The Art Of Fielding Analysis

Andy Nguyen

September 2015

English 12 - Stevens

The Art of Fielding Paper

Chad Harbach’s The Art of Fielding focuses on Henry, a small town boy that learns the value of life through the sport of baseball. Henry comes from humble beginnings of small town America, but suffers from a case of perfectionism – he will not stop short of achieving total perfection and this will eventually lead to his demise. He meets Mike Schwartz, a college baseball player that convinces him that college baseball is his future. Henry’s curiosity gets the best of him as he stumbles into the dark, cutthroat, and competitive world of college athletics. Once he steps foot in this world, Henry’s hunger for perfection is amplified. He sees the real world of athletics and

begins to have goals to simply strive to be the best and most perfect athlete. However, these goals fall through when he is met with various obstacles. Thus, Henry’s pursuit of perfection leads to the formation of his unachievable goals that fail, thus creating a compromising situation for him, which leads to his unhappiness, failure, depression and eventual demise. Consequently, this makes him more mature and less of a perfectionist after this course of events.
Henry’s own pursuit of perfection is driven by self-set unachievable and impractical goals, in turn creating a compromising situation for him when faced when moments of failure.

Henry starts out as a low-lying baseball player and through the progression of his story, becomes a highly acclaimed player. By Henry’s “junior year, he was the starting varsity shortstop”, an impressive accomplishment that landed him rave attention from scouts of professional baseball (9). No matter how many games he played, when asked “how many errors he’d made”, he would always reply with “zero”, denoting his strive to the achievement of pure perfection and nothing less (9). Although Henry’s pursuit of perfection did him well in the end, as he became a top prospect for the MLB, it did so at the cost of losing his human sanity when faced with specific moments of failure. Instances such as accidentally striking Owen denote a moment of failure, as well as when Henry breaks down and is unable to continue with said pursuit of perfection. In addition, Henry always believed in maintaining both his pursuit of perfection as well as his own self-image of perfection. When Pella asks Henry, “So, what’s it like to be the best?”, this inflates Henry’s ego and encourages him to continue his pursuit of perfection (209). To this, he responds that you only notice that you are the best “when you screw up”, a seemingly pretentious response that only adds fuel to the ambition and quest for excellence through

perfection (210). Evidently, Henry is in a situation where his human sanity is compromised. He has a massive ego that will affect him soon in the future.
Henry’s pursuit of perfection almost caused him his life at one point, therefore showing his reckless behaviour in pursuit of perfection.

After one game, Henry decides to “halfway across the lake” without a life vest, effectively attempting to commit suicide (345). Henry is so depressed of his failures that he is willing to contemplate and attempt suicide. He “want[ed] everything to be perfect” and that was what could have killed him (346). Eventually however he has a change of heart and returned to the shore, “peeled off his wet clothes” as if he was peeling off a piece of himself, a layer, before going to sleep (347). This “idea of perfection, a perfectly simple life in which every move had meaning and baseball was just the medium through which he could make that happen” has officially taken over Henry as seen in these episodes of attempted suicide and metaphorical peeling a piece of himself off. Later, Henry quits baseball due to these specific moments of failure, he allows himself to enter a compromising situation whereby he essentially gives up on

life.
Another pinnacle of Henry’s depression is seen with his stay at Pella where he decided to keep bodily fluids bottled for preservation; this shows his reluctance to move on and embrace change. At one point he “wanted to keep the pee forever”, signifying how much Henry wanted to hold on to a time when things were better (417). He is afraid of change, especially now at the point where he is very depressed and feels as though he has no future in store. To expand, he longs for a “permanent collection of all his pee and shit” because he is becoming anorexic, since “he’d stop eating” (418). The pursuit of perfection, at this point has not only caused him to be depressed, but also caused him to attempt suicide as well as become anorexic. All of this is attributed to his moments of failure, which clearly create a compromising situation for him.
Henry’s moments of failure result in a compromising situation, eventually leading to his demise, as seen with the Gatorade incident. Furthermore, drugs are proposed to Henry as a way to cure his depression by Pella when she “reached into her sweatshirt pocket and pulled out her little vial of sky-blue pills”, his depression and anxiety had at this point risen where his own friend would offer him narcotics to cure it, clearly showing the extent of Henry’s depression and the dire need to resolve it as soon as possible (419). When Henry finally returned to play, his pursuit of perfection still existed. For instance, he was afraid that if the team lost “they would blame him, rightly blame him, blame him forever, for dragging himself halfway across the country to jinx them” (457). This mode of self-conscious and egoistic thinking furthermore attributes to Henry’s demising state of mind. When he was notified about Pella’s dad’s death, all he could do was pat Owen “weakly on the back” and remarking “I’ll tell Coach Cox.” (471). This event, although not a specific moment of failure on Henry’s part, was one that continued to contribute to Henry’s case of depression, even though he was now back in play. It would bother Henry to the point where later he would end up in a hospital. He is “in the hospital”, specifically “the psych ward”, a breaking point for him (481). He is clearly very depressed, unhappy, and essentially in a state of feeling like a failure since again he is in a psych ward of a hospital. However, at the same time a MLB scout is offering him a major contract. Henry’s perfectionist side strongly considers this offer, but in the end, he turns it down in order to continue playing baseball at the college level.
After the course of events that have unfolded, Henry plays his final game, with which he used a different glove. Because “with Zero, he would have missed it, but Schwartz’s glove had an extra inch of leather”, at this point Henry’s mind-set has changed, resulting in him becoming less of a perfectionist than he used to be (512). He is able to use a different glove besides Zero, which is a tell-tale sign of his growing flexibility and open-mindedness. Therefore, those little moments of failure, depression, anxiety and stress have in the end caused Henry to change his mind-set from perfectionism to being able to cope with less than perfection. Henry decides he would continue to play baseball at division 3 level instead of taking the MLB offer because he matured and realized that what he really wanted was division 3 baseball. Henry could have easily took the MLB offer for the money, fame, and glory, but to pick low-level baseball instead shows a sense of maturity that Henry did not have when he first came to Westish.
Therefore, the little moments of failure that caused compromising situations for Henry were harmful at first glance, but in the long run, actually did a whole lot of good for Henry, as he was able to truly mature and understand that success in life is not about perfection. Perfection and striving for it is great, but it is not the only template to success in life. Even when Henry reached the quintessential peak of success as defined for an athlete, being recruited by professional scouts, he turned it down because he knew that playing division 3 baseball would be more internally fulfilling than playing in the professional atmosphere. This shows Henry’s newly-found sense of emotional and physical maturity that was not present upon his arrival at Westish. Upon his arrival, he was fuelled with the desire to achieve nothing but perfection, a mis-guided intention. This mis-guided intention caused him to learn the hard way about the meaning of life and the true path to success and living a fulfilling life.