The author of the award-winning novel “The Art of Fielding” is accused of pilfering substantial elements of an unpublished novel by a former Division III college baseball player, according to a copyright infringement suit filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.

Charles Green claims that a film script first developed in the mid-1990s that evolved into a novel, “Bucky's 9th,” that was circulated widely to publishers in the early 2000s bears “striking similarities” to Chard Harbach's acclaimed novel published in 2011.

According to Green, the two works bear particular “uncanny parallelism” in the final act of the story. Green, who played baseball at Swarthmore College in the mid-1980s, argues that the “substantial similarity … could occur only as a result of Harbach's access to a version (or versions) of 'Bucky's' and his large-scale misappropriation of Green's creative efforts.” Green previously obtained a copyright registration number for “Bucky's” which was a completed work as of 2007, with numerous previous drafts produced stretching back a decade.