The Art of Fielding
By CHAD HARBACH
Chapter
1
Schwartz didn’t notice the kid during the game. Or rather, he noticed
only what everyone else did — that he was the smallest player on the field, a
scrawny novelty of a shortstop, quick of foot but weak with the bat. Only after
the game ended, when the kid returned to the sun-scorched diamond to take extra
grounders, did Schwartz see the grace that shaped Henry’s every move.
This was the second Sunday in August, just before Schwartz’s sophomore
year at Westish College, that little school in the crook of the baseball glove
that is Wisconsin. He’d spent the summer in Chicago, his hometown, and his
Legion team had just beaten a bunch of farmboys from South Dakota in the
semifinals of a no-name tournament. The few dozen people in the stands clapped
mildly as the last out was made. Schwartz, who’d been weak with heat cramps all
day, tossed his catcher’s mask aside and hazarded a few unsteady steps toward
the dugout. Dizzy, he gave up and sank down to the dirt, let his huge aching
back relax against the chain- link fence. It was technically evening, but the
sun still beat down wickedly. He’d caught five games since Friday night,
roasting like a beetle in his black catcher’s gear.
His teammates slung their gloves into the dugout and headed for the
concession stand. The championship game would begin in half an hour. Schwartz hated
being the weak one, the one on the verge of passing out, but it couldn’t be
helped. He’d been pushing himself hard all summer — lifting weights every
morning, ten-hour shifts at the foundry, baseball every night. And then this
hellish weather. He should have skipped the tournament — varsity football
practice at Westish, an infinitely more important endeavor, started tomorrow at
dawn, suicide sprints in shorts and pads. He should be napping right now,
preserving his knees, but his teammates had begged him to stick around. Now he
was stuck at this ramshackle ballpark between a junkyard and an adult bookstore
on the interstate outside Peoria. If he were smart he’d skip the championship
game, drive the five hours north to campus, check himself into Student Health
for an IV and a little sleep. The thought of Westish soothed him. He closed his
eyes and tried to summon his strength.
When he opened his eyes the South Dakota shortstop was jogging back onto
the field. As the kid crossed the pitcher’s mound he peeled off his uniform
jersey and tossed it aside. He wore a sleeveless white undershirt, had an
impossibly concave chest and a fierce farmer’s burn. His arms were as big
around as Schwartz’s thumbs. He’d swapped his green Legion cap for a faded red
St. Louis Cardinals one. Shaggy dust-blond curls poked out beneath. He looked
fourteen, fifteen at most, though the tournament minimum was seventeen.
During the game, Schwartz had figured the kid was too small to hit high
heat, so he’d called for one fastball after another, up and in. Before the
last, he’d told the kid what was coming and added, “Since you can’t hit it
anyway.” The kid swung and missed, gritted his teeth, turned to make the long
walk back to the dugout. Just then Schwartz said — ever so softly, so that it
would seem to come from inside the kid’s own skull — “[expletive].” The kid
paused, his scrawny shoulders tensed like a cat’s, but he didn’t turn around.
Nobody ever did.
Now when the kid reached the worked-over dust that marked the
shortstop’s spot, he stopped, bouncing on his toes and jangling his limbs as if
he needed to get loose. He bobbed and shimmied, windmilled his arms, burning
off energy he shouldn’t have had. He’d played as many games in this brutal heat
as Schwartz.
Moments later the South Dakota coach strolled onto the field with a bat
in one hand and a five- gallon paint bucket in the other. He set the bucket
beside home plate and idly chopped at the air with the bat. Another of the
South Dakota players trudged out to first base, carrying an identical bucket
and yawning sullenly. The coach reached into his bucket, plucked out a ball,
and showed it to the shortstop, who nodded and dropped into a shallow crouch,
his hands poised just above the dirt.
The kid glided in front of the first grounder, accepted the ball into
his glove with a lazy grace, pivoted, and threw to first. Though his motion was
languid, the ball seemed to explode off his fingertips, to gather speed as it
crossed the diamond. It smacked the pocket of the first baseman’s glove with
the sound of a gun going off. The coach hit another, a bit harder: same easy
grace, same gunshot report. Schwartz, intrigued, sat up a little. The first
baseman caught each throw at sternum height, never needing to move his glove,
and dropped the balls into the plastic bucket at his feet.
The coach hit balls harder and farther afield — up the middle, deep in
the hole. The kid tracked them down. Several times Schwartz felt sure he would
need to slide or dive, or that the ball was flat-out unreachable, but he got to
each one with a beat to spare. He didn’t seem to move faster than any other
decent shortstop would, and yet he arrived instantly, impeccably, as if he had
some foreknowledge of where the ball was headed. Or as if time slowed down for
him alone.
After each ball, he dropped back into his feline crouch, the fingertips
of his small glove scraping the cooked earth. He barehanded a slow roller and
fired to first on a dead run. He leaped high to snag a tailing line drive.
Sweat poured down his cheeks as he sliced through the soup- thick air. Even at
full speed his face looked bland, almost bored, like that of a virtuoso
practicing scales. He weighed a buck and a quarter, maximum. Where the kid’s
thoughts were — whether he was having any thoughts at all, behind that blank
look — Schwartz couldn’t say. He remembered a line from Professor Eglantine’s
poetry class: Expressionless, expresses God.
Then the coach’s bucket was empty and the first baseman’s bucket full,
and all three men left the field without a word. Schwartz felt bereft. He
wanted the performance to continue. He wanted to rewind it and see it again in
slow motion. He looked around to see who else had been watching — wanted at
least the pleasure of exchanging a glance with another enraptured witness — but
nobody was paying any attention. The few fans who hadn’t gone in search of beer
or shade gazed idly at their cell-phone screens. The kid’s loser teammates were
already in the parking lot, slamming their trunks. Fifteen minutes to game
time. Schwartz, still dizzy, hauled himself to his feet. He would need two
quarts of Gatorade to get through the final game, then a coffee and a can of
dip for the long midnight drive. But first he headed for the far dugout, where
the kid was packing up his gear. He’d figure out what to say on the way over.
All his life Schwartz had yearned to possess some single transcendent talent,
some unique brilliance that the world would consent to call genius. Now that
he’d seen that kind of talent up close, he couldn’t let it walk away.
Excerpted from "The
Art of Fielding," Little, Brown & Company Copyright © 2011 by Chad
Harbach. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without
permission in writing from the publisher.
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