* Baseball and philosophy and Baseball and Philosophy

April 22, 2008

From Alex Beam of the Boston Globe:

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.”

Which leads to the inevitable metaphors about baseball and life, etc., ad infinitum, ad naseum.

Actually, there are a couple of worthy books that manage to blend baseball and philosophy without being too cute or heavy handed.

Watching Baseball, Seeing Philosophy: The Great Thinkers at Play on the Diamond, by Raymond A. Belliotti (McFarland, 2008), links classic thinkers with traditional non-thinkers, i.e., baseball players. Sorry, that’s a bit harsh. But pairing Ted Williams breathes with Camus’ Sisyphus, Satchel Paige and Marcus Aurelius, and Joe DiMaggio and Nietzsche, seems like a bit of a stretch (although Billy Martin and Machiavelli seems like a good match).

An older, title consider the union is Baseball and Philosophy: Thinking Outside the Batter’s Box (2005), part of Open Court Publishing’s Popular Culture and Philosophy series.

Among the issues considered are “The Zen of Hitting,” “Baseball and the Search for an American Moral Identity,” “Damn Yankees: Why America Needs Reggie Jackson,” “The Ethics of the Intentional Walk,” “Saving the Twins with Rawlsian Justice,” “Wait ’til Next Year: The Faith of a Cubs Fan,” “Taking Umpiring Seriously,” “He Missed the Tag!: The Ethics of Deception,” and “The Asterisk in the Record Book: Roger Maris and Normative Assessments.”

I did a story on Ted Cohen, a philosophy professor at the University of Chicago who contirbuted the essay “There Are No Ties at First Base,” for the NJ Jewish News in December, 2006.

“Gamesmanship is a way of trying to get the better of whoever you’re competing against, often by bending the rules or doing things that are unexpected or even unethical if you think you can get away with it,” he said in a telephone interview.

Cohen was skeptical that there can ever be a strict adherence to “the law.” “I think it’s out of the question that will ever happen,” he said, citing the high stakes business that sports have become, even at the amateur level in high schools and colleges.

Nor are the religious learning institutions, which one would expect to be paragons of morality, guilt-free.

“I think it would probably be wrong to think of religious schools as a group. Georgetown, Notre Dame, Marquette…even Oral Roberts University, are all religious schools. So is Brandeis, to a degree, and certainly yeshivas, Do they behave any differently than other schools? I kind of doubt it.”

Cohen, 66, said he grew up in a time when the “team you would follow depended on what radio broadcast you received.” These days, he suggested, fans frequently pick their teams on the basis their ethnicity, race, or religion.

“It’s better than engaging in warfare and ethnic cleansing. ,” he said. “Better to send your football team out there, said Cohen, who is also author of several books, including Jokes: Philosophical Thoughts on Joking Matters.

“Notre Dame, for example, is enormously popular in Chicago, perhaps even more so than the University. The reason? Chicago has a large Catholic population that identifies with the team, even though the majority of the players may not be Catholic.

“It’s why Jews go gaga when they produce a major league baseball player who can actually play in the major league credibly. I must say, I kind if enjoy it myself when that happens,” Cohen admitted.

While Cohen doesn’t have a problem with athletes invoking Divine Intervention for their success, “There is something utterly objectionable in the idea that sports are always …zero sum games. If you think that God helped you win, you also have to think that God had to make the other guy lose, and that’s not a very savory idea.

He also believes that Little League is “a terrible thing.” He coached youth sports one year — reluctantly, he emphasized — and was dismayed by the pressure put on the kids to win and favoring those with superior skills over kids who were just out for a good time.

“If you would leave these kids alone, give them a bat, and a ball and a little equipment and then just go away, they’ll learn how to play,” Cohen said. “They will find out that there’s no good cheating. But if you start supplying them with umpires, so they can argue and whine and moan and claim that they’ve been defrauded, then all of the humanizing opportunities for a group activity like that among children will simply be lost because the children no longer have to assume any responsibility for making the game work.

“When kids are six or seven already, they understand that in order to have the fun that comes from this group activity, they’re going to have to cooperate, and that means putting up with some things that they don’t like. And that’s not bad training for life. In life, there are no umpires.”

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1 * Joshua Cohen April 22, 2008 at 7:28 pm

For the Rawls letter, see

http://bostonreview.net/BR33.2/rawls.php

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