Was Melville a baseball fan? Was Luis Aparicio a writer?: The Art of Fielding

(Putting aside Don Quixote for a few days to catch up with book group): Started Chad Harbach's "The Art of Fielding" and find it very well written, easy to read, easy to like, hoping for the best (in this year of, as I begin to look back on it, slim pickings for new fiction, at least for new novels) - From the first 60 or so pages in which Henry (long last name) gets recruited to play shortstop at a Division III small somewhat elite Wisconsin College (Westish - modeled on Beloit perhaps?) and finds himself very much lost and alone, except on the diamond: this genre of an outsider, often a working-class kid, making his or her way at an elite school, has been pretty well trodden ground, most often from a woman's POV: Sittenfield's Prep, Lorrie Moore's The Top of the Stairs (or whatever that disappointing novel was called), Tartt's The Secret History (one of the best), and perhaps from the guy's POV Farrelly's Outside Providence? - here the twist is first of all the baseball novel, more familiar ground here (there are echoes of The Natural) but the college setting is very intriguing, and the homoerotic elements: Henry's roommate, Owen, is gay (and the college prez has a crush on him); Owen gets injured by a thrown ball (an echo, unconscious?, of Irving's Owen Meany?) - and as you can see the novel is also dense with literary allusions - the college itself has adopted Melville as its mascot (yes, in Wisconsin, which Harbach explains with a bit of fancy footwork). Non-baseball fans, who will still like this novel I think, may want to know that Henry's idol, the great (but not real) shortstop Aparicio Rodriguez, is modeled on the great (real) Luis Aparicio and Ozzie Smith. I think the real Aparicio did write a well-respected manual on fielding, didn't he?