When ‘‘The Slump’’ begins, its narrator, a professional baseball player, has already been experiencing trouble with his hitting. The opening line goes right past the subject of a batting slump, leaving readers to understand the subject matter from the story’s title, and starts immediately with guesses about what might be causing the problem. The first topic that the narrator suggests is ‘‘reflexes,’’ which his coach and the press assume to be causing his problem. He explains that he does not think it is caused by reflexes, though. As evidence for why he discounts this theory, he explains that the night before his wife surprised him in their bedroom with a rubber gorilla mask and he jumped under the bed in less than a second—she had a stopwatch ready and timed his reaction.

He remembers how easy it used to be for him to hit before falling into this slump, how the pitched ball seemed to float in the air before his eyes so that he could see every detail about it clearly. Now, though, the ball is obscured in a cloud, a ‘‘spiral of vagueness.’’ He paraphrases the Danish philosopher, Søren Kierkegaard, as saying that ‘‘You can’t see a blind spot.’’ Aware that his hitting is his strong point as a ballplayer, he reflects on the likelihood, which he has already seen reported in a newspaper, that his team will try to trade him.

One good thing about being unable to hit is that he feels less pressure. He recalls how he used to leave home for the stadium and as he drew closer and closer, he could feel the butterflies in his stomach growing. He thought of himself as a thief, and walking through the corridors to the locker room, he imagined that he was being taken to the electric chair. It seemed like a dream, then, that players he had looked up to all his life recognized him. The whole experience of being on the team had been so amazing to him that he was constantly nervous—‘‘by the time I got into the cage, I couldn’t remember if I batted left or right.’’

Since the slump, however, the pre-game nervousness is gone. He drives to the stadium singing along with the radio, ignores the fans on the street, strides into the stadium, and performs perfectly in the batting cage before the game. When he steps up to the plate to bat, however, he is overcome with self-consciousness and unable to hit at all.

He describes his situation as ‘‘panic hunger.’’ It is not the kind of hunger that drives him to achieve what he needs to sustain himself, which is what his detractors say he has lost as he has grown successful. He compares panic hunger to the intensity that a child puts into trying to catch a ball, becoming so consumed with the idea of doing well that he closes his eyes as the ball approaches. He tries to force himself to keep his eyes open, to look at something off in the distance (the example he gives is ‘‘some nuns in far left field’’), but his eyes keep closing.

The slump that has affected his hitting has affected other parts of his life, as well. He avoids intimate contact with his wife, although he knows that it disappoints and angers her. He rides the lawn mower around the lawn so often that the grass is all dead. Filled with inexplicable dread, he is afraid to see his children trying at baseball. When he goes to Florida with the team, the repetitive sameness of wave after wave...