I can still remember the sound of the dull thud, and the scream that came after. It was a tournament game, and our pitcher, Paul, was dealing. He always did, because he could throw 80 mph as a 13-year-old, and he never missed the catcher's mitt. Games with Paul on the mound were easy; I'd just stand at my position at second or first base and watch the strikeouts accumulate while feeling sorry for the kids on the other team who had to quiver through each at-bat. Paul was the best player any of us had ever seen. During this game, though, a fastball got away from him and sailed directly into the cheekbone of the batter, Josh, a kid we all knew and were friends with. There was a sound like a mallet hitting meat, followed by the muffled ping of the bat hitting the ground just before Josh's body, and then the most upsetting scream I've ever heard.
An ambulance came for Josh (he ended up being fine, I'm not sure if he even broke a bone), and the game continued without him. Paul spent most of the delay crouched between home plate and the mound, his hat pulled down as far as it would go. Somehow he stayed in the game, and got through the next few innings while soft-tossing balls over the plate. Paul, who up until that point I could only perceive as a mythically good ballplayer, was scared. He didn't want to hurt anyone else.
Chad Harbach's The Art of Fielding hinges on a similar crisis. Henry Skrimshander is a D-III shortstop playing for Westish College, a fictional liberal arts school nestled against the shore of Lake Michigan in Wisconsin. The opening chapters whisk us through Henry's origin story: He's recruited to play at Westish by a member of the team, Mike Schwartz, who spots Henry's preternatural defensive talent while watching him take grounders after a Legion game. Schwartz molds Henry into something like the perfect baseball player—a flawless defensive shortstop with a decent bat and an artist's approach to the game—and by his junior year, Henry is destined for the MLB draft. And then he misfires a throw from short to first, sending the ball sailing into the dugout and smashing into the face of Owen, his roommate and teammate. From there, Henry fights and loses a long battle against the yips, leaving him physically and psychologically hollowed out. By the end of the book he is a ghost, disconnected from everyone and everything that gave his life meaning.
I bring up my memory of Paul hitting Josh not just because of its similarities to the incident that starts Henry's downfall, but because I think that anyone who has spent any meaningful amount of time playing baseball will have similar memories of their own surfaced by this book. The Art of Fielding understands, perhaps better than any other work of baseball-adjacent fiction, how quickly and dramatically the game can betray you. This betrayal is inflicted on anyone who plays the game for long enough: Even the best ballplayers have to face down madness-inducing 0-for-28 slumps, or entire months without being able to find the feel on their curveball. What separates those who can play the game from those who can't isn't just talent, but an ability to beat back the particular kind of psychic damage the game is designed to deliver.
Not everyone can stay in that fight. The way Henry comes apart is harrowing, but still falls short of how the yips have undone several of his real-life analogues. Steve Blass, Rick Ankiel, Chuck Knoblauch, Steve Sax, Mackey Sasser—all players who suffered as Henry does, without the benefit of having a single violent incident to trace their troubles back to.
The yips provide fertile dramatic ground for a novel, and The Art of Fielding is at its best when it rolls around in the game's damaging mysteries. Some of its best passages are those that articulate the fundamental and often destructive paradox of baseball—that a sport which maximizes time for overthinking and hesitation is best performed in an unconscious flow state. If basketball is like jazz, then so is baseball, if each player was also forced to sit in silent contemplation for several minutes after each note:
Baseball was an art, but to excel at it you had to become a machine. It didn't matter how beautifully you performed sometimes, what you did on your best day, how many spectacular plays you made. You weren't a painter or a writer—you didn't work in private and discard your mistakes, and it wasn't just your masterpieces that counted. What mattered, as for any machine, was repeatability. Moments of inspiration were nothing compared to elimination of error. The scouts cared little for Henry's superhuman grace; insofar as they cared they were suckered-in aesthetes and shitty scouts. Can you perform on demand, like a car, a furnace, a gun? Can you make that throw one hundred times out of a hundred? If it can't be a hundred, it had better be ninety-nine.
Acknowledging that I am a particular kind of reader for this book, I wish it had spent more time in this register. There's a self-consciousness to the way the book is constructed, which sees a great baseball novel stretched too thin over a middling campus novel. Everything from the Melville references to the character's names—Guert Affenlight?—ultimately feels like too-desperate signaling that this is more than a baseball book. But what's wrong with a baseball book?
Luckily, the story ends where it should: on the diamond. The final scene, in which Henry undertakes a last-ditch effort to heal himself by taking grounders from Schwartz, thrilled me just as much as it did when I read it the first time, 13 years ago. Everything I like about this book can be found here, in how crisply Harbach conveys the feeling of playing baseball, of struggling to get to that moment when body, glove, mind, and dirt seem to dissolve, and all that remains is a ball sailing perfectly towards its target. It's those moments that make a game as maddening as this one worth playing.
Check back tomorrow for our roundtable discussion of The Art of Fielding, in which we will try to figure out how "Guert" is meant to be pronounced.
