It takes years of training to reach the big leagues. You have to practice every day, sharpen your skills, and maintain your focus, keeping your eyes on the prize. If you're good enough, and maybe just a little lucky too, you might get a six-figure signing bonus with your favorite team and become a national sensation almost overnight. And hopefully you can do all this without the assistance of performance-enhancing drugs.

Now, replace "team" in our intro with "publishing house" and you basically have the behind-the-scenes story of author Chad Harbach and his 2011 debut novel The Art of Fielding, a book more famous for Harbach's blockbuster publishing deal than for the content itself.

We'll explain this way: how much would you pay for The Art of Fielding? $14.99 for paperback? $8.99 for a digital copy? Both prices are a bargain compared to the $650,000 Little, Brown, and Co. paid Harbach to publish the book. (Plus, we think Doubleday publishing would be better equipped to handle a book about baseball). That figure was one of the highest advances ever for a book without a vampire in it. And the only performance-enhancing drugs Harbach probably consumed were gallons of coffee to keep writing.

The Art of Fielding, which Harbach wrote over the course of nine years, was finally published in 2011. It follows a promising young shortstop named Henry Skrimshander. Henry excels at college ball and has the potential for a Major League deal, until he chokes and can't stop overthinking his game, putting his prospects at risk. It sounds like Henry has trouble getting used to fame and success (much like Harbach himself).

And "success" here is perhaps not the best choice of words. Baseball may be America's pastime, but Harbach's novel failed to reach the status of America's favorite book, selling just 142,000 copies in 2012. (Maybe it needed more vampires in it—or dragons… or vampire dragons who just happen to be boy wizards.) Given those figures, Harbach's huge advance raised some criticism, prompting B.R. Myers with The Atlantic to call the book a "hyped-up work" that "fizzles." But like the rivalry between Red Sox and Yankees, The Art of Fielding has a fair share of reviewers putting on a proverbial foam finger to cheer for it. Judith Shulevitz of Slate calls it an "oddly charming, upbeat" novel and compares Harbach favorably to David Foster Wallace.

In order to decide which team to root for, you have to watch the team play first—or in this case, read the book. So step up to the plate and take a swing at The Art of Fielding today.

Whether it's to pitch a perfect game, have the perfect wedding, look like Barbie or Ken, or get the perfect photograph of a weasel riding on a woodpecker, everybody wants to do something perfectly. We can all identify with the drive to be the best. The central conflict in The Art of Fielding is man vs. himself, and the man who is most conflicted about his desire to be perfect is Henry. All his young life, he's been the perfect zero-error shortstop. And he thinks this is going to last forever.

Spoiler alert: it doesn't. After Henry's first error—a throw so bad it hits his teammate in the face—Henry crumbles faster than a piece of day-old coffee cake (and brother, that's crumbly). Henry's one error quickly snowballs into another, and another, until he's making more bad throws than good ones. So what does Henry do? Does he find a way to clear his head? Nope. He obsesses over his failure until he becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy and quits. (At least he never cries, though, because we all know there's no crying in baseball.)

It's not all doom and gloom, though. Henry's journey shows us that, even if we never plan to pick up a baseball bat, what's really important isn't being perfect, but learning how to cope with failure. Does Henry ever bounce back? You'll have to read The Art of Fielding to find out. Just, you know, try not to beat yourself up if you don't.