“Baseball has become countercultural in America. Its pacing defies our Twitter-addled era. The game denies instant gratification. Thousands of measurable events and matchups provide inarguable facts. The sport demands respect for history and context. Given the current political climate, the republic needs baseball more than ever.
As the country has sped up, baseball has gotten slower. The average nine-inning game takes over three hours — 13% longer than in 2005. There is no ‘running the clock’ as there is in just about every other sport. Batters saunter to the plate and fiddle with batting gloves. Pitchers shake off signs, get set and then step off the mound. Major League Baseball hopes to quicken the pace by limiting the number of coaching visits to the mound and shortening breaks between innings. Players, bless them, have resisted a 20-second pitch clock.
Baseball teaches delayed gratification. It lacks the constant movement of basketball or violent contact of football, and the pleasure of an inning-ending strikeout or run-saving catch comes only after a period of tense waiting. The exact opposite occurs, too. With the crowd on its feet during a go-ahead moment, a batter will foul off five pitches only to meekly ground out to first base. Baseball also fosters a philosophical outlook. There are 162 regular season games; players and teams often recover from slow starts. Fans and players expect ups and downs. This is not the orientation of hyperbolic cable news shows or the incessant outrage traded on social media.”—John R. Bawden for the Los Angeles Times (March 28, 2018)
The rest of this delightful opinion piece is here.
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Jack Kerouac (1922-1969) “learned about haiku from Gary Snyder in 1955 while in the San Francisco Bay area. In The Dharma Bums (1958), Kerouac mentions Snyder had R.H. Blyth’s four-volume Haiku in his shack in Berkeley and tells how they talked about ways to write haiku. Of the Beat writers, Kerouac was the most perfectly attuned to haiku and was soon writing good ones. He wrote the first American baseball haiku (‘Empty baseball field’). It came out in 1959 on Blues and Haikus, a record on which he read his haiku with piano accompaniment. [….]
Though best known as a football player—at Horace Mann prep school and Columbia—Kerouac played in the outfield for the Horace Mann baseball team in 1940. He threw and batted right-handed.”— Cor van den Heuvel and Nanae Tamura (tr. and eds.) Baseball Haiku: American and Japanese Haiku and Senryu on Baseball (W.W. Norton & Co., 2007).
Empty baseball field
—A robin,
Hops along the bench
Further Reading:
- Bronson, Eric, ed. Baseball and Philosophy: Thinking Outside the Batter’s Box. Chicago, IL: Open Court, 2004.
- Rawls, John. “The Best of All Games,” Boston Review (March/April 2008). This is a letter from John Rawls to Owen Fiss: “In the letter that follows, written in 1981, Rawls puts philosophy to the service of baseball and gives an account of the sport and its special appeal to the American people. The letter recounts a breakfast conversation some twenty years earlier with Harry Kalven (1914 - 1974) who had been a friend and colleague of mine at the University of Chicago. Kalven was a legal scholar of great distinction who specialized in torts, the jury, and free speech. On his death, Kalven left a manuscript, to which Rawls alludes and which was eventually published in 1988 as A Worthy Tradition, on freedom of speech. Like Rawls, Kalven loved baseball. He was proud that his torts casebook contained more baseball cases than any of its competitors, and each year made a point of taking students to a Cubs game.”
- Setiya, Kieran. “Going Deep: Baseball and Philosophy,” Public Books, October 23, 2017.
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