Bryan Harvey, who has previously written here about Brian McCann and Jason Heyward and John Henry, is a high school teacher and poet, who writes for The Faster Times and The Lawn Chair Boys. His poetry has appeared in the Cold Mountain Review and DeckFight Press released his eBook, Everything That Dunks Must Converge, in April..

The truth is sobering. The lie intoxicating. To get better, at some point, the truth is needed, and if I’m wrong in what I’m about to say, put me in my place.

Surrounded by land, Westish College and its bevy of depressed characters are still somehow connected to the water: there’s the Melville statue overlooking the lake, there’s Pella swimming her laps, there’s Schwartz rehabbing in the athletic center’s whirlpool, and then there’s Henry’s soup and bathtub routine. But Henry’s aquatic melancholy doesn’t begin in a bathroom. As far as I can tell, it begins in Chapter 54 when he swims out into the lake (most likely with Melville’s stone eyes watching him), wearing a flak jacket. It’s dangerous. It’s foolish. And it’s the most desperate act Henry makes, that is until he sleeps with Pella.

A lot is going on in Chapters 54 and 55. No doubt. Prior to these chapters Henry is a rather flat character, as many here have stated. He plays baseball. He lifts weights. He runs the stadium. He plays baseball. Everything is cyclical and, well, predictable. Then a gust of wind disrupts everything, Owen goes to the hospital, and Henry is introduced to the harshness of real life, like a baby forced to breathe air through its nose for the first time, and that’s what Henry is prior to this segment of the novel: a baby. He does what he’s told, as he’s told, not thinking, soaking up the wisdom of Aparicio and Schwartz tabula rasi. And when baseball fails to give him “The dream of every day the same” (345), where does Henry go for answers but back to the womb-like waters of Lake Michigan, reenacting the single time in everyone’s life when their being is entirely flawless, “[improving] little by little till the day it all [becomes] perfect” (345)? Everything after that is downhill, right? Mistakes, unmet potential, and sin.

Henry goes to the water because there’s something within him that must be cleansed, and when he comes out of the cool Lake Michigan waters, he gets down on all fours and drinks from a puddle “like an animal” (346), having washed away the complexities of his existence. Then he curls up in the sand–fetal style–and sleeps the night away, only to awake the next day, in Chapter 55, not with the mind of a child but contemplating “the longest speech of his academic career” (348), which happens to be about St. Peter, a man whose most famous act is one of denial (apparently, sainthood does not operate on baseball’s three strike rule), and what else is Henry trying to do in this part of the novel than deny the fallible traits that make him a human rather than a machine. Then this chapter that begins with his most complex thoughts on religion (which a young Henry appears to deny), free will, and even damnation ends with Henry’s hand being guided into the “icy blue” that guards Pella’s private parts (353). So when the baseball diamond fails to replicate the perfect potential of Henry’s in utero existence, he turns to Pella, the strongest representation of the feminine there is in the novel, but even this effort will fail to heal him, just like no amount of hours in a whirlpool can restore Schwartz’s joints, and Henry will spend the next several chapters, like a fish or a whale, in bathtubs full of water, slurping on warm soup as if it came to him out of an umbilical cord.

Here’s the thing, though, Henry knows his actions are “crazy” (346), that perfection is dull to the point of not existing, that he had to leave his mother’s womb, that playing baseball long enough will result in errors, that a person cannot tread water forever, that pretty much all moments of ejaculation are short lived, and that bathtubs have a drain for a reason, so where does Henry go from here? And how did Harbach make such a seemingly dull kid from South Dakota into whatever this character is now?

Find more of Adam at Everyday Footnotes.

Well, that certainly got plotty, didn’t it? Maybe I skipped over the warnings but I hadn’t been concerned that Guert was putting his job on the line with his affair. The book successfully encouraged me to focus my concern on Owen’s eventual rejection of Guert. This development seemed to appear out of nowhere (dean ex machina?) but I loved the way this turn of events played off the unending and seemingly inconsequential talk of climate change. (Inconsequential to the novel, not — you know — the world.) In hindsight, I realize Owen’s solar-power pillow talk was actually quite strange and I would love it if Guert’s fleeting paranoid idea that Owen may be sleeping with him simply to make Westish carbon-neutral turned out to be true.

While Guert has the Skrimshanders to thank for the unraveling of his life’s work, Henry has both Affenflights to thank for avoiding fates such as ramen soup and shallow water drowning. I’m curious to see what’s driving Guert, at this dark moment, to send Henry to Nationals.

A question for everyone else: did I miss some legitimate reason for Schwartz to turn down the assistant athletic director job? I understand that we’re supposed to believe that he’s too stubborn or single-minded to accept this perfect gap-year opportunity … but is anyone buying that?

Find more of Megan Wells at Around the Horn from Aerys Sports.

Everything seems finally to be coming to a head in the novel. Relationships are breaking down and forcing the characters to figure out their own lives, instead of using each other to fill the gaps. Probably the most striking loss, to me, was Henry’s loss of baseball. Every other character has something else to chase, for good or ill, but most importantly, for themselves: Schwartz wants the championship. Pella wants a normal, adult life. Affenlight wants a normal, adult life (an unexpected parallel between father and daughter that, to be honest, I only just caught on to as I was writing this).

But Henry has nothing else to want, and frankly, I’m not even sure he’s capable of wanting anything else. Even his relationship – insofar as you can call that weird one-sided dependency a relationship – with Pella is a sort of an aimless, reflexive action. And here’s where things got difficult for me.

Harbach has illustrated depression extremely convincingly in these pages. As someone who has been where Henry is, it was an exceedingly uncomfortable read for me. And it makes me wonder whether the loss of baseball is really what’s tormenting Henry, or whether there’s been something pathological about him all along. I object to the tendency society as a whole seems to have for diagnosing from a distance and with limited information. But Henry is fictional, so with that caveat in place, I’ll say that his reaction to walking away from baseball throws the observations I’ve made so far – about the essential emptiness of his character – into a wholly different light. What do you think: is Henry grieving normally? Or was he, by pursuing baseball so single-mindedly, staving off this feeling all along?

Pete Beatty is a future boss at The Classical and P&P’s resident Jim Thome scholar.

“Comedy aims at representing men as worse, Tragedy as better than in actual life.”–Poetics

“Is Ahab, Ahab?”–Moby-Dick, Ch 132

As Henry and Schwartz and the fifth business folks eddy toward Act V, things have taken a not-unwelcome turn toward the predictable. The story hangs on the national championship, even if the Skrimmer’s defective wing and Americanitis aren’t responding to treatment, not even the alienated love of the strangely static Pella. Guert’s desperate, curious love for Owen has brough his  administration down, but home ownership and anchor pets may bring a happy tomorrow. The lines of the plot are largely drawn, but what we’re left with is little more than a skeletal sketch, flawlessly styled but a bit transparent.

The burden of making this book flesh has fallen on character, as a stock-in-trade, in the form of Henry and Mike. Both boys/men are increasingly damaged; Schwartz especially:

All he could have today was … the knowledge that there’d be at least two more games–because nationals were double-elimination–before he had to face his fucked up life … He’d never found anything inside himself that was really good and pure, that wasn’t double edged, that couldn’t just as easily become its opposite.

Henry, chapters earlier, expresses the same essential frailty in a goofier way:

Sometime in elementary school his class had read Anne Frank’s diary, and Henry, terribly alarmed, asked why Anne hadn’t simply pretended not to be Jewish. The way Peter escaped from the Romans by pretending not to be a Christian. Peter got in trouble for that in the Biblbe, but if you put it in the context of poor Anne, who was not only real but a kid, didn’t it make sense? What difference did it make what religion you were, if you were dead?

The Art of Fielding is largely powered by character. Our rooting interests in Henry and Schwartz and Pella, and even lesser lights like Starblind and Chef Spirodocus and Contango the dog, are what bind us to the work. The universe of Westish, much like the Seven Kingdoms of George R.R. Martin (and notably unlike the deck of the Pequod) is only engaging insofar as we thrill to the doings of our heroes. While Henry and Schwartz are brilliantly realized and complex, they’re not given much in the way of a plot to interact with. Aristote might disagree with this sentiment, but I don’t particularly mind. I can see where this novel is headed, and in fact I might have guessed it–but knowing a game is scheduled for nine innings doesn’t detract from the tragicomedy. Or is this comedy? Or dramedy?

My last question before the final installment: Henry’s paralysis versus Schwartz’s self-hatred: I think I’m with Henry. Which is weird, because I am totally a Schwartzian to this point. Anybody else feeling their sympathies drift Skrimward?

If I was going to pick one chapter of The Art of Fielding to excerpt on Pitchers & Poets it would be Chapter 50. Chapter 50 deals explicitly with none of the story’s main characters – Guert Affenlight is there, but only as a literary device allowing Chad Harbach to philosophize about baseball. The chapter, less than three pages, is a self-contained meditation on Steve Blas Disease, also known as the yips.

Affenlight, scout Dwight Rogner, and philosopher-shortstop Aparacio Rodriguez are sitting behind the backstop watching baseball. In the beginning they talk about “Sasser. Wholers. Knoblauch. Sax.” (With a great dig by Aparicio at Sax’s failed Republican campaign for the CA State Assembly.) There is a lot happening in the dialogue. Mainly, baseball men are sympathetic to the sufferers of Steve Blass Disease – principally Blass himself. In a slightly stilted, slightly portentous bit of expository dialogue, Aparicio establishes the Blass history:

“Clemente was named Most Valuable Player, but the honor could have easily gone to Mr. Blass,” Aparicio says. “He had an exceptional ability to control the baseball.”

Clemente’s death is presented as a possible cause for his loss of control.

“When spring training began, Mr. Blass could no longer do what he’d always done. It happened very suddenly. Walks, wild pitches. One year later, only two years removed from the height of his career, he decided to retire.”

Then, half-a-page later, Rogner delivers the line of all lines. The one that gets at the essential futility, the cosmic joke, that is trying to understand the ruined or un-ruined baseball player’s mind. He is talking about Chuck Knoblauch’s move to the outfield where the throws are much longer than from second-base. “Sometimes harder is easier,” Rogner says.

(Off-topic slightly: one day we will do a Reading Club or some other extensive project on Pitchers & Poets about Sadaharu Oh’s memoir “Sadaharu Oh! A Zen Way of Baseball,” the very premise of which is exactly that: “harder is easier.” In the meantime, Ted wrote a great essay about Oh and Jeff Bagwell during 90s first basemen week.)

All this sets the stage for the key exchange between Aparcio and Affenlight, who is wisely afraid to bring up Henry Skrimshander directly because he is afraid of violating one of baseball’s codes. Affenlight asks if the yips really never happened before Steve Blass in 1973. Then Aparicio gets all postmodern:

“How many times does something happen before we give it a name? And until the name exists, neither does the condition. So perhaps it happened many times before but was never named.

“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.”

To this Affenlight begins an inner-monoloue that reads as a parody of this very website. He starts off with the year: 1973. The year of Watergate, Roe v. Wade, etc. etc. He thinks of Prufrockian paralysis (the inability to say something you want to say) and of Modernists, finally arriving at the conclusion that “the American postmodern period began in spring 1973, when a pitcher named Steve Blass lost his aim.”

But, because everybody in The Art of Fielding is likable, Affenlight quickly backtracks. He sees the humble Aparicio and remembers “literature can turn you into an asshole.” Affenlight’s warning about literature, about our tendency to treat real people like characters, seems like a fundamental part of what Harbach is doing with this novel. His characters – Aparicio Rodriguez excluded because he is more of a spiritual presence than a person– are drawn with extreme humanity. The entire novel can be read as a plea for civility, a grand reaching toward a society where everybody acts like they are on campus at Westish College all the time.

The line about treating people like literary character also gnaws at me because what I do when I write nonfiction is try to draw characters out of real life people – especially athletes. I spend hours trying to build a rounder character out of Milton Bradley, for instance, or Luke Scott based on fairly scant information: the way they stand in the batter’s box, the way another writer portrays them after an interview. In narrative-driven sports writing, which is something that interests me a great deal, we are making the characters of athletes (statistical profiles, selected quotes, on-field style) into real people and then turning back again and using those real people as literary characters.

Harbach doesn’t seem to be warning against projecting – all writers project. And I don’t think the mask of fiction lowers the stakes any. What I do see in Chapter 50 is a case for awareness. The dialogue, the Affenlight monologue, the sympathy ultimately extended to Henry and Steve Blass and all literary characters fictional and nonfictional – they amount to a subtle argument for all of us, readers and writers both, to be more conscientious.