Eric Weinberger

Lake Michigan days

It is probably hard to enjoy this new big novel from America without some understanding of the shortstop’s position on the baseball field. But that is easily remedied, thanks to YouTube, where searching for ‘shortstop, fielding’ arouses multiple videos that compete for attention, with stars of the game in their infield position between second and third base, taking ground balls hit at, near, or even away from them, scooping them up, throwing to first base for the out: something the shortstop does six or more times in a game. Besides the catcher, who largely stays put, it is the most demanding field position in baseball, and if you’re going to write a novel about a peerless fielder (the commonplace, in baseball fiction, is to write about a hitter who crushes home runs), then this is the position you’d choose; where when one excels, nothing in baseball is more glamorous, but failure is glaring and ugly.   

In The Art of Fielding, the wondrous young shortstop, Henry Skrimshander of Westish College in the agrarian northeast of Wisconsin, starts to stink up the place, just as his undergraduate team is getting good for the first time in its sporting history. Suddenly he can’t throw anymore, when the ball is hit to him, whereas previously he was perfection itself — no errors, no missteps, nothing but the ‘same easy grace, same gunshot report’ following arrival at the place where the ball always went, ‘instantly, impeccably, as if he had some foreknowledge’. How will Henry’s team fare in the wake of his collapse?

It’s always said of baseball, or any sports, novels, that they are about more than the game itself — they are about life; but there is a hefty element of baseball spread over these 500 pages, in all its intricate and revealing plays, slang and jargon (a widespread term, in America, for minutiae that outsiders can’t comprehend is ‘inside baseball’).

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