One of the most underrated episodes in the history of "The Simpsons" is a little ditty from the fourth season entitled "Duffless." Although it's one of the most disjointed of the show's entire run, the episode is both touching and poignant as it depicts a month-long struggle Homer undertakes in an attempt to overcome his alcoholism. It's also damn funny.
In one scene, Barney and Homer are shown sitting in the bleachers at a Springfield Isotopes game listening to the announcer call the play-by-play: "...the windup and a two-two pitch. Oh, no, wait a minute, the batter is calling for time—looks like he's going to get himself a new bat. And now there's a beach ball on the field, and the ball boys are discussing which one of them's going to get it."
As the only sober fan in the stands, Homer comes to a sudden revelation at that exact moment: "I never realized just how boring this game is."
In all fairness, baseball ranks among golf and baseball's pretentious-older-sister sport—cricket—as one of the slowest-paced and least riveting widely-played sports on the planet. Its detractors regularly criticize the game for harboring athletes—to borrow two examples from the New York Yankees' current starting rotation—as large-bodied as C.C. Sabathia and as out of shape as Bartolo Colon. Furthermore, the fact that a player like Sabathia could rake in a salary of more than $24 million per year only adds fuel to the fire.
Nonetheless, there seems to be something quite literary, quite poetic about the sport that many authors of contemporary fiction have picked up on as of late.
As poor a work as Jeffrey Eugenides' "The Marriage Plot" was (see the January 27, 2012 issue of the Orient), one of the better observations in the book is a description of the etymology of the word "paradise" given by a character named Leonard as he's watching a Red Sox game on TV.
He says, "It means 'walled garden.' From the Arabic. That's what a baseball stadium is. Especially Fenway. A walled garden. Look how green it is! It's so soothing to just sit here and look at the field."
Although Eugenides doesn't quite seem to find his way with words there, the reader at least knows what he's driving at.
Editor of the New York-based literary magazine, n + 1, Chad Harbach takes another aspect of the sport—namely, the solitude and vulnerability of each player on the diamond when the action comes his way—in his recently-released debut novel, "The Art of Fielding."
Nine years in the making, the novel largely resists clear categorizations of genre: It alternates between sports story, a coming-of-age tale, and a campus novel (set at the fictional Westish College on the shores of Lake Michigan) and is lined with elements of bromance and romance of both the straight and gay variety.
The narrative shifts between the perspectives of four different characters, but the character at the heart and center of the action is the Lankton, S.D. native Henry Skrimshander, seemingly dull in person yet anything but with his glove in hand. At the shortstop position, Henry's defensive skills are, at one point, likened to those of Derek Jeter. So when the hirsute Mike Schwartz, a rising sophomore at Westish, first spies Henry taking practice grounders (Schwartz describes the blank look on the shortstop's face as "expressionless, expresses God"), he does everything in his power to get his school to recruit the younger athlete. In the process, he takes Henry under his wing.
The story's other two protagonists—Guert Affenlight, the president of the college, and Pella, his daughter—are both athletes-turned-scholars whose emotional and romantic entanglements with the other characters provide the story with a kind of backbone while still propelling it forward at a breakneck pace.
The conflict at the story's core arises during Henry's junior year playing baseball for the Westish Harpooners when an errant throw he makes to first base flies way off-course.
In light of Steve Blass Disease—the inexplicable loss of one's ability to throw a baseball accurately—it quickly becomes clear how Harbach was able to build such an all-consuming work around this single development in the sport's modern era. Furthermore, given the explicit reference the story makes to the disorder, Henry's symptoms will prove as understandable and compelling to those who aren't familiar with baseball as it will to those who are.
And what a compelling story it turns out to be. "The Art of Fielding" borrows its title from a fictional point-by-point guide to the shortstop position written by the sagacious mystic Aparicio Rodriguez—a character composite of two real-life shortstops, Hall of Famer Luis Aparicio and current Yankee Alex Rodriguez.
Henry reads the guide for the inspirational passages, such as rule number 59: "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." Juxtaposed with rule number 147, "Throw with the legs," the novel is certainly worthy of a laugh and a half. The fact that that such irony manages to stick with the narrative, tone and thematic content of the novel throughout is even more impressive.
It's when Aparicio makes an appearance halfway through the story that the work's relevance to the contemporary moment becomes most explicit. "Doubt has always existed...even for athletes," he announces, just as Affenlight imagines what "an era when even the athletes were anguished Modernists. In which case the American postmodern period began in spring 1973, when a pitcher named Steve Blass lost his arm." Not literally, of course, but you get the idea.
Truly an all-consuming work, "The Art of Fielding" arms each of its four protagonists with some philosophical notions that—along with doubt—aim towards diagnosing the 21st century condition. Pella grapples with gender politics ("She hated the namelessness of women in stories, as if they lived and died so that men could have metaphysical insights."). Schwartz tends to see the world in ethical terms, like when he gets into a confrontation with his roommate Starblind: "Schwartz could get only so pissed at Starblind; Starblind was Starblind the way a dog was a dog and a shark was a shark. You didn't expect moral distinctions from a shark." Affenlight gets existential with passages where he thinks to himself, "There were no whys in a person's life, and very few hows."
Even the possibly autistic Henry joins the fun as he considers the nature of language (albeit by analogy to the national pastime): "Talking was like throwing a baseball. You couldn't plan it out beforehand. You just had to let go and see what happened. You had to throw out words without knowing whether anyone would catch them—you had to throw out words you knew no one would catch."
The sheer lyricism of lines like these is easily recognizable. Although Harbach's narrative becomes predictable once or twice, he continually stuns the reader with his natural flair for writing. To quote one of the book's best passages—"People thought becoming an adult meant that all your acts had consequences; in fact it was just the opposite."
Although the work has received acclaim from nearly every major American periodical and publication that's reviewed it, a number of Amazon reviewers have refused to buy into the book so easily. Among the most vitriolic complaints are those that call his characters emotionally flat and lacking in dimensionality. Such a reading of the novel, however, misses out on all the subtleties of the characters. Just when we think we have one pinned down, he (or Pella, the only important "she" in the story) will invariably defy our expectations for how they might act.
Perhaps it's because these characters are takes on those that appear in the works of Melville (from whose "Moby Dick" Westish College borrows its school mascot) and because Henry, Schwartz and Pella speak in such a way that reminds readers of their college years that some have felt these characters to be caricatures. For undergraduates, however, neither issue should prove to be a problem. Even without any knowledge of Melville, these characters sound enough like our friends that Henry and the others loom almost as largely.
The book's popularity may also stem, as Gregory Cowles put it in his review of the book for The New York Times Sunday Book Review, from its adherence to the "middlebrow." Although Cowles' descriptor is an apt one considering the book's masterful ability to address both baseball and Emerson, the story begins and ends with the sport it takes up in its title.
"What other sport not only kept a stat as cruel as the error, but posted it on the scoreboard for everyone to see?" Harbach asks.
Through baseball—a sport that feels almost preordained to make its players feel isolated from one another—Harbach paints a deeply affecting portrait of contemporary existence. By the story's end, Henry has proven himself just as much of an outsider on the diamond as he is off of it.
By reflecting our intuition that—as paradoxical as it may sound—alienation has been molded by the modern era into something universal, "The Art of Fielding" begins to truly hit home.