: Harris does not pull punches on the sights, sounds or smells of alcohol use disorder, nor are the realities of homelessness (or of the shelters that struggle mightily to meet those needs on shoestring budgets) downplayed. And while some of the main characters have found recovery by the end of the novel, not all of them do. The novel does not reduce these real people and their real lives to either success stories of sobriety or cautionary tales of alcohol use disorder.
Which might well be the point. Through “A Season on the Drink,” Harris brings us past the stereotype of the homeless alcoholic and introduces us to Marty and the rest – insisting on their dignity precisely through focusing on their unique and unrepeatable personhood. Marty might be a person with alcohol use disorder. He is also an excellent leader, mild-mannered but inspiring, tough, quiet, resourceful and good-humored.
And he’s darned good at baseball.
“A Season on the Drink” is a funny, heartfelt, sometimes irreverent and deeply human novel about real men who demonstrated to the world that there is more to all of us than meets the eye. It’s about the importance of seeking the face of Christ in all our neighbors, regardless of circumstance or stereotype.
As stated in a common refrain in the book: Pray to St. Anthony, and you will find it.
Madelyn Reichert is publications administrative coordinator at The Catholic Spirit, the official publication of the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis, Minnesota.