Capturing "The Art of Fielding"

Capturing "The Art of Fielding":

The literary lightning bolt of the now is Chad Harbach's The Art of Fielding, a first novel that Jonathan Franzen, a writer who knows a little bit about the buzz generated by big important books, calls "complete and consuming."

It also happens to be about baseball.

A review copy of Harbach's book found its way to the clubhouse a month or so ago, and I picked hesitantly through its pages before diving in completely a week or so ago. The story is as much about a s...