Triumph and Tragedy in Mudville (24 page)
Read Triumph and Tragedy in Mudville Online
Authors: Stephen Jay Gould
Will ridicules the common notion, particularly among insecure intellectuals who don’t understand the subtlety of the game, that success in baseball rests upon sheer brawn tempered by good instinct, because activities of the body cannot demand much of the mind. Will quotes Tony La Russa, baseball’s most intellectual manager:
La Russa says, with a fine sense of semantic tidiness, that what are called baseball “instincts” are actually the result of “an accumulation of baseball information. They are uses of that information as the basis of decision making as game situations develop.”
Will advances his unexceptionable thesis by concentrating upon the daily work and cogitation of four particularly thoughtful and industrious men at the top of their specialties within the profession—Tony La Russa for managing, Orel Hershiser for pitching, Tony Gwynn for batting, and Cal Ripken Jr. for defense. (By the way, Will’s thesis, if ever properly grasped, would forthwith and forever end the silly discussion about the supposed anomaly of why so many intellectuals love baseball, and why baseball, alone among major sports, has a distinguished literature [with Will’s book as the latest entry]. We who have loved and lived with the game all our lives feel no need to mount a defense against such ignorance.)
I most admire
Will’s success in resolving a structural problem inherent in his excellent choice of procedure. Having made a key decision to stress the incremental, repetitive honing of skills by practice, the tiny advantages that accrue with eternal vigilance to detail, and the minute edges gained from your thoughtfulness and someone else’s slack, how can Will make these workaday themes lively and continuously interesting (Carlton Fisk’s homer possesses an undeniable éclat compared with daily batting practice)? Will realized that his favored theme could not carry the book unaided. He has therefore created a marvel of variegated but seamless patchwork by lacing the central text with all manner of baseball lore, including statistical digressions, and hot-stove-league commentary, with a good (and entirely legitimate) sprinkling of classical tales about past and present stars from Janus’s other face.
Above all, the commitment and professionalism of these splendid men shines forth, teaching us that excellence transcends any particular subject, and demands the same discipline for both body and mind. The primary value in eliminating the myth of the invincible “natural athlete” should lie in the possibility of fellowship—in the recognition that some form of excellence is accessible to anyone who can bring will and discipline to opportunity.
But I must quibble with Will’s overextension of his observations on baseball to a program for American rejuvenation in general. (Of course, we all know that life imitates baseball, so I have no objection to Will’s general attempt, only to this particular version.) Will actually advances two related claims in his central thesis. First, the quality of play in professional baseball has improved markedly through time, in opposition to more mythology from the other face of Janus—this time, the legend of past Golden Ages. Will writes:
Human beings seem to take morose pleasure from believing that once there was a Golden Age, some lost Eden or Camelot or superior ancient civilization, peopled by heroes and demigods, an age of greatness long lost and irrecoverable. Piffle. Things are better than ever, at least in baseball, which is what matters most.
Second, this increasing excellence narrows the range of disparity among professional players (by relative equalization at higher summits) and makes the tiny edges supplied by obsession, practice, and intelligence all the more important. Perhaps Ruth could excel by brawn, and shun conditioning while feeding his insatiable gustatory and sexual appetites. Modern competition will not permit such laxity. Will writes:
The fundamental fact is this: For an athlete to fulfill his or her potential, particularly in a sport as demanding as baseball, a remarkable degree of mental and moral discipline is required.
We speak of such people as “driven.” It would be better to say they are pulled, because what moves them is in front of them. A great athlete has an image graven on his or her imagination, a picture of an approach to perfection.
And finally, bringing both arguments together:
What spectators pay to see is a realm of excellence, in which character, work habits and intelligence—mind—make the difference between mere adequacy and excellence. The work is long, hard, exacting, and sometimes dangerous. The work is a game that men play but they do not play at it. That is why they, and their craft, are becoming better.
I am a
card-carrying (dare I utter the word?) liberal, Will an equally self-identified writer of conservative bent. On baseball, however, we differ little, for most fans are deeply conservative in this jewel-like world where legacy is so precious (as Seymour shows) and where you do not die when age drops you from this realm of true and appropriate laissez-faire. I applaud Will’s curmudgeonly conservatism on all issues of baseball practice. His diatribe against aluminum bats alone should inscribe him in the writer’s Hall of Fame, for a deep understanding of the details that count, and the issues well worth a trip to the stake if necessary. Aluminum bats, he asserts, would destroy both the sound of baseball and the precious continuity of statistical comparability:
Allowing aluminum bats into the major leagues would constitute a serious degradation of the game, and not just for aesthetic reasons. But let us begin with them. Aesthetic reasons are not trivial. Baseball’s ambiance is a complex, subtle and fragile creation. Baseball’s sounds are important aspects of the game, and no sound is more evocative than that of the thwack of wood on a ball. It is particularly so when it is heard against the background sizzle of crowd noise on a radio broadcast, radio being the basic and arguably the best way to experience baseball if you can not be at the park. To a person of refined sensibilities, aluminum hitting a ball makes a sound as distressing as that of fingernails scraping a blackboard.
On the statistical point, Will notes that aluminum bats “would dilute baseball’s intensely satisfying continuity and thereby would render much less interesting the comparison of player’s performances. Those comparisons nourish interest in the game as it passes down from generation to generation and they sustain fans in the fallow months of the off-season.”
Nor do I dispute Will’s assertion that play has improved through time (especially since the evidence comes partly from my own statistical work on the history of batting averages, particularly on the elimination of .400 hitting as a paradoxical mark of improvement). I only question his upping of the ante in extending his two-part argument to a basically conservative, individualist solution of America’s current social and economic ills—the dissociable and more contentious “baseball imitates life” part of his thesis. Will argues that if we, as a nation composed of individuals, could only imitate the gumption and drive of high baseball achievers who prevail by dedication and obsession more than by natural gifts, then we would regain our national power and purpose. This drive cannot be granted by governmental gift or program, but must come from within:
I believe that America’s real problem is individual under-stretch, a tendency of Americans to demand too little of themselves, at their lathes, their desks, their computer terminals…. I will not belabor the point but I do assert it: If Americans made goods and services the way Ripken makes double plays, Gwynn makes hits, Hershiser makes pitches and La Russa makes decisions, you would hear no more about the nation’s trajectory having passed its apogee.
I don’t even dispute this claim. But I do quarrel with the premise that major league baseball, as a totality, represents an island of self-motivated excellence that could save us by extensive emulation. I think that Will has made an error in confusing parts for wholes. He has chosen four exemplary human beings at the summit of their profession—and these four share the qualities that he imputes to the entire enterprise at this level. But I doubt the validity of such a generalization. He has taken the best, but they cannot stand as surrogates for all. They are best because they have conjoined a basic intelligence and a fine body with a fierce inner drive. I don’t doubt that major league baseball features more such people than you might find in your average factory or college faculty lounge. Such are the fruits of highest selectivity. But all of us who work in elite institutions of their chosen profession know that cynicism, submission, and dead wood exist at all levels. Baseball also contains its journeymen and its losers, its men of superb talent who never grow up or never catch fire. Major league baseball is not a priesthood of unflagging commitment, but an institution far more selective than most, yet still containing all kinds of folks with all manner of problems and modes of life. Major league baseball may precipitate out the losers more quickly, but we cannot so proceed in life (where consequences include death and starvation), and this oasis of unbridled laissez-faire doesn’t even produce Will’s universal, internally driven excellence in its own house.
My best evidence
for this variety in attitude among major leaguers comes from the last of the three books reviewed here—Heiman, Weiner, and Gutman’s
When the Cheering Stops
. These extended interviews with twenty-one players of the late forties through mid-seventies present a very different picture from Will’s four paragons. These twenty-one include a few genuine stars, but most were journeymen who spent careers on yo-yos of trading and demotion to the minors. Some showed the obsession that has pushed Will’s men to success, but most lost the drive to injury and disappointment, or never had it at all. They admired the heroes of their own age, and they recognized the zeal as well as the talent of Warren Spahn or Mickey Mantle, but could not play at this level.
These men played baseball in a different age of less intense strategy—the fifties game of “put some men on and hope for a bases-clearing homer,” rather than the highly intellectual “little ball,” or one-run-at-a-time (and much more exciting) baseball recaptured from the age of Cobb and Wagner and now again in vogue. These journeymen of the fifties often make too many excuses for their own abbreviated careers. (I cannot quite accept Al Weiss’s argument—if only because I loved him so much after his heroics won the 1969 World Series for the Mets—that this moment of greatness wrecked his career because he could never again play to a level justifying his salary increase after his day in the sun, and he soon lost his job as a result.) They also clearly demonstrate that continuous intellectual struggle does not pervade the pinnacle at all moments. Consider these two identical assessments of Bucky Harris’s managerial style, from one who loved and one who hated this successful skipper. First, from Chuck Stobbs:
My favorite manager…was Bucky Harris. We’d have two meetings a year. On opening day he’d say, boys, you know we’re glad you’re here and whathaveyou. Then, at the end of the year we’d have another meeting and he’d thank everybody for doing the best they could and say he’d hope to see us all next year.
And this, from J. W. Porter:
On opening day…he got everyone around him at the mound. And here’s exactly what he said. He said, “Guys, you’re major leaguers. If you don’t know how to play this fucking game now, you never will.” And he dropped the bag of balls on the mound, went and sat in the dugout and stayed there for two years until they ran him off.
I rather suspect that major league baseball imitates life pretty well—by including its share of flakes, kooks, goof-offs, and cry-babies. We can isolate a core of splendid exemplars, probably a larger core than in most professions because competition is so much stiffer. But when you probe deeply enough into the totality, all the foibles and frailties of human life emerge. Which brings me back to Janus, god of our beginnings and the “play ball” call of this essay. In his poem “A Coat,” W. B. Yeats wrote of the uses of mythology:
I made my song a coat
Covered with embroideries
Out of old mythologies
From heel to throat….
But others misuse his pretty covering, and he discards it:
Song, let them take it,
For there’s more enterprise
In walking naked.
This review has
been dedicated to defending the virtues of such nakedness—in truth value, even (for I will grant Will this) in moral instruction. This nakedness of reality is the second and less familiar face of Janus. But it’s cold out there in our markedly imperfect world. So I guess we need the conventional showy face of Janus as well—the world of baseball myth and legend. And why not? In what other world is myth so harmless? Great battles kill and maim; great homers and no-hitters are pure joy or deep tragedy without practical consequence (no one, in my presence, must ever mention Bill Mazeroski’s 1960 homer against my beloved Yankees). Life is inherently ambiguous; baseball games pit pure good against abject evil. Even Saddam Hussein must have committed one act of kindness in his life, but what iota of good could possibly be said for aluminum bats or the designated hitter rule?
As a skeptic and rationalist, I prefer the second face of Janus; as a fan, I acknowledge the power of his first and legendary visage. I began with a mythic home run of this first face, and I end, for symmetry’s sake, with another, perhaps even more famous, as described by the hitter himself in
When the Cheering Stops
. The New York Giants (my National League club in my youth) stood thirteen and a half games behind the Brooklyn Dodgers in August 1951. Charlie Dressen, manager of the Bums, pronounced the immortal line: “The Giants is dead.” The New York papers debated his grammar, but did not doubt his conclusions. Yet Durocher’s Giants persisted, and miraculously tied the Dodgers on the last day of the season. The two teams split the first two games of the playoff. In the last inning of the third and final game, with the Giants trailing by two runs and all apparently lost, Bobby Thomson came to bat with two men on and hit the most famous homer in baseball history. I was nine years old, home alone after school and glued to the tiny TV screen that we had just purchased—a family first. I was never so purely and deliriously happy in all my life. Thomson, it seems, was pretty pleased as well: