Taking a swing at baseball philosophy
Aside from trout fishing, baseball suffers most from the tender mercies of intellectuals. In his 1991 bestseller, "Men at Work," George F. Will memorably called St. Louis Cardinals manager Whitey Herzog "the National League's Spinoza." Another brainy baseball lover, the New Hampshire poet Donald Hall, couched his 26-page, "nine-inning" poem "Baseball" as an imagined dialogue with the deceased German artist and typographer Kurt Schwitters.
Gotta love Hall! In "Baseball," which runs into 12 pages of "extra innings," he writes of driving 5 miles to pick up a copy of the Globe. "How else do I find out when the Sox trade Smoky Joe Wood for Elizabeth Bishop?" he asks.
Now the Boston Review has unearthed a 1981 letter from the late Harvard philosopher John Rawls, ruminating on baseball. Rawls, citing some insights that sprang from a conversation with University of Chicago legal scholar Harry Kalven, offers up six reasons why baseball "is the best of all games."
It's an interesting, clear argument. But it's just an argument. To mix sports analogies: When the goalie comes out of the crease, he's fair game. And when the philosophy professor emerges from Emerson Hall heading for Fenway, we can argue back.
1. Rawls asserts that "the rules of the game are in equilibrium . . . from the start, the diamond was made just the right size, the pitcher's mound just the right distance from home plate, etc. . . . The physical layout of the game is perfectly adjusted to the human skills it is meant to display and to call into graceful exercise."
Comment: Not really. There has been some fiddling with the pitcher's mound, and Rawls ignores the wild, chaotic expanse of the outfield, where the Gadsden Purchase-shaped dimensions bollix up many a game. E.g.: the Little-League-like left field at last week's Red Sox pre-season tilt in the LA Coliseum.
On the Boston Review website, Michael Evans comments: "Anyone who has played or watched Little League Baseball, Slow Pitch Softball, or Women's Fastpitch Softball (bases 60 feet, rubber 45 feet) or Pony League Baseball (bases 80 feet, rubber 55 feet) knows that double plays, bunts, steals, 'strike 'em out throw 'em out's,' and 'bang-bang' plays regularly occur at dimensions other than the arbitrary dimensions of MLB."
2. Rawls: "The game does not give unusual preference or advantage to special physical types, e.g., to tall men as in basketball . . . the tall and the short can enjoy the game together in different positions."
Lenny Dykstra . . . David Eckstein . . . even in the era of steroid-inflated torsos, there is some truth to this.
3. "The game uses all parts of the body . . . per contra soccer, where you can't touch the ball. It calls upon speed, accuracy of throw, gifts of sight for batting, shrewdness for pitchers and catchers, etc."
Yes and no. Why are so many major leaguers fat slobs who can barely run to second base? They wouldn't make it past minute three of a World Cup soccer game.
4. "All plays of the game are open to view. . . . Per contra football where it is hard to know what is happening in the battlefront along the line." Rawls praises baseball umpires, at the expense of football and basketball referees.
Rawls wrote a famous article, "Two Concepts of Rules," in which he explained, inter alia, that the "game-ness" of baseball derived not from its actions - pitching, throwing, catching - but from its rules. I think he's right about the inherent transparency of baseball.
5. "Baseball is the only game where scoring is not done with the ball, and this has the remarkable effect of concentrating the excitement of plays at different points of the field at the same time. Will the runner cross the plate before the fielder gets to the ball . . . and so on."
Rawls later corrected this point, noting that cricket likewise does not score with the ball. Sagely, he held off a more detailed discussion of this barbaric sport.
6. "Finally, there is the factor of time, the use of which is a central part of any game. Baseball shares with tennis the idea that time never runs out, as it does in basketball and football and soccer. This means that there is always time for the losing side to make a comeback."
Until 2004, that proposition meant: Unless you are the Boston Red Sox. But no longer.
Alex Beam is a Globe columnist. His e-dress is beam@globe.com.
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