The Art of Fielding: A Novel

by Chad Harbach

Henry looked at Sophie—sometimes, when he found himself unable to speak, Sophie did it for him. Her eyes were as wide as his. “Well well!” she said. “Tell us more!”

His forearms, hands, and thighs formed a diamond-shaped pond into which his tie dropped like an ice fisher’s line.

She’d gotten so far ahead of the curve that the curve became a circle, and now she was way behind.

“Free? Heavens, no. After a cappella practice I’ll be volunteering down at the soup kitchen while I finish my paper on the theme of revenge in Hamlet. Then my sorority has a mixer with the Alpha Beta Omegas, my bulimia support group is getting together for dessert, and after that I have a date with the captain of the football team.” “I’m the captain of the football team.” There was a long pause. “Oh. Well, in that case. What time can you pick me up?”

He already knew he could coach. All you had to do was look at each of your players and ask yourself: What story does this guy wish someone would tell him about himself? And then you told the guy that story. You told it with a hint of doom. You included his flaws. You emphasized the obstacles that could prevent him from succeeding. That was what made the story epic: the player, the hero, had to suffer mightily en route to his final triumph. Schwartz knew that people loved to suffer, as long as the suffering made sense. Everybody suffered. The key was to choose the form of your suffering. Most people couldn’t do this alone; they needed a coach. A good coach made you suffer in a way that suited you. A bad coach made everyone suffer in the same way, and so was more like a torturer.

The problem, like most problems in life, probably had to do with his footwork.

But baseball was different. Schwartz thought of it as Homeric—not a scrum but a series of isolated contests. Batter versus pitcher, fielder versus ball.

You could only try so hard not to try too hard before you were right back around to trying too hard.

“And yet. Baseball has many historians, including among its players. There are statistics, archives, legends, lore. If earlier players had experienced similar troubles, it seems likely the stories would have been passed down. And then the name would be applied in retrospect.”

The effort required to speak was immense, like hauling stones up out of a well, but he’d decided to try his best.

There were two kinds of incompetent con men. Those who talked too much and those who didn’t talk enough.

A profound, interstellar kind of silence filled the office.

It was a baseball commonplace, dimly remembered from Affenlight’s childhood days as a halfhearted Braves fan, that left-handed batters had more graceful swings than righties, long effortless swings that swooped down through the strike zone and greeted shoe-top pitches sweetly. Affenlight didn’t see why this should be so, unless the right and left sides of the bodies possessed inherently different properties, something to do with the halves of the brain, but Owen’s languid, elliptical swing did nothing to deflate the hypothesis.

Amid his confused and wounded thoughts it struck him that a baseball was a beautifully designed thing—it seemed to demand to be thrown, made him want to give it a good strong toss through the open window and across the dove-gray quad.

Henry marveled, not for the first time, at Schwartz’s uncanny ability to orchestrate situations. How did he know that the ump wouldn’t eject Starblind, leaving the Harpooners totally pitcherless? How did he know that that particular batter would be so readily intimidated? How did he know that one strikeout would rejuvenate Starblind, at least for the moment? The answer, presumably, was that Schwartz didn’t know any of that. But he’d thought of a plan, something to try, and he’d been bold enough to try it.

The righty who jogged to the mound looked more like an accountant than a star pitcher—he was Henry’s height, pale-haired and sunken-chinned, with slouched and flimsy shoulders. “Name’s Dougal,” Arsch told Henry. “Pitched a two-hitter against West Texas the other day. He is filthy.” Henry nodded. The ability to throw a baseball was an alchemical thing, a superhero’s secret power. You could never quite tell who possessed it.

Schwartz held out his fist and Henry bumped it with his own, and Pella could tell from their somber, ceremonious expressions that their feud, or whatever you’d call it, had ended. Men were such odd creatures. They didn’t duel anymore, even fistfights had come to seem barbaric, the old casual violence all channeled through institutions now, but still they loved to uphold their ancient codes. And what they loved even more was to forgive each other. Pella felt like she knew a lot about men, but she couldn’t imagine what it would be like to be one of them, to be in a room of them with no woman present, to participate in their silent rites of contrition and redemption.

The night was close and soupy, so that the rain didn’t seem to be falling so much as oozing out of the wet air,