Fielding Average (The Art of Fielding, by Chad Harbach)

I'm still enjoying (about half-way through) Chad Harbach's "The Art of Fielding," but I have to say I'm a little disappointed that it's not the book it started out to be, or at least not the book I expected it to be. The first few chapters led me to think of this as a coming-of-age college novel largely about two guys on the same baseball team with very different backgrounds, temperaments, skill sets. The older student/player recruits the younger one to come to his small college, and the younger is at least initially quite a misfit - few friends, no social skills. But the novel does not move in expected ways. First of all, Harbach moves the characters pretty quickly through time - three years of college in a flash. Second, he doesn't really explore the gradual maturation of the younger character/player, Henry, but moves on to other issues and other characters, particularly the university president, a repressed homosexual, and his crush on one of the ballplayers (Henry's roommate, Owen) and the arrival on campus of the prex's daughter, Pella (like the windows?), leaving her husband without a leaving a note (very improbable) and beginning a relationship with the older player, Schwartz, who laments that he has been rejected by all law schools. I find the story, though still very well written and compelling in its way, moving toward more conventional melodrama - but that may be just me and my mistaken expectations. I am mostly interested in Henry - who now, half-way through the book, seems on the verge of losing his uncanny skills at fielding - a Bill Blass experience, or is it something more overtly psychological, like his repressed homoerotic jealousies coming to the fore and interfering with his game?