The Art of Fielding

“Indeed!” Owen gave Two Thirty a celebratory smack on the ass with his Omar Khayyám. “Indeed!”

With that win the Harpooners, for the first time in anyone’s memory, including Coach Cox’s, were undefeated. They celebrated at the all-you-can-eat Chinese buffet in the strip mall near their motel. Then, over the next three days, they lost their next five games. Tennant was booting every grounder that came his way. Two Thirty struck out repeatedly. As the losses mounted, Coach Cox stood in the third-base coaching box with crossed arms, digging a moat in the dirt with the toe of his cleat and filling it with a steady stream of tobacco juice, as if to protect himself from so much ineptitude. The mood in the dugout turned from optimistic, to determined, to gloomy, to gloomy with a venomous edge. On the bench during their seventh game, Rick hid his phone in his glove and surreptitiously scrolled through the Facebook photos that their classmates had posted that day from West Palm, Miami, Daytona, Panama City Beach — album after album of bikinied girls, blue ocean, brightly colored drinks. “So close,” he moaned, shaking his head. “But so, so far away.”

“Owen,” Henry said excitedly, “I think Coach wants you to hit for Meccini.”

Owen closed The Voyage of the Beagle, on which he had recently embarked. “Really?”

“Runners on first and second,” Rick said. “I bet he wants you to bunt.”

“What’s the bunt sign?”

“Two tugs on the left earlobe,” Henry told him. “But first he has to give the indicator, which is squeeze the belt. But if he goes to his cap with either hand or says your first name, that’s the wipe-off, and then you have to wait and see whether —”

“Forget it,” Owen said. “I’ll just bunt.” He grabbed a bat, ambled to home plate, nodded politely at Coach Cox’s gesticulations, and pushed a perfect bunt past the pitcher. The shortstop’s throw nipped him by a quarter step, and Owen trotted back to the dugout to receive congratulations from his teammates. This was Henry’s favorite baseball custom: when a player hit a home run, his teammates were at liberty to ignore him, but when he sacrificed himself to move a runner, he received a long line of high fives. “Sweet bunt,” Henry said as he and Owen bumped fists.

“Thanks.” Owen picked up his book. “That pitcher’s not bad-looking.”

Throughout the week the Harpooners slept, ate, traveled, practiced, and played as a unit. If they weren’t at the fields or their crappy fleabag motel, they were tethered to their decrepit rented bus. The most inconsequential decisions, like whether to eat dinner at Cracker Barrel or Ye Olde Buffet, took hours. “I love it when I have to take a dump,” Rick said. “It’s the only time I get to be alone.”

As the losing continued, the constant togetherness grew tougher to take. On the too-lengthy trips between the diamond and their motel, the juniors and seniors sat in the back of the bus with Tennant, the sophomores and freshpersons up front with Schwartz. Only Jim Toover stretched his endless limbs across the empty seats of no-man’s-land; being six-six and Mormon lifted him above the fray.

Meanwhile Tennant’s defense was growing worse with each passing day. His face hardened into a haggard, pinched expression, and he radiated a black energy whenever Henry came near. Between games Coach Cox would confer with Tennant quietly, a hand on his shoulder, while Tennant nodded and looked at his shoes. “He’s pressing,” Rick said after Tennant bobbled a toss at second, botching a sure double play. “Look at his face.”

Owen cleared his throat, pressed a hand to his chest. “For at his back he always hears / Henry’s footsteps hurrying near.”

On Thursday night, Henry and Schwartz reclined in stiff plastic-weave chairs by the scum-topped, unswimmable pool of the Motel 4. As the earth cooled, Henry’s senses expanded to take in what they normally missed: the scutter of roaches and geckos over the tile, the flit of moths against the blue security lights, a whiff of distant water on the breeze. Schwartz paged through a phonebook-sized LSAT prep guide, though he wouldn’t be taking the LSAT for eighteen months. “You know, it’s only my first year,” Henry said. “I can wait.”

“Maybe you can.” Schwartz didn’t look up. “But the rest of us can’t. We’re one and seven. We need you out there.”

“Maybe if somebody told Lev he didn’t have anything to worry about, he’d relax and play better.”

“What do you think Coach Cox is saying during their little powwows? He spends half his time stroking Tennant’s ego, telling him he’s the man. But Lev’s not stupid. He knows you’re the better player.”

“But I’m not, really. Tennant’s just playing tight.”

“He’s playing tight because he’s a crappy shortstop. He did this last year too. Makes errors and mopes about it. His attitude’s abysmal. It has nothing to do with you, Skrimmer. Almost nothing, anyway.”

“I hope not.”

“It has nothing to do with hope either.” Schwartz slapped his LSAT book shut. “It has to do with Coach Cox. I respect Coach a lot, but he’s too loyal to guys just because they’ve been here for a while. Why be loyal to a bunch of losers? I’m sick of losing. This is America. Winners win. Losers get booted. You should be in there, and Rick should be in there, and the Buddha should probably be in there too. If only to get you ready.”

“Tennant’s a senior,” Henry said uncertainly. “I can wait till next year.”

“Wait till tomorrow,” Schwartz said. “That’s all I ask.”

The next afternoon, they played Vermont State, the team against which they’d scored their only victory. The Harpooners led 4 to 1 with an inning to play. But the first Lion batter of the ninth stroked a routine grounder to short, and Tennant couldn’t get the ball out of his glove. It was just one play, but it seemed to remind the Harpooners that they were losers and destined to lose. Four batters later the game was over. 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.

When he reached the locker room, Schwartz had Tennant in a head-lock. A steady stream of blood dripped from his nose into Tennant’s hair. “Try that again!” he roared as he rammed the crown of Tennant’s head into the metal lockers. “Try it one more time!”

“Get him off me!” Tennant pleaded, his voice muffled by Schwartz’s meaty forearm. “Get this crazy bastard off me!”

“You crazy bastard!” Owen cheered. “Get off him!”

No one moved to intervene, and the scene hung in an almost peaceful stasis, Schwartz slowly banging Tennant’s head against the lockers, until Coach Cox charged in from the coaches’ room, his unbuttoned jersey flapping around his white briefs. He and Arsch pried Tennant from Schwartz’s grasp.

Henry braced for a tirade from Coach Cox. But Coach Cox didn’t scream at all. “Schwartz, go wash your face,” he said, his tone that of a weary parent at the end of an exasperating day. Schwartz walked toward the bathroom, head held high, not bothering to check the flow of blood down over his lips and chin. He returned with a wad of toilet paper protruding from one nostril and held his hand out to Tennant. Tennant studied it for a moment before shaking it firmly.

“You two take the night off.” Coach Cox cast his gaze around the room. “You loose, Arsch?”

“Like a goose, Coach.”

“Henry, you loose?”

“—”

“Henry?”

“Sure, Coach.”

Henry heard the story from Rick and Owen during warm-ups: While Henry picked up paper cups from the dugout floor, Schwartz walked past Tennant’s locker and whispered something under his breath. Tennant whirled and threw a wild punch that connected with Schwartzy’s nose. His head snapped back and blood poured down. “Schwartzy looked pissed for about half a second, while his head was still bouncing around,” said Rick. “But then he sort of smiled, like getting socked by Tennant was exactly what he wanted.”

“I think it is what he wanted,” Owen said.

Rick nodded. “Even when he was banging Lev’s dome against the lockers, you could tell he wasn’t trying to hurt him. Strictly pro forma.”

“He orchestrated the whole episode to get you in the game,” Owen told Henry. “He even took a punch in the nose for you. You should feel flattered.”

It seemed far-fetched to Henry. Then again, Schwartz had promised he’d be in the lineup, and here he was, in the lineup. Two hours later, as he jogged out onto the diamond under the lights, he felt giddy and lightheaded. He bounced on the balls of his feet, windmilled his arms, dropped into a squat to slap the ground. Starblind collected a fresh ball from the ump, went into the night’s first windup. “Adam Adam Adam,” Henry chanted. He danced a step to the left and back to the right, kicked up each knee, pounded his fist into Zero, leaped, and landed in his crouch.

Ball low. Starblind called time and motioned to him. Henry sprinted to the mound.

“Are we at a dance party?” Starblind asked. “I’m trying to pitch over here.”

“Sorry sorry sorry,” Henry said. “Sorry.”

Starblind looked at him, spat into the grass. “Are you hyperventilating?”

“Not really,” Henry said. “Maybe a little.”

But when the game’s second batter lofted a blooper down the left-field line, Henry turned his back to the infield and took off, unable to see the ball but guessing its landing point based on how it had come off the bat. Nobody else was going to get there; it was up to him. He stretched out his glove as he bellyflopped on the grass, lifted his eyes just in time to see the ball drop in. Even the opposing fans cheered.

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. By the fourth inning he was directing the other fielders, waving them left or right, correcting their tactical miscues. The shortstop is a source of stillness at the center of the defense. He projects this stillness and his teammates respond. The Harpooners made only one error, by far their fewest of the trip. Most of their tiny, grating mistakes disappeared. They lost by a run, but Coach Cox was grinning after the game.

The next day, their last in Florida, Henry started at shortstop and Tennant moved to third. Instead of bitter or angry, Tennant seemed relieved. When Henry struck out, as he did too often — his hitting was nowhere near as good as his defense — Tennant cuffed him on the helmet and told him to hang in there. They won the game, and though a 2 and 9 Florida trip wasn’t great, an odd kind of optimism was creeping in.

After his freshperson year ended, Henry stayed at Westish to train with Schwartz. They met at five thirty every morning. When Henry could run up and down all the stairs in the football stadium without stopping, Schwartz bought him a weighted vest. When he could run five seven-minute miles, Schwartz made him do it on the sand. When he could do it on the sand, Schwartz made him do it with lake water lapping at his knees. Medicine balls, blocking sleds, yoga, bicycles, ropes, tree branches, steel trash cans, plyometrics — no implements or ideas were too mundane or exotic. At seven thirty, the sun still low over the lake, Henry showered and headed to the dining hall to wash breakfast dishes for the summer-school kids. After his shift he walked to Westish Field, where Schwartz set up the pitching machine and the video camera. Henry hit ball after ball until he could hardly lift his arms. Then they went to the VAC to lift weights. In the evenings they played on a summer team in Appleton.

Henry had never felt so happy. Freshperson year had been one thing, an adventure, an exhilaration, all in all a success, but it had also been exhausting, a constant struggle and adjustment and tumult. Now he was locked in. Every day that summer had the same framework, the alarm at the same time, meals and workouts and shifts and SuperBoost at the same times, over and over, and it was that sameness, that repetition, that gave life meaning. He savored the tiny variations, the incremental improvements — tuna fish on his salad instead of turkey; two extra reps on the bench press. Every move he made had purpose. While they worked out, Schwartz would recite lines from his favorite philosophers, Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus — they were Schwartz’s personal Aparicios — and Henry felt that he understood. 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. Done: there was only one of those. He was becoming a baseball player.

By the time his sophomore season began Henry had gained twelve pounds. He was still one of the smaller guys on the team, but the bat felt different in his hands, lighter and more lively. He batted .348 and was named the first-team Upper Midwestern Small Colleges Athletic Conference shortstop. In thirty-one games he didn’t make a single error. He was still shy in class and around campus — he never went to the bars and rarely to parties; there was too much work to do — but among his teammates he flourished. He loved those guys and felt good in their midst, and now that he was undisputedly the best player on the team, he became something of a leader. He wasn’t loud like Schwartz, but everyone listened when he spoke. The Harpooners finished .500 for the first time in a decade.

That summer, inspirited by success, he worked even harder. Instead of five thirty, he got up at five. Instead of five meals a day, he ate six. His mind felt clear and pure. The ball rocketed off his bat. He was coming to understand certain parts of The Art of Fielding in a new way, from the inside out, as if the great Aparicio were less an oracle than an equal.

He acquired a protégé too — Izzy Avila, a player Schwartz had recruited from his old neighborhood in South Chicago. Schwartz loved Westish, and he both loved and hated where he came from, and he wanted to help guys get from one to the other. Izzy was a perfect candidate, a gifted athlete and decent student who nonetheless needed the help. His two older brothers had also been gifted athletes — now one lived with their mom and the other was in prison. “He’s a little raw,” Schwartz said. “He can ride the bench this year, learn some things. Then play second next year after Ajay graduates. Then when you’re gone, he’s the new shortstop.”

Izzy feared and respected Schwartz, but he worshipped Henry. When they took their daily ground balls, he tried to copy Henry’s every move. When Henry talked about the subtleties of infield positioning, Izzy, unlike the other Harpooners, understood. When he didn’t understand, he studied until he did. They worked relays, rundowns, bunts, feints, pickoffs, double plays. Henry bought him a copy of The Art of Fielding for his birthday.

But Izzy wasn’t ready, mentally or physically, for Henry’s toughest workouts. Henry trained speed with Starblind, the fastest guy on the team. He trained strength with Schwartz, the strongest. When those guys went home, he went to yoga class with Owen. Then he trained some more. He fielded grounders in his mind until he fell asleep. He got up at five and did it again.

By the start of his junior season, he’d become something Westish College had never seen: a prospect. He hit a home run in the second game of the Florida trip, another in the fourth game, a third in the sixth. By then the scouts were loitering in their Ray-Bans behind the backstop. Fans showed up too, local baseball lovers who’d heard about the must-see kid with the magic glove. By week’s end the team was 10 and 2, Henry was hitting .519, and he’d moved within a single game of tying Aparicio Rodriguez’s NCAA record for most consecutive errorless games. The flight back to Wisconsin was one long celebration.

Chapter 6

In the spring of 1880, Herman Melville, then sixty years old, was working as a customs inspector at the Port of New York, having proved unable to support his family through literary work. He was not famous and earned almost nothing from royalties. His first-born son, Malcolm, had committed suicide thirteen years earlier. Melville’s in-laws, among others, feared for his health and regarded him as insane. On a national scale, the horrific, bloody rift he’d prophesied in Moby-Dick and Benito Cereno (both long out of print in 1880) had come to pass, and, as he had been perhaps the first to foresee, the anguish had not ceased with the end of the war.

Not surprising, then, that the great writer might have found himself growing grim about the mouth, as his best-known protagonist put it; that he might have deemed it high time to get back to sea. Too old, impecunious, and hemmed in by family matters to make any more ocean crossings, Melville settled upon a more modest adventure. The spring thaw came early that year, and in March he boarded a ship headed up the Erie Canal, to tour the Great Lakes and thereby reprise alone a trip he had taken with his friend Eli Fly forty years before. Scholars have made much of Melville’s pilgrimage to Jerusalem (1856—57), but this later domestic voyage went unmentioned until 1969, when an undergraduate at Westish College — a small, venerable but already in those days slightly decrepit liberal arts school on the western shore of Lake Michigan — made a remarkable discovery.

The undergraduate’s name was Guert Affenlight. He was not, at the time, a student of literature. Rather, he was a biology major and the starting quarterback for the Westish Sugar Maples. He had grown up in the undulant, plainsy part of the state, south and west of Madison, the fourth and by far the youngest son of small-time dairy farmers. He’d been accepted to Westish in part to play football, and though the school, then as now, did not offer athletic scholarships, he was rewarded for his gridiron toils with a cushy job in the college library. Officially he was supposed to shelve books for twelve hours a week, but it was understood that the bulk of that time could be spent studying.

Affenlight enjoyed having the run of the library after hours, and frequently he neither studied nor shelved but simply poked around. Late one evening in the fall of his junior year, he found a thin sheaf of yellowed paper, tucked between two brittle magazines in the library’s non-circulating bowels. The faded handwriting on the first page announced that it was a lecture given by one “H. Melville” on “this first instant of April 1880.” Affenlight, sensing something, turned the page. A visceral charge went through him when he read the opening sentence:

It was not before my twenty-fifth year, by which time I had returned to my native New York from a four years’ voyage aboard whalers and frigates, having seen much of the world, at least the watery parts, and certain verdant corners deemed uncivil by our Chattywags and Mumbledywumps, that I took up my pen in earnest, and began to live; since then, scarcely a week has gone by when I do not feel myself unfolding within myself.

Upon his first reading, Affenlight failed to untangle the syntax before the semicolon, but that final clause embedded itself swiftly in his soul. He too wanted to unfold within himself, and to feel himself so doing; it thrilled him, this oracular promise of a wiser, wilder life. He’d never traveled beyond the Upper Midwest, nor written anything a teacher hadn’t required, but this single magical sentence made him want to roam the world and write books about what he found. He snuck the pages into his knapsack and back to his room in Phumber Hall.

The stated topic of the lecture was Shakespeare, but H. Melville, excusing himself by the sly pronouncement that “Shakespeare is Life,” used the bard as reason to speak of whatever he wished — Tahiti, Reconstruction, his trip up the Hudson, Webster, Hawthorne, Michigan, Solomon, marriage, divorce, melancholia, awe, factory conditions, the foliage of Pittsfield, friendship, poverty, chowder, war, death — all with a scattered, freewheeling ferocity that would have done little to refute his in-laws’ allegations of mental imbalance. The more deeply Affenlight imbibed the lecture, hidden away in his dorm room from any influence that might shake him out of his strange mood, the more convinced he became that it had been delivered extemporaneously, without so much as a note. It astonished and humbled him to think that a mind could grow so rich that its every gesture would come to seem profound.

The next day Affenlight left his room and went in search of an appropriate authority. Professor Cary Oxtin, the college’s expert in nineteenth-century America, perused the pages slowly in Affenlight’s presence, tapping his pen against his chin. Upon finishing, Oxtin declared that though the prose was unmistakably Melville’s, the handwriting was not. The lecture must have been transcribed — and who knew how reliably — by some attentive listener. He added that by 1880 Melville counted as little more than a travel writer past his prime, and so it was not implausible that his lecture had been misplaced and that his visit to Westish had passed unnoticed by history.

Affenlight left the pages with Professor Oxtin, who shipped copies of them eastward, to the counters and compilers of such things. Thus they entered the scholarly record. Several months later, Oxtin published a long essay on Melville’s Midwestern trip in the Atlantic Monthly — an essay in which Affenlight’s name did not appear.

At the end of that dismal ’69 season — the Sugar Maples won just one game — Affenlight turned in his helmet. Football had been a diversion; he had a purpose now, and the purpose was to read. It was too late to change majors, but each night when his problem sets were finished, he devoted himself to the works of H. Melville. He began at the beginning, with Typee, and read through to Billy Budd. Then the biographies, the correspondence, the critical texts. When he’d absorbed every word of Melvilleania in the Westish library, he started over with Hawthorne, to whom Moby-Dick had been dedicated. Somewhere in there he’d stopped shaving as well — these were the opening days of the ’70s, and many of his male classmates wore beards, but Affenlight imagined his as something different: not a hippie beard but an antique, writerly one, of the kind that graced the faded daguerreotypes in the books he was learning to love.

He had also, from his first days on campus, fallen in love with Lake Michigan — having grown up in landlocked farmland, he was amazed by its vastness and the combination of its steadiness and its constant fluctuations. Walking along its shore called forth some of the same deep feelings that his reading of Melville did, and that reading explained and deepened his love of the water, which in turn deepened his love of the books. He resolved to get himself to sea. After graduation, he managed to display enough knowledge of marine biology to win an almost unpaid job — an internship, in today’s parlance — aboard a U.S. government ship bound for the South Pacific. For the next four years he saw much of the world, at least the watery parts, and learned how well Melville had captured the monotony-in-motion of life under sail. He woke in the night, every three hours, to record data from a dozen instruments. With the same regularity he recorded his lonely thoughts in graph-paper notebooks, trying as best he could to make them sound profound.

After those four years he returned to the Midwest. He’d turned twenty-five, the Age of Unfolding, and it was time to write a novel, the way his hero had. He moved to a cheap apartment in Chicago and set to work, but even as the pages accumulated, despair set in. It was easy enough to write a sentence, but if you were going to create a work of art, the way Melville had, each sentence needed to fit perfectly with the one that preceded it, and the unwritten one that would follow. And each of those sentences needed to square with the ones on either side, so that three became five and five became seven, seven became nine, and whichever sentence he was writing became the slender fulcrum on which the whole precarious edifice depended. That sentence could contain anything, anything, and so it promised the kind of absolute freedom that, to Affenlight’s mind, belonged to the artist and the artist alone. And yet that sentence was also beholden to the book’s very first one, and its last unwritten one, and every sentence in between. Every phrase, every word, exhausted him. He thought maybe the problem was the noise of the city, and his dull day job, and his drinking; he gave up his room and rented an outbuilding on an Iowa farm run by hippies. There, alone with his anxious thoughts, he felt much worse.