The Art of Fielding

A Novel

Chad Harbach

Meet Henry Skrimshander. He’s short and scrawny, a naturally gifted shortstop who doesn’t know yet that he’s fated to be a star. While he’s physically unimpressive, he has a secret gift: a graceful, preternatural ability to know where a ball is going to go.

Henry hails from a town in South Dakota, an unassuming place not known for producing future Hall-of-Famers. But at an amateur competition, Henry catches the eye of a catcher named Mike Schwartz. Although they’re the same age, Schwartz appoints himself Henry’s mentor, and soon they’re both playing baseball at the same school: the fictional Westish, a small college on the shore of Lake Michigan.

Henry and Mike don’t just love baseball, they live baseball. The passages about their relentless training routine and quotes about how to play the game will inspire you to lace up your trainers and hit the stadium stairs yourself.

We gain an inside look at what it’s like to be part of a team as we follow them through one full season. There’s dugout banter; someone gets the yips. And by the final games of the season, it feels like everyone’s future is riding on the score. It takes solid writing to make a baseball game feel clutch on the page, and author Chad Harbach delivers.

But this is also a campus story that romps through administrative politics, dorm life, and romantic entanglements. Henry’s gay roommate, also a baseball player, becomes entangled in a complicated relationship. The college president, a confirmed bachelor, accidentally and wholly unexpectedly falls madly in love. His life is further complicated with the return of his estranged daughter, who’s recovering from her own heartbreak (whilst wreaking emotional havoc on the team’s locker room). And then there’s the friendship between Henry and Mike, a brotherhood, really. They’re inseparable and make each other better until Henry can’t tell the difference between Mike’s help and control — and Mike wonders if by prioritizing Henry, he’s shortchanged himself.

There’s a lot to love in this mashup of baseball action, campus life, and rom-com. It’s charming and sweet, but never twee. The stakes are high for everyone, and the characters are well-meaning in their explorations of ambition, sacrifice, and loyalty. And, not for nothing, it will make you care deeply about the final game of the season.

On a shelf in his office Schwartz kept a long row of DVDs of Henry taking batting practice. Labeled and arranged by date, they formed a complete record of Henry’s progress as a hitter under Schwartz’s tutelage, week by diligent week, from his freshperson season till now. Together they’d spent hundreds of hours watching these tapes, breaking down and rebuilding Henry’s swing frame by frozen frame. If you had the editing equipment and time to kill, you could take a frame from each day’s session and splice them together chronologically, so that the Henry who awaited the pitch would be skinny and indefinite, the bat wavering timidly above his bony right elbow, while the Henry who finished the swing, following through with such forceful purpose that the bat head wrapped around and struck him between the shoulder blades, would be chiseled and resolute, his eyes hardened, his curls shaved down to a military half inch. The making of a ballplayer: the production of brute efficiency out of natural genius. — Chad Harbach

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