The Art of Fielding_ A Novel - Chad Harbach [106]
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. It didn’t matter how beautifully you performed sometimes, what you did on your best day, how many spectacular plays you made. You weren’t a painter or a writer—you didn’t work in private and discard your mistakes, and it wasn’t just your masterpieces that counted. What mattered, as for any machine, was repeatability. Moments of inspiration were nothing compared to elimination of error. The scouts cared little for Henry’s superhuman grace; insofar as they cared they were suckered-in aesthetes and shitty scouts. Can you perform on demand, like a car, a furnace, a gun? Can you make that throw one hundred times out of a hundred? If it can’t be a hundred, it had better be ninety-nine.
At the far left of the shelf of DVDs was a single unlabeled videocassette. Schwartz slid it out with a finger and popped it into the ancient VCR.
“What’s this?” Henry asked.
“You’ll see.”
Schwartz watched this tape alone sometimes, late at night, the way he reread certain passages of Aurelius. It restored some nameless element of his personality that threatened to slip away if he didn’t stay vigilant.
The camera, that day, had been positioned on a tripod behind home plate. A thin stripe of chain-link backstop cut at an angle across the frame. The sun glared white against the lens, bleaching out one side, so that when Henry ranged to the camera’s right his white undershirt and finally his entire scrawny body dissolved in a ghostly burst of light.
Henry watched himself field a few grounders and whip them to first. “Is this from Peoria?”
Schwartz nodded.
“Weird. Where’d you get it?”
“My Legion team. We taped all our games.” After Henry finished fielding on that scorching afternoon, Schwartz had checked the camera and found its red light still lit. He wanted a record of what he’d seen—proof to other people, and especially to himself, that he hadn’t exaggerated Henry’s talent or hallucinated him altogether. So he commandeered the tape, watched it several times, mailed a copy to Coach Cox. It had served, more or less, as Henry’s Westish application.
Henry didn’t know the tape existed. Schwartz couldn’t quite say why he’d kept it to himself for the past three years—as if there were a part of Henry that belonged more to him than it did to Henry. That he didn’t want to share, not even with Henry.
“Weird,” Henry said again. “Look how skinny I was. Somebody give that kid some SuperBoost.”
“Just watch.”
Henry tossed a baseball from hand to hand, gazed at the screen. “What am I watching for?”
“Just watch, Skrim.”
“I thought maybe you’d noticed something.”
“Maybe you’ll notice something,” Schwartz snapped. “If you shut up and watch.”
Henry looked hurt. He stopped tossing the baseball, stared at the screen.