The Art of Fielding

All Things Considered interviews author Chad Harbach about his novel, The Art of Fielding:

Skrimshander ascends to NCAA stardom at Westish with the help of Mike Schwartz, a team captain for the Westish baseball team. Where college recruiters see a skinny, sunken-chested benchwarmer, Shwartz sees something else.
"Schwartz is a person who feels that he doesn't possess a kind of transcendent genius," Harbach says. "That's what he sees when Henry is out on the field."
Skrimshander, a student of the game, carries around a worn paperback by a fictional shortstop, also called The Art Of Fielding. He's memorized the book's numbered mantras, guidance like:

3. There are three stages: Thoughtless being. Thought. Return to thoughtless being.
33. Do not confuse the first and third stages. Thoughtless being is attained by everyone, the return to thoughtless being by a very few.

The book follows Skrimshander as he loses the ability to field the ball without thought, he can no longer field the ball and throw cleanly.  The author mentions in the interview that Chuck Knoblauch struggled with the same thing, but it is also much like what happened to Rick Ankiel and Steve Blass on the pitcher's mound.  It sounds like a book I'll have to pick up sometime.