By Jonah Keri
Grantland, February 8, 2012

Some pitchers grew to be known as artists, skilled practitioners who worked for years on mastering their tricky pitches and hiding their guilt.

“I was a big fan of Gaylord Perry,” said Derek Zumsteg, author of the book The Cheater’s Guide to Baseball. “I would go with my dad to see him pitch for the Mariners. Dad would say to me, ‘He throws a spitball, watch for it,’ and my eyes would be as big as saucers. You’d watch him fidget through his whole routine. Then he’d throw this crazy pitch. The batter would swing and miss, then look at the ump as if to say, ‘Come on!’ It was so, so cool.”

Perry was a very good pitcher with great command and exceptional endurance, firing 300 or more innings six times between 1969 and 1975. But you couldn’t separate his success from the Vaseline-loaded pitches he slimed at hitters. Perry was so successful throwing illegal pitches and so impossible to catch that after the 1973 season, baseball began granting much broader powers of judgment to umpires who suspected cheating. The next year, Perry spilled his guts in his book, Me and the Spitter, An Autobiographical Confession, copping to his rule-breaking and even sharing intimate details on exactly how he threw his various spitballs and greaseballs. He was already 35 years old by then. All he did thereafter was pitch another decade and rack up 137 more wins, returning to his illicit ways in rapid order.

“It was like a Penn & Teller thing,” Zumsteg said. “‘I’m going to tell you how the trick is done, I’m going to stop doing it … then I’m going to do it again.’ He really was a magician.”

The magician went more than two decades without getting caught, too, constantly mixing up where he stashed his precious petroleum jelly, perfecting hand wipes, and keeping umpires guessing. It wasn’t until his 21st season that Perry finally got suspended for his trickery.

The advantage Perry, Sutton, and their contemporaries had on today’s pitchers was infrastructure. Sutton and Drysdale could and would exchange notes on how to beat hitters using doctored pitches. If you didn’t have a teammate who threw a spitter, your pitching coach may have known how to throw one. Or a pitcher on another team. Or a recently retired pitcher willing to share his trade secrets. You apprenticed at the feet of the masters, learned the ways of deception, then passed your own knowledge on to the next generation. But Sutter’s emergence and the subsequent spread of the split-fingered fastball ate away at that support system. The incentive to throw a spitball dropped with a new weapon emerging, and then even if a pitcher wanted to learn to throw a spitball, there were far fewer teachers willing and able to show him how it was done.

“Pitchers got reluctant to do it simply because they didn’t know how to do it,” said Jim Hickey, pitching coach for the Tampa Bay Rays and a former minor league pitcher. That knowledge base eroded so badly that today, “it’s like a hitter trying to change the way he positions his hands. He’s afraid to do it, even for one at-bat, because he doesn’t want to go 0-for-1. Pitchers now are afraid of using an experimental pitch, getting whacked, and losing the game because of it.”

That’s not the only reason, of course. The advent of newer pitches such as the cut fastball have given pitchers even more weapons to deploy against hitters without risking the suspensions and damaged reputations that can come from getting caught. Catching a pitcher in the act has become easier, too. Chesbro and Cicotte pitched decades before the advent of television. When Perry and Sutton first broke in, you might have one or two primitive cameras to cover the entire field of play. Even when Rogers got caught on live TV just six years ago, games weren’t routinely broadcast in high-definition the way they are now. Now you have an army of crystal-clear cameras and legions of video experts able to slice and dice footage and discover the tiniest little transgression. Advanced play-by-play systems such as PITCHf/x and TrackMan go even further, tracking the arm angle, break, and velocity on every single pitch thrown in a big league game. Even a handful of aberrations would show up as big, flashing question marks to the brilliant analysts who break down such data for a living. Technology has done more than its share to exterminate the spitter.

Of course, that doesn’t mean pitchers have stopped cheating completely. With such a sharp decline in teaching the pitch, so many technological safeguards, and so few embarrassing incidents to raise public pressure, umpires aren’t exactly hunting for rogues.

“We have always tried to keep our eyes on the pitcher,” said Randy Marsh, MLB’s director of major league umpires, who spent 27 years umping in the big leagues. “They have to step off the rubber if they’re going to their mouth to rub the ball up — we watch that. But there hasn’t been any crusade or directive with umpires to go after guys with spitballs. It hasn’t even been mentioned.”

There are factors working in a pitcher’s favor, if he wanted to bend the rules. Though blatantly spitting on a ball is strictly forbidden and easy to spot, the definition of a foreign substance remains vague. A rosin bag sits at the foot of every pitcher’s mound in every ballpark. Pitchers are allowed to use that rosin to dust their hands and get a better grip on the ball. Leave a rosin bag out in the rain, though, and you get a substance that’s so sticky, it’s “as good as having pine tar in your hand,” said Marsh. Still, you won’t see many umps walk out to the mound, chemistry sets in hand, to gauge the relative moisture of a rosin bag. Beyond stashing rosin, pine tar, or other substances on their person — say, under the brim of a cap or on a sleeve — enforcing the rules depends on an umpire’s interpretation. Even the best umpires are, of course, subject to human error.

A bigger factor is the reluctance of managers to call out a pitcher. Hickey said he’s talked more than once with Rays manager Joe Maddon about a pitcher they suspect might be cheating. But if Maddon asks an ump to inspect an opposing pitcher, he’s inviting other teams to come back at his guys twice as hard. Even if James Shields or David Price or Matt Moore is found to be clean, getting frisked by an umpire in plain view of an entire stadium could break the pitcher’s routine, maybe even leave him rattled. Not only that, “you don’t want to be that unsportsmanlike guy who’s calling people out,” Hickey said.

To defenders of baseball and literary fiction, the charges against each are familiar, and overlapping: too slow, too precious, not enough action. The only realistic response is a resigned shrug. Guilty, and so what? You may as well complain that lemons are too yellow. The indictment amounts to a kind of category error; detractors went looking for entertainment, and found art instead.

Chad Harbach makes the case for baseball, thrillingly, in his slow, precious and altogether excellent first novel, “The Art of Fielding.” “You loved it,” he writes of the game, “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.”

If it seems a stretch for a baseball novel to hold truth and beauty and the entire human condition in its mitt, well, “The Art of Fielding” isn’t really a baseball novel at all, or not only. It’s also a campus novel and a bromance (and for that matter a full-fledged gay romance), a comedy of manners and a tragicomedy of errors — the baseball kind as well as the other kind, which as Alexander Pope pointed out also has something to do with the human condition.

But it starts and ends with baseball. The novel centers on the Westish College Harpooners, a Division III team from the Wisconsin side of Lake Michigan that sees its fortunes rise and then rise some more with the arrival of a nearly magical young shortstop named Henry Skrimshander. Henry is an infield savant, scrawny but supremely gifted, and by his junior year he’s chasing records and being scouted by the majors as a top draft prospect. Then, in the baseball equivalent of a werewolf movie, it all goes terribly wrong: Henry changes, before his teammate’s horrified eyes, into Chuck Knoblauch. In other words (for those who don’t remember Knoblauch’s struggles with the turn-of-the-millennium Yankees), he enters a prolonged and agonizing funk in which, for no good reason, he finds it impossible to field his position.

“Only two balls were hit to Henry,” Harbach writes in one of many crisp passages about what it’s like to play the game. “Both times he double-clutched and made a soft, hesitant throw. Instead of rifle shots fired at a target, they felt like doves released from a box.” If it’s painful to watch Henry fall apart, it’s excruciating to track his dissolution thought by anguished microthought: “The distance called for a casual sidearm fling — he’d done it ten thousand times. But now he paused, ­double-clutched. He’d thrown the last one too soft, better put a little mustard on it — no, no, not too hard, too hard would be bad too. He clutched again. Now the runner was closing in, and Henry had no choice but to throw it hard, really hard, too hard for Ajay to handle from 30 feet away.” This is the paradox of sports novels, which like all novels thrive by leaving their heroes vulnerable and exposed: the worse the play, the better the fiction.

As befits a shortstop, Henry is the linchpin around which the book’s other major characters revolve. These include a couple of his teammates, the lumbering catcher and captain Mike Schwartz, who is moved to recite Robert Lowell when he first sees Henry play, and the skilled hitter (and fervent environmentalist) Owen Dunne, who introduces himself to Henry with the statistically improbable phrase “I’ll be your gay mulatto roommate.” They also include a couple of people who might quaintly be called team boosters: the college president, Guert Affenlight, and his prodigal daughter, Pella, who has fled her marriage and is enduring a crisis of confidence that echoes Henry’s own. Over the capacious expanse of the novel’s 500 pages, these characters come together and move apart in ways that a resident adviser might not recommend but that remind us our lives are shaped at least as much by our mistakes as by our ideals.

Measured against other big, ambitious debuts by striving young writers (Harbach is a founder and editor of the literary magazine n+1), “The Art of Fielding” is surprisingly old-fashioned and almost freakishly well behaved. There’s some strained humor in the early going, when Harbach seems unsure of his register, but once he settles into a mildly satiric mode of psychological realism — the mode of latter-dayJonathan Franzen, rather than the high turbulence of David Foster Wallace — the book assumes an attractive, and fitting, 19th-century stateliness. President Affenlight is a Melville scholar, and thanks to a discovery he made during his undergraduate days at Westish, the school has adopted Melville as its presiding spirit: hence the Harpooner mascot, and hence the brooding Melville statue that looks out over the lake. (In this light, Henry’s surname seems a remnant of the jokier book Harbach may have intended, but oh well: silly names are so much a feature of serious fiction these days that it’s hard to object, and in any case he’s mostly called “Skrimmer” or “Skrim.”)

In fact, the novel is so rife with literary allusions that you have to wonder whether Harbach, who studied English at Harvard, cares more about baseball or books: a sport, or a pastime? Besides Lowell and Melville, there are explicit or implicit references to Emerson and Dickinson and Whitman, to “Death in Venice” and “A Prayer for Owen Meany”; even the title, “The Art of Fielding,” can be read as a winking reference to that other Henry, who knew something about satiric novels. So it feels exactly right that Henry’s crisis is precipitated by over­analysis — he’s paralyzed by thought, by an inability to simply act (or react). This is credible from a sports point of view, and fraught with significance from a literary one. Thinking, after all, is a writer’s primary weapon, but every writer knows it’s double-­edged; live too much in your head and you don’t live enough in the world. This is Hamlet’s quandary, and, as one character unsurprisingly notes, also Prufrock’s: “Do I dare, and do I dare?” Harbach’s achievement is to transfer the thinking man’s paralysis to the field of play, where every hesitation is amplified and every error judged by an exacting, bloodthirsty audience. “We all have our doubts and fragilities,” Affenlight thinks, “but poor Henry had to face his in public at appointed times, with half the crowd anxiously counting on him and the other half cheering for him to fail.”

Last year, in an essay in n+1 contrasting the writing culture of M.F.A. programs with that of the New York-based publishing industry, Harbach argued that commercial pressures push nonacademic writers to be “readable” and “middlebrow.” These aren’t necessarily insults — the middlebrow is where art and entertainment get together over canapés and cold beers, and Harbach knows it: in the same essay, he first cited Franzen’s “Freedom” as an archetype of the New York middlebrow, then praised it as “the best American novel of the young millennium.” It’s worth observing that when Harbach wrote those words, he had already received a significant advance for the very Franzen-like “Art of Fielding.” So his reflections on market pressure and the “deep authorial desire to communicate to the uninterested” have, in retrospect, the frisson of a writer anxious he was selling out. He needn’t worry. Failure and success and outsize ambition — “to want to be perfect,” as Henry puts it; “to want everything to be perfect” — these are fitting themes for a crowd-pleasing baseball story, yes, but they are also the natural concerns of a serious artist coming to terms with his powerful talent and intentions. Welcome to the big leagues, kid. Now get out there and play.

Baseball player Don Carman had grown so tired of mundane post-game interviews by 1990 that he decided to forego them altogether, and instead attached a handwritten list of stock responses to his locker along with a message to reporters: “You saw the game. Take what you need.” 

The list read as follows:

1. I’m just glad to be here. I just want to help the club any way I can.
2. Baseball’s a funny game.
3. I’d rather be lucky than good.
4. We’re going to take the season one game at a time.
5. You’re only as good as your last game (last at-bat).
6. This game has really changed.
7. If we stay healthy we should be right there.
8. It takes 24 (25) players.
9. We need two more players to take us over the top: Babe Ruth & Lou Gehrig.
10. We have a different hero every day.
11. We’ll get ‘em tomorrow.
12. This team seems ready to gel.
13. With a couple breaks, we win that game.
14. That All-Star voting is a joke.
15. The catcher and I were on the same wavelength.
16. I just went right at ‘em.
17. I did my best and that’s all I can do.
18. You just can’t pitch behind.
19. That’s the name of the game.
20. We’ve got to have fun.
21. I didn’t have my good stuff, but I battled ‘em.
22. Give the guy some credit; he hit a good pitch.
23. He, we were due to catch a break or two.
24. Yes.
25. No.
26. That’s why they pay him _____ million dollars.
27. Even I could have hit that pitch.
28. I know you are but what am I?
29. I was getting my off-speed stuff over so they couldn’t sit on the fastball.
30. I had my at ‘em ball going today.
31. I had some great plays made behind me tonight.
32. I couldn’t have done it without my teammates.
33. You saw it… write it.
34. I just wanted to go as hard as I could as long as I could.
35. I’m seeing the ball real good.
36. I hit that ball good.
37. I don’t get paid to hit.