The Buddhist Baseball Wisdom of Aparicio Rodriguez

Finished: The Art of Fielding.

Among my favorite books as a kid were sports stories of the Matt Christopher ilk, especially basketball and baseball books.  These books more or less always featured a preteen or teen whose real-world problems overlap with and affect their sports abilities.  I still have one of these, which I’m pretty sure I bought through Weekly Reader for $4 or so: Johnny Long Legs, featuring a new kid in town heroically struggling to improve the strength of his freakishly long legs and help his school’s basketball team, the hilariously named White Cats.  But I loved the baseball books, too, and have a vivid memory of reading one on my bed on a rainy summer afternoon, swept away by a young shortstop’s difficulty with turning the double play.

I mostly read these books for the descriptions of the games: the main, non-sports conflict in the book was only useful insofar as it enhanced the conflict I really cared about, that of the Cougars vs. the Eagles or whatever mascots were involved.  To be honest, I also just loved the creation of team and player names, uniforms, and mascots.  My favorite sections of pretty much all of these books were the expository paragraphs at the beginning of the games, the scenery of names, colors, gyms or fields.

All of which is to say that, though I’ve done an awful lot of reading since then, there’s still a big part of me that craved the baseball action in The Art of Fielding, and that valued it as a baseball book with a nostalgic, Christopher-esque structure: boy loves baseball, boy has baseball-related life problem (or life-related baseball problem?), boy finds help and solves problem to improve baseball skills.  Harbach intentionally embedded this nostalgic structure, I think, having a similar reading background: in this interview, he mentions growing up reading “Matt Christie” books, which I think is a reference to Matt Christopher.  And you can feel his delight in the creation of the Harpooner’s uniforms and logo, and those of their small-college rivals.  The “powder-blue jerseys” of the Muskingum Muskies (a real school whose colors appear to be red and black).  The “beet-red” jackets, uniforms, faces of the preppy Coshwale “douchetards.”  And, especially, the mild satire of the Opentoe College Holy Poets, in “threadbare brown-and-green uniforms” like a bunch of John the Baptists or Thoreaus.

Of course, because this is not a kids’ book, Harbach uses Henry Skrimshander’s baseball problem as a way into complex thinking about life and the process of becoming a functioning human adult, and critiques its own embedded YA sports-book structure.  But it’s also a really good baseball book, and one of its interesting sidelights is that it might, in its roundabout way, show how maybe athletics of the small-college variety could still have a place in the educational mission of institutions of higher learning.  (There’s no point in even trying to defend big-money Div I programs anymore.  They’re hopelessly corrupt alum-appeasing farm systems with zero educational reason for being.  And I’m pretty sure that, deep down, every administrator knows that.)

The device that brings this all together is the eponymous book within the book, The Art of Fielding by Aparicio Rodriguez, Henry’s idol, a Hall of Fame shortstop for the St. Louis Cardinals.  Rodriguez’s book is a collection of numbered items of practical advice, epigrams, and aphorisms, some of them cryptic koans.  The two most important appear very early in Harbach’s book:

3. There are three stages: Thoughtless being.  Thought.  Return to thoughtless being.

213. Death is the sanction of all that the athlete does.

These epigrams form a fascinating thought.  These two statements are bookends to Rodriguez’s book, the earliest and latest excerpts we are given from it, and keys to Harbach’s book, as well.

The first is the journey of Henry Skrimshander compressed to a “simple” Buddhist thought.  In the book’s gorgeous, idyllic 50-page opening overture, Henry is a “natural”: a scrawny South Dakota kid whose preternatural grace, constant practice,  and passionate love for the game have made him the perfect defensive shortstop.  He thoughtlessly is a being made to play shortstop.  If such being is useful, we call it talent, and Mike Schwartz recognizes and hones Henry’s talent.  In a bravura passage at the book’s center, Mike reflects on Henry’s development, and “[t]he making of a ballplayer: the production of brute efficiency out of natural genius.”

For Schwartz this formed the paradox at the heart of baseball, or football, or any other sport.  You loved it because you considered it an art: an apparently pointless affair, undertaken by people with a special aptitude, which sidestepped attempts to paraphrase its value yet somehow seemed to communicate something true or even crucial about The Human Condition.  The Human Condition being, basically, that we’re alive and have access to beauty, can even erratically create it, but will someday be dead and will not.

Baseball was an art, but to excel at it you had to become a machine….

The body of the book constitutes “Thought” in Aparicio’s formulation, introduced to Henry’s mind by his near-fatal errant throw into the dugout, and brings us to the second aphorism.  Sanction is a complicated word.  A sanction can be a permission or encouragement; it can also be a punishment, and this seeming contradiction stems from the word’s original meaning of a law or decree — and, even more interesting, its etymology from the Latin sancire, “to render sacred or inviolable” (per OED).  Death can be the athlete’s sanction in the sense that Mike uses above — encouraging production of the grace and beauty that athletes feel and display in the use of the lively body that will eventually perish and move no more.  But it can also be a warning or punishment, as when Henry nearly kills Owen with a bad throw, and has his own brush with death later.  And athletes grow older, lose their skills.  The athlete must become reconciled to the mini-death of losing the body’s ability, an image of the larger, final death of the body and spirit.

Beyond the level of the individual, Henry’s crisis of thought — his severe case of “Steve Blass Disease,” or “the yips” — also has cultural significance.  In another great passage, the literary scholar Guert Affenlight reflects on the apparent lack of such cases before 1973:

It made sense that a psychic condition sensed by the artists of one generation — the Modernists of the First World War — would take a while to reveal itself throughout the population.  And if that psychic condition happened to be a profound failure of confidence in the significance of individual human action, then the condition became an epidemic when it entered the realm of utmost confidence in same: the realm of professional sport…. that might make for a workable definition of the postmodernist era: an era when even the athletes were anguished Modernists.

Rodriguez’s Buddhist formulation has an important codicil: “33. Do not confuse the first and third stages.  Thoughtless being is attained by everyone, the return to thoughtless being by a very few.”  Henry has to come to realize that he cannot un-think the thought — the consciousness of life, and death, to which he has been awakened — which has been introduced, but must understand and learn from it.  His (and Mike’s) desire for life to remain forever the same must be understood as impossible.  Like any college student, and any baseball player, he has to move into the world, and become an adult, to be able to play again.  There’s a lovely little intimation of this cycle in an early training scene. Henry, in the batting cage, seeks to “meet the ball so squarely that it retraced its path and reentered the mouth of the pitching machine, sending the big rubber wheels spinning in the opposite direction, as if reversing time.”