Chad Harbach - The Art of Fielding

The inning ended, and the Moose trotted off the diamond. Affenlight leaned forward as the Westish players emerged into the frigid daylight to take the field. He took pride in knowing the names of the school’s twenty-four hundred students, and even from a distance the faces of the upperclasspersons were familiar to him: Mike Schwartz, Adam Starblind, Henry Skrimshander. But where was the face he’d come to see?

Perhaps he wasn’t playing today. Affenlight knew he was a member of the baseball team, but whether he was a starter or a benchwarmer or somewhere in between was a question he’d never considered. How stupid to have sat here, behind the home dugout, so that he couldn’t see inside. And yet what else could he do? Move over to the visitors’ bleachers and become a traitorous president? How suspicious would that look? For now he stayed put. He couldn’t see O, but he and O were facing the same way, watching the same white ball zip toward home plate, the same anxious batter swing and miss, and that in itself, that same-way-facing, felt like something.

Whatever happened, he couldn’t be late to pick up Pella. To be late would be a bad start, and things were tricky enough without a bad start. He hadn’t seen her since she’d dropped out of Tellman Rose, midway through her senior year, to elope with David. That was four years ago, an unthinkably long time. If events had unfolded differently, she’d be graduating from college this spring.

Two nights ago she left a message on his office phone — strategically avoiding his cell, which he might have answered — and asked him to buy her a ticket to Westish. “It’s not an emergency,” she said. “But the sooner the better.” Affenlight bought the ticket with an open return. How long she’d stay, whether things were going badly with David, he didn’t know.

Baseball — what a boring game! One player threw the ball, another caught it, a third held a bat. Everyone else stood around. Affenlight looked about, bethinking his options. He had less than an hour. What he needed was a reason, an excuse, to circle over to the Milford side and thereby catch a glimpse of the person he was eager to glimpse. He scanned the visitors’ bleachers, and his eyes settled on two large, well-dressed men whose attitudes and accessories marked them as distinct from the other spectators. Affenlight, combining what he saw with what he’d lately heard, guessed that they must be professional scouts, here to see Harpooner shortstop Henry Skrimshander, a junior. Which seemed to afford the perfect excuse: he would pay his guests a cordial visit.

He rose from the bench, pulling his tie out of the pond-shaped space between his knees. As he followed the bleachers around the backstop, the corrugated aluminum resounded beneath his loafers. He shook a pair of powerful right hands — insisting that Dwight and L.P. call him Guert, just Guert—and lowered himself beside them. The new patch of aluminum felt far colder through his slacks than the old one.

“So gentlemen,” Affenlight said. “What brings you to Westish?”

The one named Dwight gestured toward the shortstop position with his sunglasses, indicating Henry Skrimshander. “That fellow right there, sir.”

L.P. and Dwight, it turned out, were ex—minor leaguers not far removed from their playing days. Smooth-featured and polite, business-casual in dress, with slender laptops in their laps and BlackBerries laid beside them on the bleachers, they looked like oversize consultants or CIA agents playing a very reserved sort of hooky. L.P. had his hands clasped behind his head and his legs stretched before him, covering several rows; he would have dwarfed Affenlight if they both stood. Dwight was blond and pale, more densely built than L.P. but not quite as tall. Dwight did most of the speaking, in the chatty, choppy tones of the Upper Upper Midwest—Affenlight guessed Minnesota, or maybe he was Canadian:

“Henry Skrimshander. I tell you what, Guert. A heck of a shortstop. I first saw him play last summer at this tournament down in, boy, I forget where . . .”

If Affenlight wanted, he could swivel his head to the right, away from the smiling eyes of Dwight, and look down into that distant corner of the Westish dugout and see him.

“. . . and this pitcher I was there to scout, boy, did he turn out to be a dog, but I was too lazy to get up and . . .”

If he wanted? Of course he wanted. It was the wanting, the incredible strength of the wanting, that had prevented him so far. Affenlight felt afraid to look — afraid, perhaps, that looking might commit him irrevocably. But to what? Commit him to what?

Now, finally, as Dwight paused for breath, Affenlight indulged the desire that had been simmering in his mind. He snuck a peek into the Westish dugout. Oh. His features were indiscernible at this distance, lost in the heavy shadows that shrouded that corner of the dugout. A thin stream of light connected his cap to the book in his lap.

“. . . that’s what scouting is,” Dwight was saying, more or less. “Following up on tips and notes, ninety-nine point five percent of which inevitably turn out to be . . .”

Features indiscernible but contours unmistakable: slender-limbed, right knee flipped girlishly over left, torso gently canted in that direction, bundled up against the cold in a hooded Westish sweatshirt with a wind-breaker on top of that. Chin at a downward tilt, studying his book instead of the game. Affenlight felt something young swell up in his chest, a thudding pain interspersed with something sweet, as if he were being dragged by an oxcart through a field of clover. He blinked hard.

Dwight shook his head slowly, as if disbelieving his own memory. “I’ve seen a lot of baseball, Guert. But never have I seen someone like Henry, in terms of sheer — what would you call it, L.P.?”

L.P. reclined with his elbows spread wide on the row behind him, his wraparound shades disguising his eyes. He answered as if from the depths of sleep: “Prescience.”

The maroon-clad batter rifled a one-hopper to short. Henry backhanded it without a flourish and threw him out. The ease and power of the throw startled Affenlight; he himself was several inches taller than Henry and had been no slouch at quarterback, but he’d never thrown a projectile half that hard.

“Henry can flat-out play,” Dwight went on. “The only question mark in some people’s minds is competition. It’s tough to guess a guy’s ceiling when he’s in such a lousy environment for baseball. No offense, Guert.”

“None taken, Dwight.” The next batter popped up, and the Harpooners jogged off the field to soft applause. There couldn’t have been more than thirty people left in the stands.

“I’ll tell you one thing, though. After the way he played in Florida last week, the word is out. That’s how scouting works nowadays — you don’t discover guys so much as you take the master list and rank them. And Henry’s on the master list. The only reason this place isn’t crawling with scouts today is it’s so dang cold and we’re so dang far from a decent airport. But they’ll be here.”

Airport. Pella. Affenlight checked his watch.

“As of yesterday we had him rated the third-best shortstop in the draft, behind Vance White, who was first-team all-American last year, and this high school kid from Texas who scouts call the Terminator, because he looks like he was built in a lab.” Dwight paused. “But after seeing Henry today, I’d have half a mind to take him over both those guys. He’s not big enough to be the best, he’s not fast enough to be the best, he doesn’t have the body or the raw numbers to be the best. He just is.”

“Beautiful to watch,” L.P. opined from behind his shades.

Dwight nodded, his pale-blue eyes and pink-rimmed nose glistening in the cold. “He understands the game like a veteran major leaguer. And defensively there’s no competition. Today he ties Aparicio Rodriguez’s NCAA record for consecutive errorless games by a shortstop. Fifty-one and counting.”