Play ball! But first read 'The Art of Fielding'

“But baseball was different. Schwartz thought of it as Homeric — not a scrum but a series of isolated contests. Batter versus pitcher, fielder versus ball. You couldn’t storm around, snorting and slapping people, the way Schwartz did while playing football. You stood and waited and tried to still your mind. When your moment came, you had to be ready, because if you f----d up, everyone would know whose fault it was. What other sport not only kept a stat as cruel as the error but posted it on the scoreboard for everyone to see?” — Chad Harbach, “The Art of Fielding”

How lucky am I to fall in love with baseball for the first time, so late in the season of my life? How lucky that this sudden onset of baseball fever strikes deep in the heart of the baseball year, with big games ahead and the biggest — the World Series — set to start on Oct. 24?

I might have lived my entire life deprived of the experience of watching a game, which some have likened to watching a writer write: Long interludes of stillness relieved by moments of thrilling virtuosity. I might have missed the broader implications of the great American pastime: the metaphor of baseball as life, with its dazzling performances, its bitter defeats and the extant possibility of always being able to come from behind to win.

I might have missed the perennial joy of the game if not for reading “The Art of Fielding,” a first novel by Chad Harbach, a book I studied and discussed with my book groups last week.

Harbach’s story, with allusions to Melville’s “Moby-Dick,” is about a callow young man recruited to play shortstop for a small Midwestern college. But the novel is about baseball in the same way that “Moby-Dick” is about fishing. Hailed as witty, intellectual and heartfelt, the book puts you inside the head of the players, especially the shortstop, and makes you feel what it’s like to need to win. As Mike, the team captain, says before a big game: