Book Review: Double Play on the Red Line
Double Play On The Red Line, Rajesh C. Oza,
Third World Press,
October 2025,
Paperback, 282 print pages
Reviewed by Dorothy Garcia.
Double Play On The Red Line brings to life the things that make Chicago great, and a few that will make lovers of the city want to weep. It’s a story of the vagaries of fate, an unlikely friendship, and justice denied, against the backdrop of baseball. The persistent odor of sweat in the bleachers, the relief of a cool breeze coming off Lake Michigan, the ever-present clatter of the “L,” and the fan’s abiding faith in the Cubs are a metaphor for life. It’s hard and noisy, offers only occasional relief, and demands faith in the face of adversity and failure.
The protagonist, Ratangunjshakar Vyas (nicknamed Rat) is an untenured Northwestern University sports journalism professor with a shaky grip on his job, a distant family, and zero love life. Wrigley’s right field bleachers are his summer escape. One sunny day Rat switches to left field in a well-intentioned effort to do his part in breaking another losing streak. As the Cubs falter, the drunken bleacher bums turn into a surly mob and attack a peanut vendor. They beat him with their fists, call him a murderer, and carry him away with the intention of tossing him over the rails to certain death.
Watching the attack shakes Rat to the core. All around him the faces of good people register the same shock, but no one rises to the man’s defense. Horrified, Rat knows he should intervene, but fears the mob will turn on him, a brown man. In the nick of time a security team arrives, freeing the peanut vendor.
Shame at his cowardice and a guilty conscience drive Rat to learn more about the peanut man. It turns out the vendor, Ernie, is indeed a convicted killer. However, once he was a hotshot batter, hired to play for the Cubs when the game was just beginning to be integrated. Ernie’s baseball skills were widely expected to lead the team to victory and land him in the Hall of Fame. The night he arrived in Chicago, a cab driver played a trick on him, thinking Ernie was “too full of himself.” He ended up a young black man in the wrong place, at the wrong time, arrested for murder.
Instead of getting his “at bat” playing for the Cubs, Ernie spent the next nineteen years in prison. He’s granted clemency and in an ironic twist returns to Wrigley field as a peanut vendor. The incident with the bleacher bums makes clear that Ernie’s release didn’t really free him. When the world—or at least your part of it—believes you’ve gotten away with murder the prison is invisible but very real.
Rat uses his journalistic investigative skills to discover what really happened that fateful night. Through the course of his investigation the two men develop an unlikely friendship over their shared experience of what it means to be a man of color in America, loneliness and love of the Cubs.
Rat uncovers details surrounding the crime that never came to light during Ernie’s trial. He’s convinced of Ernie’s innocence. Proving it two decades later when a highly placed politician prefers to leave the past unexamined is a fool’s errand. Is Rat’s effort to help Ernie clear his name pure altruism, or the selfish intention to exploit his story to earn tenure and secure his own future? The tension between the two objectives jeopardizes their friendship.
Oza takes the reader down a winding path that ultimately reveals common ground between disparate lives. Double Play On The Red Line is a vividly written, serious novel that will leave the reader thinking long and hard about the nature of friendship, the uncertainty of justice, and whether some wrongs can ever be made right.
