The Art of Fielding: A Novel

by Chad Harbach

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/25/opinion/baseball-sports-defeat.html

roasting like a beetle in his black catcher’s gear.

he got to each one with a beat to spare. He didn’t seem to move faster than any other decent shortstop would, and yet he arrived instantly, impeccably, as if he had some foreknowledge of where the ball was headed. Or as if time slowed down for him alone. After

! Fire 🔥

Schwartz couldn’t say. He remembered a line from Professor Eglantine’s poetry class: Expressionless, expresses God.

“The glove is not an object in the usual sense,” said Aparicio in The Art of Fielding. “For the infielder to divide it from himself, even in thought, is one of the roots of error.”

Henry played shortstop, only and ever shortstop—the most demanding spot on the diamond. More ground balls were hit to the shortstop than to anyone else, and then he had to make the longest throw to first. He also had to turn double plays, cover second on steals, keep runners on second from taking long leads, make relay throws from the outfield.

Achebe through Tocqueville, with the rest of the Ts through Z

he’d kept the book open on his lap as the dreary slabs of interstate rolled by.

The shortstop is a source of stillness at the center of the defense. He projects this stillness and his teammates respond.

To field a ground ball must be considered a generous act and an act of comprehension. One moves not against the ball but with it. Bad fielders stab at the ball like an enemy. This is antagonism. The true fielder lets the path of the ball become his own path, thereby comprehending the ball and dissipating the self, which is the source of all suffering and poor defense. 147. Throw with the legs.

the number 3 had deep significance. 3. There are three stages: Thoughtless being. Thought. Return to thoughtless being. 33. Do not confuse the first and third stages. Thoughtless being is attained by everyone, the return to thoughtless being by a very few.

Flow !

213. Death is the sanction of all that the athlete does.

lunular

Me, I hearken back to a simpler time.” Schwartz patted his thick, sturdy midriff. “A time when a hairy back meant something.” “Profound loneliness?” Starblind offered. “Warmth. Survival. Evolutionary advantage. Back then, a man’s wife and children would burrow into his back hair and wait out the winter. Nymphs would braid it and praise it in song. God’s wrath waxed hot against the hairless tribes. Now all that’s forgotten. But I’ll tell you one thing: when the next ice age comes, the Schwartzes will be sitting pretty. Real pretty.”

He’d seen the smooth, sharklike way Tennant moved around campus, devouring girls’ smiles. “I’ll do my best, sir,” Henry said now.

The plane’s propellers pureed the air. Dry week-old snow swept across the runway in windblown sine curves.

Owen closed The Voyage of the Beagle, on which he had recently embarked.

Why be loyal to a bunch of losers? I’m sick of losing. This is America. Winners win. Losers get booted.

As his teammates filed grimly to the locker room, Henry lingered in the dugout, picking up scraps of trash and gazing at the infield, which looked especially green and regal in the afternoon sun.

Putting Henry at shortstop—it was like taking a painting that had been shoved in a closet and hanging it in the ideal spot. You instantly forgot what the room had looked like before.

The shortstop is a source of stillness at the center of the defense. He projects this stillness and his teammates respond.

They won the game, and though a 2 and 9 Florida trip wasn’t great, an odd kind of optimism was creeping in.

that sameness, that repetition, that gave life meaning.

Every day is a war. Yes, yes it was. The key is to keep company only with people who uplift you, whose presence calls forth your best.

growing grim about the mouth, as his best-known protagonist put it;

monotony-in-motion of life

none had achieved so desperate a grasp on the literature of his chosen period. Affenlight could drink more coffee, not to mention whiskey, than the rest of them put together. Monomaniacal, they called him, an Ahab joke; and when he spoke in seminar—which he did incessantly, having suddenly much to say—they nodded their heads in agreement. Thirty-page papers rolled out of his typewriter in the time it had taken to write a single paragraph of his not-quite-forgotten novel.

He was fascinated with his daughter, with the sheer reality of her,

a credenza devoted to dark liquor.

Affenlight exhaled and watched his lungs’ CO2 float whitely away.

“Humbled, I am, by the severe beauty of this Westish land, and these Great Lakes, America’s secret sinew of inward-collecting seas.”

sipped from Styrofoam cups of decaf that had long ago ceased to steam.

Baseball—what a boring game! One player threw the ball, another caught it, a third held a bat. Everyone else stood around.

they looked like oversize consultants or CIA agents playing a very reserved sort of hooky.

bundled up against the cold in a hooded Westish sweatshirt with a windbreaker on top of that. Chin at a downward tilt, studying his book instead of the game. Affenlight felt something young swell up in his chest, a thudding pain interspersed with something sweet, as if he were being dragged by an oxcart through a field of clover. He blinked hard.

“I’ve seen a lot of baseball, Guert. But never have I seen someone like Henry, in terms of sheer—what would you call it, L.P.?” L.P. reclined with his elbows spread wide on the row behind him, his wraparound shades disguising his eyes. He answered as if from the depths of sleep: “Prescience.”

he doesn’t have the body or the raw numbers to be the best. He just is.”

Dwight’s BlackBerry bleated. He answered in a hushed, almost childlike voice and wandered off, phone pressed close to his ear. He was wearing a wedding band; Affenlight pictured a perky blond sales rep with a diamond of reasonable size, whispering PG-13 yearnings into her cell phone while she shopped at the Whole Foods in downtown St. Cloud. Perhaps she was wearing one of those complicated toddler holders strapped to her chest. Or perhaps she was pregnant and trying to decide which toddler holder to buy.

The pumpkin sun had impaled itself on the spire of Westish Chapel and begun to bleed. He was so glad Pella was coming, overjoyed, but he dreaded it too—it had been so long since they’d seen each other, and so much longer than that since they’d gotten along.

“He woke up for a moment in the ambulance,” Affenlight said. “Out cold, and then suddenly his eyes popped open. He said, April.” “April?” “April.” “April,” Henry repeated. “The cruelest month,” Schwartz said. “Especially in Wisconsin.” “April.”

“If anything happens to him I’ll kill him.”

even in their most strident moments they were waiting for him to intervene.

she was already beginning to regret not having packed a suitcase. It was the kind of overly emphatic gesture she was famous for, at least in her own mind, and should have outgrown by now.

Their sex life dwindled, and neither of them mentioned it. “They” were fine. She had to get better. Why was one in quotes and not the other? David prescribed regimens to help her sleep at night: no caffeine, no TV, no electric lights. Each night she would go to bed beside him and then, the instant his breathing changed, get up and go to the kitchen to begin her nightly vigil of slowly drinking whiskey and chewing sunflower seeds while enduring the sheer excruciating boredom of being alive.

“It’s the Affenlight men who die young,” her dad had said long ago, in a weird attempt to reassure the nine-or ten-year-old daughter he’d never quite known what to do with. “The women live forever.”

It was hard to imagine her father as anything but immortal, her own purchase on the world as anything but tenuous.

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

Eagleton

She stretched out across three plastic chairs and watched the carousel mouth disgorge a series of compact black bags with wheels. Her dad had said he’d be late—how dully typical of him—but he hadn’t said how late.

“The prodigal daughter,” she said as they embraced in a quick, stiff clinch.

When interrupted by a polite paternal throat-clearing, Pella would look up from her book and wipe a coppery curl from her eyes,