Presentati

1. Baseball and the Meaning of Life
Baseball in Literature and Culture
17th Annual Conference
Middle Tennessee State University
March 30, 2012

2. James Phil Oliver
Department of Philosophy
Middle Tennessee State University
P.O. Box 73
Murfreesboro, Tennessee 37132
==
307B James Union Building
615-898-2050
poliver@mtsu.edu
"Delight Springs" -
http://delightsprings.blogspot.com/
"Up@dawn" –
http://osopher.wordpress.com/

3. Follow me, @osopher, on Twitter -
(http://twitter.com/OSOPHER)
But of course,
"You don't have to follow me.
You don't have to follow anybody."
-Brian Cohen

5. ―The Curious Case of Sidd
Finch‖ – April 1, 2011

6. Two years ago I presented “From Gibson to
McGwire” here. I was worried about how
the presence in the dugout of their new
steroidally-enhanced hitting coach might
interfere with the purity of my ancestral
devotion to the Cards. How would it play
with my own innocent openness to baseball
experience and meaning?
I’m pleased (but should I be?) to report that Big Mac’s greybearded visage did not in
any memorable way dilute my pleasure at the team’s improbable late-season run to
their 11th World Series championship in 2011.

8. And now find I have no problem contemplating the post-Albert era in St. Louis either.
So, the game really is much larger than any "star" performer.
But still I worry: Is my team loyalty admirable, or is this precisely the knee-jerk “my
country right or wrong” attitude I routinely condemn in politics? Maybe we’ll have
time to discuss that.
But for whatever reason, healthy or not, I don’t feel as alienated or jilted as some …

9. Look, as it turns out Albert Pujols was just an intelligent, attractive but ultimately
sour girlfriend. Let me explain. Your entire world revolves solely around her, and
everyone can see it except for her. You give her fancy gifts, tell her what she needs
to hear, go to one fast food restaurant to get her chicken strips then another because
"they have better fries," and join a gym to be the man she wants you to be rather
than the one who you are simply to make her feel the kind of special love you think
she deserves. But the secret is that she doesn't want the love. She wants the proof.
She doesn't want to hear that you love her; she wants to hear how much.
Even worse, she wants to remind you how lucky you are to have her. When that
turns dangerous is when you then struggle to maintain your relationship --
stepping up your game, buying fancier gifts, working extra hard just to not lose
pace, and losing yourself to make her happy and to keep her from looking at other
dudes. When that turns tragic is not when she leaves, but rather when you
convince her to stay. A relationship which requires you to prove your love is not a
relationship worth preserving.
The worst part of yesterday is that Albert Pujols tacitly told us that we are not in
his league. The best part of yesterday is that Albert Pujols tacitly proved to us that
we aren't.
Anaheim, you can have her. Just tell her to please not text us.

10. “The best thing to do if you’re going to lose a legend or three…”
(Pujols, LaRussa, Duncan)
“StL, a city that loves its Cards no matter who fills the uniforms…”
Freese: “That’s never going to happen again. But you have to turn
the page. People have short memories. And so do we.”
CBS Sports “Card Tricks” 3.9.12

11. Team Loyalty , childhood indoctrination, neuroscience
It‘s probably more accurate to say that team loyalty of this sort begins with
youthful enchantment. You got thrown together by circumstance with a magical
team — maybe one that happened to be doing well when you were a kid or one
that featured the sort of heroes children are wise to revere. You lunged upon
the team with the unreserved love that children are capable of.
The team became crystallized in your mind, coated with shimmering emotional
crystals that give it a sparkling beauty and vividness. And forever after you feel
its attraction. Whether it‘s off the menu or in the sports world, you can choose
what you‘ll purchase but you don‘t get to choose what you like.
The neuroscientists might say that, in 1969, I formed certain internal neural
structures associated with the Mets, which are forever after pleasant to
reactivate. We have a bias toward things that are familiar and especially to
those things that were familiar when life was new: the old house, the old
hometown, the people, smells and sounds we knew when we were young.
David Brooks

12. That sounds about right. For Brooks it was
the ‗69 Mets, for me the ‗67 Cards.
I left Missouri more than three decades
ago, and have even occasionally
experimented with temporary shifts of
allegiance.
But the team with the birds
perched on bats is still
magical for me, when
nothing else is.

13. Before I say another word, let me hasten to remind us all that it’s only a game.
Richard Ford wrote a very nice foreword to Roger Angell’s 2003 collection Game Time , in
which he noted that
Many people take it too seriously and
need to be told to lighten up… life’s
lessons can’t be taught very well by
overpaid twenty-two year olds…

14. That said, Angell has been dispensing meaningful baseball
wisdom for decades.
For instance:
Baseball always remains a
fraction beyond our reach.
Despite the sabermetric leap ,
it is irreducible and crazily
difficult to predict.
New Yorker blog,Oct. 30.2011, “That Series”

15. And that‘s true of our elusive quest for life‘s
largest meanings, too.
―I didn‘t hardly think about life at all ‗til I was
65 or 70,‖ says one old spectator in New
Gerontium (aka Sarasota) to another, in
Angell‘s hearing.
Plato said we shouldn‘t encourage anyone
to philosophize before their fifth or sixth
decade. I don‘t agree, but the game‘s pace
and rhythm definitely reward the grandstand
reflections of those who‘ve lived.

16. Like this guy. In 1989, Donald Hall was
diagnosed with Colon cancer,
but he eventually went into
remission. His wife Jane
Kenyon was diagnosed with
Leukemia in 1994 and she
passed away in 1995.
In 2006 he became U.S. poet
laureate.
President Obama awarded him
the National Medal of Arts in
2010.

17. His poem, "Baseball,― included
in The Museum of Clear Ideas
(1993), is the poet‘s ode to the
great American pastime and is
structured around the sequence
of a baseball game, with nine
stanzas of nine lines each.
Hall is passionate for the Sox.
Hall on the Red Sox, 2004
Hall‘s poem ―The Coffee Cup‖
New Yorker podcast: Hall looks out his
window

18. “The meaning of life”…The topic
sounds pretentious and vague and even
a little comical, and although I’ve
actually taught a course called “The
Meaning of Life” I probably wouldn’t
have proposed it for this year’s
conference if I hadn’t happened to be
reading Donald Hall at the very
moment when I received Ron Kates’s
email.

19. Hall now lives alone in the ancestral New Hampshire farmhouse he shared with
Kenyon for many years. He wrote about that experience recently.

20. Generation after
generation, his family‘s
old people sat at this
window to watch the
year. There are beds in
this house where babies
were born, where the
same babies died eighty
years later. After a life of
loving the old, by natural
law the writer turned old
himself.
Read more

21. The Baseball Players
BY DONALD HALL
Against the bright
grass the white-knickered
players tense, seize,
and attend. A moment
ago, outfielders
and infielders adjusted the catcher twitched
their clothing, glanced a forefinger; the batter
at the sun and settled rotated his bat
forward, hands on knees; in a slow circle. But now
the pitcher walked back they pause: wary,
of the hill, established exact, suspended while
his cap and returned;. abiding moonrise
lightens the angel
of the overgrown
garden, and Walter Blake
Adams, who died
at fourteen, waits
under the footbridge

22. Ah, the game! The game!
But what of the meaning of life…
Baseball connects American males
with each other, not only through
bleacher friendships and neighbor
loyalties, not only through barroom
fights, but most importantly
through generations.
D. Hall, “Baseball and the Meaning of Life,” in
The Complete Armchair Book of Baseball

23. Right… but if you’ve seen “Field of
Dreams”…
or read Doris Kearns Goodwin on
growing up in Brooklyn…
or hung out at my house, you’d strike
“males” from that statement.

24. The little girl in Field of Dreams, you’ll recall, can see the ghostly “baseball men” her
father sees. Both see with innocent eyes. The absence of cynicism, the openness to
experience and meaning, couldn’t be clearer.
But, that film’s reach far exceeded its grasp, meaning-wise. James Earl Jones’s famous
speech (“This field, this game, reminds us of all that was once good and that could be
again” etc.) earned one of Roger Angell’s shorter bursts of eloquence.
“Get a grip.”

25. Dewey’s “continuous human community” John Dewey
Philosopher
Educator
Class of '79
―The things in civilization we most
prize are not of ourselves. They
exist by grace of the doings and
sufferings of the continuous
human community in which we
are a link.
Ours is the responsibility of
conserving, transmitting,
rectifying and expanding
the heritage of values we have
received, that those who come
after us may receive it more solid
and secure, more widely
accessible and more generously
shared than we have received it.‖
A Common Faith

26. Dewey's antipathy for spectator theories of
knowledge did not block his acute perception
of "the sources of art in human experience
[that] will be learned by him who sees how the
tense grace of the ball-player infects the
onlooking crowd. . . ."

27. Dewey's critics charge him with an obsessive instrumentalism, but he
understood well enough what William Carlos Williams called the "spirit of
uselessness― which for some of us can drench an afternoon or evening at the
ballpark, or a morning in the garden, in delight.
The crowd at the ball
game
is moved uniformly
by a spirit of
uselessness
which delights them —
all the exciting detail
of the chase
and the escape, the
error
the flash of genius —
all to no end save
beauty
the eternal – (continues)

28. "When my revered friend and
teacher William James wrote
an essay on 'A Moral
Equivalent for War' (sic), I
suggested to him that
baseball already embodied all
the moral value of war, so far
as war had any moral value.
He listened sympathetically
and was amused, but he did
not take me seriously enough.
All great men have their
limitations.― Morris Raphael Cohen

29. OUR judgments
concerning the worth of
things, big or little,
depend on the feelings
the things arouse in us.
The spectator's judgment is sure to miss the root of the
matter, and to possess no truth.
―On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings‖

30. The solid meaning of life is
always the same eternal
thing,—the marriage,
namely, of some unhabitual
ideal, however special, with
some fidelity, courage, and
endurance; with some
man's or woman's pains.
—And, whatever or
wherever life may be, there
will always be the chance for
that marriage to take place.
―What Makes a Life Significant‖

31. Keeping score:
This year I read the best
example of literary
baseball fiction I’ve seen
in ears, The Art of
Fielding. It’s about
baseball the same
way Moby Dick‘s about a
fish.
Actually it is about that, too. But also about “Aparicio Rodriguez”
and the Tao of playing shortstop, of working to achieve mastery,
of learning the meaning of humility, of pursuing a dream with
courage and persistence and pain. It’s about the value and joy of
practice practice practice.
Art of Fielding

32. Every baseball fanatic of years who contracted this blessed affliction in
childhood understands "the thrill of the grass," the ripple of pleasure and
anticipation and the promise of happy absorption that comes with that first
glimpse of outfield through the grandstand tunnel.

33. “Go Cubs Go”
JUNE 16 2011. Chicago, my kind of town. Why do I only go
every thirty-nine years? I actually think I appreciated it
more this time, through the extended perceptions of my
younger traveling companions.
Wrigley in '72 was not
nearly the "religious
experience" of Monday
night, when a capacity
crowd rose yet again in
the 7th inning to give
spirited, full-throated, un-
ironic voice to our real
national anthem. Harry's
been gone for several
years, but only in body.

34. Then, the improbable 1-0 win against the 1st-place
Brewers sealed, there was this victory anthem. Younger
Daughter, a Cubs fan by choice, was in heaven. We all
were.

35. Cubs Win! “So real it’s unreal.” Not good enough?

36. Good Enough
FEB.24 2012. My old
teacher John Lachs delivered
this year‘s inaugural Berry
Lecture at Vanderbilt last night.
‖Why is Good Enough not Good
Enough for Us?‖ It was just as
I‘ve come to expect of his talks
through the years, thoughtful
and elegant and crisply
performed.
It spurned Platonism, the impossible and stultifying
―pursuit of perfection‖ which he said…

37. is not the search for something definite and well-known. The limits of human
capacity and the vagueness of the ideal make attainment of perfection
impossible, yet its lure ruins our satisfaction with what is clearly excellent and
therefore good enough.
This isn‘t the ―good enough‖ of Lake Wobegon, where things could always be
worse, but the genuine good of ἀρετή [aretê] that ought to be enough to fill our
hearts and entice our eagerness for the morrow. But most of us fall prey to
perfectionism at one time or another, and cheat ourselves of the life
satisfactions we‘ve earned.

38. After the talk I asked Lachs if
he‘d seen Moneyball. He
hasn‘t. But consider the case
of poor Billy Beane, Oakland
Athletics General Manager.
Incapable of relishing his small-market team‘s record-
setting win streak or his own unorthodox contributions to
that achievement, he‘s a ―perfect‖ illustration of Lachs‘s
thesis.
The A‘s didn‘t win the Big One at season‘s end, so the
perfectionist GM considered himself and his team a failure.
He couldn‘t give himself a moment‘s pause to mark and
remember their remarkable success.

39. Final Score: 0-0
JAN. 14 2012. I find myself thinking this morning about Lawrence Krauss and Billy
Beane, an unlikely pairing unless you spend as much time as I pondering the
mysteries of the universe and the diamond.
Krauss was on SciFri talking
about his new book, spun out
of his viral video, making the case
that there‘s enough something in
―nothing‖ to make a universe. Or
multiverses.
And Beane was in Moneyball, the
movie based on Michael Lewis‘s
book…

40. Beane, I think, at least as depicted in the film, is ultimately a sad
figure who can‘t celebrate his victories because he expects never to
suffer big defeats. His daughter‘s serenade is painfully accurate:
―You‘re a loser, Dad,‖ not because he loses but because he can‘t fully
accept his passing victories, can‘t ―enjoy the show.‖
Still waiting to win the last game? None of us wins the last game, it all
ends in a draw. Nothing-nothing.
So maybe what a fan needs most , to find meaning in baseball, is the
consolation of quasi-religion?

41. Annie Savoy's "Church of Baseball
I believe in the Church of
Baseball. I've tried all the
major religions, and most of
the minor ones. I've
worshipped Buddha, Allah,
Brahma, Vishnu, Siva, trees,
mushrooms, and Isadora
Duncan. I know things. For
instance, there are 108
beads in a Catholic rosary
and there are 108 stitches in
a baseball.
When I heard that, I gave Jesus a chance. But it just didn't
work out between us…

42. The Lord laid too much guilt on me. I prefer metaphysics to theology. You see,
there's no guilt in baseball, and it's never boring... which makes it like sex.
There's never been a ballplayer slept with me who didn't have the best year of
his career. Making love is like hitting a baseball: you just gotta relax and
concentrate.
Besides, I'd never sleep with a player hitting under .250... not unless he had a
lot of RBIs and was a great glove man up the middle. You see, there's a
certain amount of life wisdom I give these boys. I can expand their minds.
Sometimes when I've got a ballplayer alone, I'll just read Emily Dickinson or
Walt Whitman to him, and the guys are so sweet, they always stay and listen.
'Course, a guy'll listen to anything if he thinks it's foreplay.
I make them feel confident, and they make me feel safe, and pretty. 'Course,
what I give them lasts a lifetime; what they give me lasts 142 games.
Sometimes it seems like a bad trade. But bad trades are part of baseball - now
who can forget Frank Robinson for Milt Pappas, for God's sake? It's a long
season and you gotta trust it. I've tried 'em all, I really have, and the only church
that truly feeds the soul, day in, day out, is the Church of Baseball.

43. To each her own. But I think what a fan needs most, for meaning in baseball, is
not religion but patience. Time changes everything. It‘s worth waiting for.

44. "The game is a repository of age-old American verities . . .
and yet at the same time a mirror of the present moment."
Ken Burns
Baseball has always had an uncanny appeal to intellectuals
and poets, from Whitman ("I see great things in baseball")
on,…
Morris R. Cohen, Robert Frost, Bartlett Giamatti, Doris
Kearns Goodwin
Stephen Jay Gould, David Halberstam, Donald Hall,
Christopher Lehmann-Haupt
Bernard Malamud,, John Updike, William Carlos Williams…

45. Those creatively images in which a
swatting Ruth melds with an Aaron, Mantle,
Maris, Mays, or
McGwire demonstrate at some level how
this mere game can
encourage its devotees to slip the bonds of
time, in transient
green reveries.

46. The late Renaissance scholar and baseball
commissioner Bart Giamatti wrote with
unscholastic passion of the
inner fields of play where we mortals may
visit paradise

47. Transcendence may be unexpected and
surprising, or it may be
the object of methodical cultivation. My
delight in the game of
baseball, for instance, or in a particular
game, sometimes
catches me by surprise but on other
occasions has to be tracked
down like a shot lined deep into the gap.

48. The "national pastime" is public, and
frequently baffling,
but—with a respectful bow to documentary
artist Ken Burns5 --it
is a stretch to call it "large." It is only a
game; but then,
there are times when life is best played at,
too

49. F. Scott Fitzgerald was
just wrong when he called it "a boy's game,
with no more
possibilities in it than a boy could master, a
game" without
"novelty or danger, change or adventure."

50. Closer to the mark is
the observation that it "has been a
touchstone to worlds
elsewhere."6 But for me the transcendent
dimension of this game
is not "elsewhere," it is (as in Field of
Dreams) in my own back
yard.

51. trans-end-dance: the ability to move
beyond the end,
otherwise called the dance of death. -Peter
Ackroyd, The Plato Papers: A Prophecy