I haven't written lately about baseball, my favorite
sport, one I played constantly as a kid, pitching in sort of a combination
Little League/Babe Ruth league (very informal and disorganized, more like pick-up
games with uniforms) for the Highland Park Terriers, taking the old Jamaica
Avenue El to get to the field in Highland Park.
I am a lefty and even though I could not crank up an intimidating fast
ball, I compensated with breaking balls and placement. I was constantly practicing with neighborhood
kids, with dreams of big league ball, but high school and then college teams
put those dreams to rest. When I tried
out for college baseball I found that most on the team were on an athletic
scholarship and although I pitched some batting practice, the first baseman at
the time -- forgot his name -- took one of my balls not only over the fence,
but to an apartment building way beyond.
It was meager compensation to learn, well after I graduated, that he apparently
made it to AAA ball.
Although those days are now long gone, there is something
about having played the game, knowing its nuances, that still gives rise to
fantasies of what might have been, had I been more physically gifted, or worked
harder, or had more support from my parents (who pretty much ignored my quest,
rarely attending my games). No, mine was
a solitary undertaking, getting on the El for practice and then games on Saturday
mornings. So to this day I watch
baseball with a sense of awe, especially the mental contest between the batter
and the pitcher.
While I follow the team of my childhood, the NY Yankees
(truly an over the hill gang this year), we enjoy going to our nearby Florida
State "Advanced A" minor league games of the Jupiter Hammerheads or
the Palm Beach Cardinals at Roger Dean Stadium in Jupiter, FL. There we can watch the game almost right on
the field, not like being exiled to some distant corner of Yankee Stadium at
fifty times the price.
So it is no wonder that when the highly praised The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach was
published last year, it immediately went on my Amazon wish list, patiently
waiting for a used copy to come on sale through one of their partners. (I
usually wait it out until it's one cent plus shipping).
Last time I checked my "wish list" the book was
getting close to my price point and one day I was on the phone with one of my
best friends, Ron, who, like me, shares a love of the game and he asked whether
I had read the book. No, and I explained
why. He said, we'll I'm finished with my copy, I'll send it to you! You don't want to keep it, I asked, and he
said, no, you enjoy it and only a few days later, Jeff, my postman, handed me
the package. So, I put it early in the
queue on my bookshelf.
As I started to read it I immediately began to think that
if John Irving was a college baseball player instead of a wrestler, this is
something he might have written. It has
so many Irvingesque features, particularly the quirky nature of the characters,
the sexual overtones, not to mention the idiosyncratic names of most characters
and places. In fact, one major
character, Owen Dunne, had me thinking of Irving's Owen in A Prayer for Owen Meany,
who as a little-leaguer hits a ball that kills one of his best friend's mothers
(Harbach's Owen is hit by a ball and almost dies and like Irving's Owen has a
certain presence -- he is known as "Buddha" to his friends).
And that is not the only literary tip of the hat as the
novel is set in the fictional Westish, on the shores of Lake Michigan, where in
the novel Herman Melville once gave a lecture at Westish College. Guert Affenlight who is now the president of
the college had discovered this lecture and wrote his dissertation on it. Hence, there is a Melville statue on the
campus, and various references, both direct and implied to Melville's
work. Although the college is not
exactly the good ship Pequod, it is the place where the lives of the five main
characters are transformed through their interaction, Guert and his daughter
Pella, and three students (all members of the college baseball team, aptly
nicknamed the " Harpooners "), Owen, who is gay and Thoreauesque, and
then the larger than life Mike Schwartz who is mentor (sometimes torturer) to
the unrealized talents of the baseball prodigy, Henry Skrimshander
(yes, you could make the correlation that Mike's project was like a Scrimshaw). But, in the end, Henry takes on some of the characteristics of Bartleby
from Melville's short story.
The Art of Fielding begins with the premise
and promise of Henry following in the cleats of his idol, the greatest
shortstop ever to play baseball, the fictional Aparicio Rodriquez who had
written what is more of a philosophical treatise than an instruction book on
playing the position, with the fitting title, The Art of Fielding. So, in a sense, Harbach's novel is thematically
a "play within a play."
One of the nuggets for Henry to ponder from Aparicio's
book is it always saddens me to leave the
field. Even fielding the final out to
win the World Series, deep in the truest part of me, felt like death. Harbach writes "There were
admittedly, many sentences and statements in The Art that Henry did not yet understand. The opaque parts of The Art though, had always
been his favorites...As frustrating as they could be, [they] gave Henry
something to aspire to. Someday, he
dreamed, he would be enough of a ballplayer to crack them open and suck out
their hidden wisdom: Death is the
sanction of all that the athlete does."
As a young ballplayer, Henry was an artist, a lightly
hitting but exceptionally gifted fielder who played his position with the grace
of a ballerina, capturing the notice of Mike Schwartz when Henry was in high
school. ("What [Henry] could do was field.
He spent his life studying the way the ball came off the bat, the angles
and the spin, so that he knew in advance whether he should break right or left,
whether the ball that came to him would be bound up high or skid low to the
dirt. He caught the ball cleanly,
always, and made, always, a perfect throw.") Mike recruits him for Westish College on which
team Mike is the quintessential catcher, the team captain who plays in pain and
on pain killers, a star player whose knees are already giving out.
It is through Mike's quest to build a star out of Henry
that some of Harbach's best lapidary baseball prose shines:
The making of a
ballplayer: the production of brute efficiency out of natural genius.
For Schwartz this
formed the paradox at the heart of baseball, or football, or any other sport.
You loved it because you considered it an art; an apparently pointless affair,
undertaken by people with a special aptitude, which sidestepped attempts to
paraphrase its value yet somehow seemed to communicate something true or even
crucial about The Human Condition. The Human Condition being, basically, that
we're alive and have access to beauty, can even erratically create it, but will
someday be dead and will not.
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.
And Harbach captures the uniqueness of the game. It's one unlike any other:
Baseball, in its
quiet way, was an extravagantly harrowing game. Football, basketball, hockey,
lacrosse -- these were melee sports. You could make yourself useful by hustling
and scrapping more than the other guy. You could redeem yourself through sheer
desire.
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 couldn't storm
around, snorting and slapping people, the way Schwartz did while playing
football. You stood and waited and tried to still your mind. When your moment
came, you had to be ready, because if you fucked up, everyone would know whose
fault it was. What other sport not only kept a stat as cruel as the error but
posted it on the scoreboard for everyone to see?
And, so, Henry becomes Mike's project. It is a symbiotic relationship. Mike (AKA "artzy") needs to exhort
and Henry wants to become the perfect ballplayer.
All he'd ever
wanted was for nothing to ever change. Or for things to change only in the
right ways, improving little by little, day by day, forever. It sounded crazy when you said it like that,
but that was what baseball had promised him, what Westish College had promised
him, what 'artzy had promised him. The dream of every day the same. Every day was
like the day before but a little better....Hitches, bad habits, useless thoughts
- whatever you didn't need slowly fell away. Whatever was simple and useful remained.
You improved little by little till the day it all became perfect and stayed
that way. Forever.
He knew it sounded
crazy when you put it like that. To want to be perfect. To want everything to
be perfect. But now it felt like that was all he'd ever craved since he'd been
born. Maybe it wasn't even baseball he loved but only this idea of perfection,
a perfectly simple life in which every move had meaning, and baseball was just
the medium through which he could make that happen. Could have made that
happen. It sounded crazy, sure. But what did it mean if your deepest hope, the
premise on which you'd based your whole life, sounded crazy as soon as you put
it in words? It meant you were crazy.
And so, armed with his glove "Zero" (named so
as when his mother asked if he made any errors in a game, he was always able to
say "zero!"), Henry becomes a Westish Harpooner, and while Owen,
Pella, Mike and Henry are essentially in the same age group and naturally their
interactions are the substance of the novel, so is Guert's involvement with his
daughter and with Owen. This is a
character driven story, one that is hard to put down, particularly if you love
the game, and even though the ending seemed to me to be a little contrived ("low
and away" in baseball-speak), Harbach is on my permanent radar for future
work as a promising young American writer.
This is an exceptional first effort.
