27th annual Baseball in Literature and Culture Conference presentation: "Why I Love Baseball"... (complementing and contrasting with Joe Posnanski's eponymous book)

1. Why I Love Baseball
Phil Oliver
Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies
Middle Tennessee State University (MTSU)
Phil.Oliver@mtsu.edu
27th annual Conference on Baseball
in Literature and Culture
Friday, April 5, 2024
On the campus of Ottawa University, Ottawa KS

2. Find this and my previous 16 (or so) BLC presentations at
slideshare.net, here…

3. Describing my intentions in this presentation to a
friend, I said it’s an attempt to say why we
humans are entitled to love what we love, whether
it be a mere game or whatever (and of course
with the qualification that we mustn’t love what is
harmful to others’ parallel pursuits of happiness).
I have an Honors Lecture to deliver on Monday, on
the theme of mental health. There’s some
convergence here: loving life, being happy, and not
obstructing others’ journeys. I can’t help noticing the
spirit (I don’t mean the ghostly spirit, but rather the
philosophical temper) of my old mentor John Lachs
hovering over it all. He wrote (among other books)
The Relevance of Philosophy to Life, Meddling: On
the Virtue of Leaving Others Alone, and In Love
With Life: Reflections on the Joy of Living and Why
We Hate to Die,

4. “We fear death, we shudder at life's
instability, we grieve to see the
flowers wilt again and again, and the
leaves fall, and in our hearts we know
that we, too, are transitory and will
soon disappear. When artists create
pictures and thinkers search for laws
and formulate thoughts, it is in order
to salvage something from the great
dance of death, to make something
last longer than we do.”
–Hermann Hesse

5. “The dance of death”-
I love Peter Ackroyd’s
alternate definition of
transcendence,
which I sometimes
think I achieve at the
ballpark…
Trans-end-dance: the ability to move beyond the end,
otherwise called the dance of death.

6. “It breaks your heart. It is designed to
break your heart. The game begins
in the spring, when everything else
begins again, and it blossoms in
the summer, filling the afternoons
and evenings, and then as soon as
the chill rains come, it stops and
leaves you to face the fall alone. You
count on it, rely on it to buffer the
passage of time, to keep the memory
of sunshine and high skies alive, and
then just when the days are all
twilight, when you need it most, it
stops. Today, October 2, a Sunday of
rain and broken branches and leaf-
clogged drains and slick streets, it
stopped, and summer was gone…

7. “Sad as it may sound to say it, the
probability favors the view that
death is final. Our delights are like
the joys of the butterfly that
hovered over a flower for a
precious minute a thousand years
ago. And then it is over in a
moment of grace.
A philosopher “ought to
have the courage to look
into the abyss alone and to
face sudden tragedy and
inevitable decline with
equanimity born of joy or at
least of understanding. I am
prepared to be surprised to
learn that we have a
supernatural destiny, just as I
am prepared to be surprised
at seeing my neighbor win
the lottery. But I don't
consider buying tickets an
investment.”
Of course we can hope
for more. And, indeed, if
the universe has an
administration, we may be
employed, like faculty,
beyond our useful years.”
John Lachs
1934-2024

8. “Of course, there are those who learn
after the first few times. They grow
out of sports. And there are others
who were born with the wisdom to
know that nothing lasts. These are
the truly tough among us, the ones
who can live without illusion, or
without even the hope of illusion. I am
not that grown-up or up-to-date. I am
a simpler creature, tied to more
primitive patterns and cycles. I need
to think something lasts forever,
and it might as well be that state of
being that is a game; it might as well
be that, in a green field, in the sun.” –
Green Fields of the Mind

10. On my Boston flight last week I read a book that asked a pertinent question
of anyone participating in an academic conference (though too seldom
asked by some of my peers, in my opinion): What’s the use of [fill in the
blank]?
So what’s the use of baseball? And what’s the
use of gathering to talk about it?
For the late commissioner, the use was a
useful illusion. For me, it’s partly that. Not the
illusion of immortality, but the illusion of
ultimate meaning or importance that
transcends experience.
But there’s something else too…

11. “The joy of living”-- “For to miss the joy is to miss all,” quoted William
James of Robert Louis Stevenson. "In the joy of the actors lies the sense
of any action.” We just don’t want to miss it. That’s the short answer, isn’t
it, to why we love baseball?
The Joy of Watching
Mookie Betts Play Baseball

12. The joy of the actors–the players, the print and broadcast chroniclers,
the fans, the clubs, maybe even the scholars–is overt and observable in
a Mookie Betts or, for those old enough to remember, a Mark “The Bird”
Fidrych or a back-flipping Wizard.

13. But Stevenson’s and James’s point was to celebrate the inner, subjective
element of joy that you can’t see between the white lines. It’s between
the ears.
James: "To miss the joy is to miss all." Indeed, it is. Yet we are but finite,
and each one of us has some single specialized vocation of his own…
Our deadness toward all but one particular kind of joy would thus be the
price we inevitably have to pay for being practical creatures.
Only in some pitiful dreamer, some philosopher, poet, or romancer, or
when the common practical man becomes a lover, does the hard
externality give way, and a gleam of insight into the ejective world, as
Clifford called it, the vast world of inner life beyond us, so different from
that of outer seeming, illuminate our mind.” –On a Certain Blindness in
Human Beings

14. So the use of baseball, for me, in a word, is joy. In another word: love. And
of course there are many other words too. Connection. Memory. Renewal.
Return. Spring. Summer. Holiday. “Moral holiday”... So many words.
“Whatever universe a professor
believes in must at any rate be a
universe that lends itself to lengthy
discourse. A universe definable in
two sentences is something for
which the professorial intellect has
no use.” Pragmatism, The Present
Dilemma in Philosophy

15. “...we have a right ever and anon
to take a moral holiday, to let the
world wag in its own way, feeling
that its issues are in better hands
than ours and are none of our
business.
The universe is a system of which
the individual members may relax
their anxieties occasionally, in
which the don't-care mood is also
right for men, and moral holidays
in order…”

16. Adam Gopnik, reviewing a new history of baseball in Gotham, has lately
added some words to the list. Superior writers like he and Roger Angell,
Tom Boswell, Bart Giamatti, Joe Posnanski, some others in present
company, embolden me to take my baseball moral holidays without regret
or guilt or remorse. Gopnik says the elevated, eloquent, literary, even
philosophical genre of baseball writing got its early innings in New York…
“…a reasonable case can be made that two essential manners in
American prose—the laconic, tight-lipped style (Hemingway began as a
newspaperman and sportswriter, too) and the loquacious high irony
that A. J. Liebling passed on to Tom Wolfe—began in the baseball
stories of the New York papers. The sportswriters were there to write, in
ways that the other people on the paper weren’t…

17. Runyon knew that these two things were true: the contests were
epic in the enjoyment they provided, and they were miniature in
their importance. This practice, of remaining close to the field but
also distanced from it, evolved into the smooth, smilingly detached
narratives of such writers as Red Smith and Liebling. This
magazine’s own Roger Angell shifted that mode into unapologetic
fandom, in which the point was not to be an insider at all but to
watch from a perspective as bemused and engaged as that of Henry
James watching Daisy Miller—empathy without undue explication…

18. The constant transmutation of play into games and
games back into play is at the heart of our fandom;
something that, for the athletes, is done for
money—often in pain or without much pleasure—
becomes, for the fans, an unstructured escape from
responsibility…”
—Adam Gopnik, When New York Made Baseball
and Baseball Made New York
Moral holidays, he’s talking about.

19. Moral holidays are indeed a temporary “escape from responsibility,”
and we all need them. That’s what William Carlos Williams was talking
about: the utility of “uselessness”....
The crowd at the ball game
BY WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS
The crowd at the ball game/ is
moved uniformly
by a spirit of uselessness/which
delights them—
(etc.)

20. So this is an appreciation of Joe
Posnanski's book and a reflection on
what, beyond specific moments in the
game's history–beyond the lines, as it
were, and between the ears–
constitutes its specific appeal to me.
First thing I should say: Joe’s 50+
Moments are great. I don’t dispute a
single one of them as laying claim to
something loveable about our game.
Some of them lay claim to my own
affections…

21. I love Joe’s evocation of the spirit of Wrigley Field’s bleacher
bums. “...you’re expecting it to be fun… You aren’t expecting to
see history. That’s baseball, right? I mean, you never know.”
That was Joacquin
Andujar’s favorite
English word, btw:
youneverknow.

22. I love what Joe says about Skip Caray’s Sid Bream call, about how
“just a couple of words” can unleash “the music and the magic in
our hearts… Braves win.”
esc

23. I love that A League of Their Own gets its moments, especially:

24. I love recalling that moment in October 2005 when The Machine “hit
the mute button on the city of Houston.”

25. I love revisiting Ozzie’s pre-Cardinal wizardry, when he made Dale
Murphy’s and the Braves’ “heads explode.”

26. I love Ozzie’s improbable 1985 NLCS HR, and Jack Buck’s “Go
crazy” call.

27. I love how David Freese overcame baseball burnout and lived the dream in the
2011 World Series against the Rangers. I love Joe Buck’s call echoing his dad’s 20
years earlier. And I respect David’s class, in declining induction into the Cards’ hall
of fame.

28. I love the Musial-Colbert connection.

29. I love the way Jack Buck and Vin Scully described Kirk Gibson’s
iconic 1988 HR, in their iconically different styles.

30. I’m still “missing Vin,” still can’t imagine a better game call than his
near-perfect Koufax perfecto. “A million butterflies”... How did he come
up with the perfect words so spontaneously, so often?

31. I love how Joe’s epilogue puts it all in perspective. It’s a game, it makes
us happy. “Isn’t that the point of baseball?”

32. “Time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time.” –
John Lennon (not, evidently, Bertrand Russell)
A game that makes you happy is still a game…
but it’s not “just” a game.

33. “Of all forms of caution, caution in love is perhaps the most fatal to
true happiness.”
― Bertrand Russell, The Conquest of Happiness
But Bertie did say something that should encourage
all of us here to relax and enjoy our (not “just” a)
game:

34. That said…Why I love baseball has as much
or more to do with thoughts, feelings,
memories, associations, friend and family
bonding occasions, and sundry other
idiosyncratic connections that go well
beyond the field of play. These roots of my
passion for baseball are bound up with my
total identity.
Those tee-shirts that equate baseball with life
overstate the case, but they’re on the right
track. The part of me that is capable of loving a
mere game is incapable of reducing it to a
mere game.

35. It was in that non-reductive spirit that I
said, in my original proposal for this talk,
that among other possibly-surprising
points of observation I’d note a
connection between great lead-off
batters (my personal favorite being Lou
Brock) and what John McPhee has said
of the crucial importance of writing great
leads. "A lead should not be cheap,
flashy, meretricious, blaring." (So if we
seek a parallel to lineup lead-offs, that
might exclude popular consensus pick
Rickey Henderson ).

36. And then, more improbably
still, I draw a connection to
Ralph Waldo Emerson's
remarks near the end of
"Nature" urging every
"spirit" to build its house, its
world, its heaven.
“Build your own world”

37. Emerson’s nature, in other words, makes room for Bart
Giamatti’s “paradise” and “green fields”...

38. And on the heaven
hook, perhaps more
predictably, I relate
the whole discussion
to "Field of Dreams"
and take some issue
with aversive
analyses thereof
(such as we heard at
this conference in
'21 from Keir
Hichens).

39. Roger Angell, at the
ballgame with Bart
Giamatti– “...mostly you die
at second, don’t you? It’s the
farthest place from home.
And if you forget the home
place you’re lost…
It’s the eternal return… that
repetition and impediment
that are so much a part of
the game…
We participate in the ethic
by talking about it while it’s
in progress. It’s a
celebration.”

40. “no matter how strenuously we try to disagree, the final
illusion is to think life would be at all bearable without
illusions. " - -A. BARTLETT GIAMATTI, The Earthly
Paradise and the Renaissance Epic
That is the deepest way sport is conventional--it is a
conscious agreement to enjoy, a pleasurable self-delusion.
If sport aspires to contemplation, let us remember it begins
in a con. --A. BARTLETT GIAMATTI, Take Time for
Paradise

41. Growing up near St. Louis, the Cardinals had
been on my radar since at least ‘64 when
Harry Caray’s Cards-Yanks World Series
Game Seven play-by-play was piped over the
PA system into my 2d grade classroom.
But the ‘67 El Birdos, who topped the Red
Sox in seven, really got my attention. I had
abdominal surgery that summer, and I
recall talking baseball with my surgeon.

42. My dad wasn’t a fan, but eventually he
came around. He bought us tickets to
every Friday night home game at then-
still-newish Busch Stadium in ‘71. The
Cards weren’t very good that year, but
Joe Torre (no longer a chubby catcher,
but slimmed down at the hot corner) was
great. He got the National League MVP
award.
I’ve still got the autographed baseball I
stood in a long department store line for,
before my sister’s Doberman got hold of
it. I don’t really remember any particular
Torre moment from that season. I do
remember feeling a connection to my dad
I’d never really felt before.

43. At this year’s Baseball in Literature and Culture
Conference in Ottawa I’ll mention those Friday nights
when, in response to Joe Posnanski’s morning “Why
We Love Baseball” keynote, I’ll say why I do. For me it’s
less about the game’s iconic golden moments on the
field, or its star performers, and more about the
friends and family—Dad especially—the game
brought me closer to. I love baseball mostly for the
happy personal memories and associations it conjures.
LXVII – U@d 2.17.24
But the memories center not so much
on the diamond, as on my circle of life. If
I’d been born a Brit, say, my
enthusiasm would undoubtedly have
been directed at another sort of “pitch”
— not Gibson’s and Carlton’s – and
rightly so.

44. Royals game, March 2019

45. Greer Stadium
c.’04

46. Anaheim, May
2019

47. Dodger Stadium,
June 6, 2016
Vin Scully talked
about D-day as
Older Daughter
and I enjoyed our
pregame Dodger
dogs

48. Nashville,
Greer
Stadium 1998

50. Spring Training,
Port St. Lucie
2000

51. Outside old Yankee
Stadium, 2007

52. Older Daughter with the bat Ray Lankford gave
her when he saw Mark McGwire snub her at
the Jupiter Spring Training complex, 2000

53. August 2023,
Kodak TN
(Smokies)-Andy,
Jim, Ben, Daryl

54. Lexington KY, August 2022
With old pals Daryl and Ben, during our
bourbon tour meetup

56. March 2023, Angels Spring Training

57. March 2023, Dodgers/White Sox
Spring Training

58. Fathers Day 2023, with Younger
Daughter

59. "I have two
goals. The
first is to
play in the
World Series
and the
second is to
hit .400. And
I think I'll
do both -
someday." -
Jack Clark
StL ‘85-87
Al Lang Field
c. ‘86

60. March 5, 2024
Angels at Dodgers-
Mookie at bat,
Shoehi on deck,
Freddie in the hole

61. Below: March 6, Goodyear AZ-Reds

62. My wife bought me the shirt I was too
cheap to buy for myself.

65. George Plimpton U@d

67. 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. 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
(see the discussion of "flow" in chapter 5). And 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." 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.

68. "Whatever a man will labour for earnestly and in some measure unselfishly is religion,"5 said writer
and mystic D. H. Lawrence. Others have been known to exhibit an astonishing quasi-religious
enthusiasm for what nonenthusiasts stubbornly persist in calling mere games, diversions,
recreations, or pastimes. We have already alluded to Field of Dreams's "Church of Baseball" and its
many high-minded penitents who have waxed spiritual and poetic about the national pastime. Does
"time begin on opening day"? For some of us, that is when it stops in the salutary sense of
transcendence. Satchel Paige said that maybe he would "pitch forever," and in the sense of a
naturalized concept of eternity (see below) maybe he did. James's student, the pragmatist Morris
Cohen, once published an essay entitled Baseball as a National Religion in which he reported
actually bringing the idea to James's attention.6 James did not, apparently, warm to the idea. But he
would have implicitly understood Paul Simon's plaintive rhetorical lyric "Where have you gone, Joe
DiMaggio?" We humans have a powerful need for inspirational icons we can revere and yet still,
somehow, "relate" to.7 Beyond the simple "team concept" and its instrumental focus on victory,
baseball actively rewards such dwelling in the past and encourages the eager anticipation of future
occasions of dwelling there again, at the park and in the imagination. Those creatively spliced video
reels 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. 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.

69. Like James, Dewey meant to naturalize but not desacralize the
sources of delight in everyday life. 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.75 It is the spirit of those
perceptive moments, sometimes stretching to hours, when our own
personal experiences and valuations seem to forge real ties to the
universe. Is this a "secular spirituality, reflect[ing] an attempt to
locate optimal human experience within a nonreligious context of
existential and cosmic meaning?"76 Or was Morris Cohen just right
in proposing baseball as our "national religion?"