Who cares

24th annual conference
Baseball in Literature
and Culture
Ottawa University
March 29, 2019

Who
cares?
Reflections on
caring about
baseball, sports, life,
the universe,
everything… and
why we should

Phil Oliver
Middle Tennessee State University
● phil.oliver@mtsu.edu
● DelightSprings.blogspot.com
● slideshare.net

This book is about the centrality
for life of personal enthusiasms
and habitual "delights" and their
power to make our days
meaningful, delightful, spiritual,
and even transcendent. Such
enthusiasms, or subjective ways
of reacting to life and upon it, are
natural for us. They are at the
heart of a vision of life at once
spiritual and deeply rooted in "the
open air and possibilities of
nature." When our days become
pale, tedious, or abstract, they
sponsor our "return to life" in all
its rich, robust, and personal
concreteness.

What objects of enthusiasm can imaginably promise so much? Any
we can imagine, and then some: baseball, say, or the Beatles, beer,
Great Britain, literature, science, science fiction, Monet, Mozart,
Kentucky whiskey, Tennessee walking horses, walking, running,
tilling the soil, raising kids, healing, praying, meditating, thinking,
teaching, learning, and on and on. Whatever disparate items may
show up on anyone's list (these are a few that crop up in my own
family circle), their crucial essence is to point at, but not to replicate
or make transparent to others' grasp, the depths of experience and
personal significance they attempt to name. I can tell you that I love
baseball, but I cannot begin to convey precisely why or how or the
extent to which baseball is important for my peculiar ways of
experiencing and living in the world…
Baseball's spring is again, for those of us captivated by that old spell
of our childhood, a recurrent source of delight.

It’s probably already too late to disclaim any
intent here to reach for more profundity than our
subject matter will yield, but Stephen Jay Gould
is still a good check on reality: “The silliest and
most tendentious of baseball writing tries to
wrest profundity from the spectacle of grown
men hitting a ball with a stick by suggesting
linkages between the sport and deep issues of
morality, parenthood, history, lost innocence,
gentleness, and so on, seemingly ad infinitum .
The effort reeks of silliness because baseball is
profound all by itself and needs no excuses;
people who don't know this are not fans and are
therefore unreachable anyway.”

My previous Baseball in Literature and Culture slideshows
● The Inevitable Last Pitch: Hub Fans Bid Rabbit Adieu (‘09)
● From Gibson to McGwire: reflections from a Cardinals fan on childhood indoctrination, adult disillusion,
and the Steroid Era (‘10)
● The Short and Incredible Career of Sidd Finch - Zen and Now (April 1, 2011)
● Baseball and the Meaning of Life (‘12)
● “Right” When They’re Wrong: Fallible Umpires and Infallible (Inexorable, Inescapable) Rules (‘13)
● Coming Home: reflections on time, memory, and baseball’s eternal return (prompted by the revival of
Nashville’s Sulphur Dell (‘14)
● Spring Training and the Perennial Renewal of Life (‘15)
● This is Satchel (‘16)
● Missing Vin (‘17)
● Coming Back: Rick Ankiel’s ‘Yips’ and the Power of Perseverance (‘18)

For this year's conference
I propose to reflect on
Roger Angell's apologia
for caring about baseball,
sports, and ultimately
anything at all:
The Passion of Roger Angell (SI) Five Seasons

“It is foolish and childish, on the face of it, to affiliate ourselves with
anything so insignificant and patently contrived and commercially
exploitative as a professional sports team, and the amused
superiority and icy scorn that the non-fan directs at the sports nut (I
know this look - I know it by heart) is understandable and almost
unanswerable. Almost. What is left out of this calculation, it seems to
me, is the business of caring - caring deeply and passionately,
really caring - which is a capacity or an emotion that has almost
gone out of our lives. And so it seems possible that we have come
to a time when it no longer matters so much what the caring is
about, how frail or foolish is the object of that concern, as long as the
feeling itself can be saved. Naïveté - the infantile and ignoble joy
that sends a grown man or woman to dancing in the middle of the
night over the haphazardous flight of a distant ball - seems a small
price to pay for such a gift.”
Five Seasons: A Baseball Companion

In brief, Angell says, genuine
caring is intrinsically valuable but
increasingly rare. I agree, with
some qualifications and a question
as to whether there's a growing
disconnect between caring about
games and caring about life, the
universe, and everything else. If
so, is that something our game can
address?
“The smaller the ball, the better the
writing…”
“My way of writing about baseball
was invented by John Updike…
watching every single thing that
goes on, the crowd, the
atmosphere, the ballplayers, and
what he thinks, all flow into this
narrative…” ”

Angell writes beautifully about
baseball, as did Updike, because
their caring about baseball “flowed
into” a vastly broader narrative
about the wider world. Updike’s
editor would have to have shared
that confluence of interest and
attention.
Consider, for instance, Angell’s
passionate expression of care just
prior to our last national election…
and then, an update last Fall:
“...I am ninety-eight now, legally blind, and a pain in the
ass to all my friends and much of my family with my
constant rantings about the Trump debacle—his floods of
lies, his racism, his abandonment of vital connections to
ancient allies and critically urgent world concerns, his
relentless attacks on the media, and, just lately, his arrant
fearmongering about the agonizingly slow approach of a
fading column of frightened Central American refugees…”
I can only hope to live so long, and to muster care enough to be a pain in the ass to friends and family
about what Bertrand Russell called the impersonal world. Most nonagenerians in my experience are
more self-centered and self-pitying than Roger.

Bertrand Russell, Conquest of Happiness.
Why does anything matter? Happy people
care, they cultivate various diverse
interests in people, places, things...

“The secret of happiness
is very simply this: let
your interests be as wide
as possible, and let your
reactions to the things
and persons that
interest you be as far as
possible friendly rather
than hostile”
“The man who pursues
happiness wisely will
aim at the possession of
a number of subsidiary
interests in addition to
those central ones upon
which his life is built.”
“The wise man thinks
about his troubles only
when there is some
purpose in doing so; at
other times he thinks
about other things, or, if
it is night, about nothing
at all.”
“The wise man will be as
happy as circumstances
permit, and if he finds
the contemplation of the
universe painful beyond
a point, he will
contemplate something
else instead.”

Etta Semple… Freethought Ideal
And to the concern shared by many of us (including
Susan Jacoby in Why Baseball Matters) that young
people increasingly care less about baseball than
ever before, I suggest there's only so much we can or
should change about the game, its pace and tempo,
etc., to try and reverse that alleged trajectory of
declining interest.
We freethinkers in the Church of
Baseball are in an ambivalent
position, valuing our sacred
inheritance and eager to welcome
new acolytes, but suspecting that the
object of our care may never compel
the devotion of those who prefer to
watch balls and whole teams in
constant motion.

“There’s no reason why they
can’t speed it up. I blame the
commissioner and the umpires.”
And something else is happening
to baseball. The emotional
connection between the fan and
the game has lessened. “They’re
not paying attention in the same
way,” he says. “Nobody’s
keeping score.”
SI-The Passion of Roger Angell

The best and most we
can do to encourage
others to care,
ultimately, is to offer our
own redoubtable
example of constant
steadfast devotion, and
trust that humanity's
season will be long
enough for our example
to make a difference.
The "philosophy of
loyalty," as Josiah
Royce and others have
articulated, is the
answer to indifference
and the catalyst of care.
“Unless you can find
some sort of loyalty,
you cannot find
unity and peace in
your active living.”

Royce's Ethics: The Philosophy of Loyalty
At the center of Royce’s ethics is his contention that to lead a morally significant life,
one’s actions must express a self-consciously asserted will; the self is a plan of action,
a plan of life created by an individual out of the chaos of many conflicting personal
desires and impulses. Such a plan is forged when one finds a cause, or causes which
require a program or programs of implementation that extend through time and
requires the contributions of many individuals for their advancement and fulfillment.
When an individual finds a cause judged worthwhile, his/her will becomes focused
and defined in terms of that cause and furthermore, the individual becomes
allied with a community of others who are also committed to that same
cause. Royce calls this commitment “loyalty” and thus the moral life of an
individual is understood in terms of the multiple loyalties that a person embraces.
“There is only one way to be an ethical individual. That is to choose your cause,
and then to serve it”... IEP

The Philosophy of Loyalty
Near the end of The Philosophy of Loyalty Royce wrote:
Human life taken merely as it flows, viewed merely as it passes by in time and is gone, is
indeed a lost river of experience that plunges down the mountains of youth and sinks in
the deserts of age. Its significance comes solely through its relations to the air and the
ocean and the great deeps of universal experience. For by such poor figures I may, in
passing, symbolize that really rational relation of our personal experience to universal
conscious experience….(Royce 1995 [1908], 179–80)
Royce's ethics is rooted in his analysis of the conditions necessary for an individual life to be
meaningful. It is not enough that one's actions merely conform to the strictures of
conventional morality — a trained animal might well fulfill such minimal conditions of
morality. To lead a morally significant life, one's actions must express a self-consciously
asserted will. They must contribute toward realizing a plan of life, a plan that is itself unified
by some freely chosen aim… SEP

Mountains, deserts, and oceans are nice metaphors. Or, you could put it this way....
The one constant
through all the years,
Ray, has been
baseball. America has
rolled by like an army
of steamrollers. It's
been erased like a
blackboard, rebuilt,
and erased again. But
baseball has marked
the time.
This field, this
game, is a part of
our past, Ray. It
reminds us of all
that once was
good, and it could
be again.
Ohhhhhhhh,
people will come,
Ray. People will
most definitely
come.

“The Universal Community constitutes reality, and
its understanding increases over time, through its
members’ continual development of meaning.
Royce’s concern for building a universal or
“Beloved Community” is exemplified in two later
works focused on building peace and a world
community…” IEP
And that brings us to what Royce
called the beloved community.

So… much as some would love to see teams in Las Vegas,
Nashville, Charlotte, San Antonio, Portland, or Oklahoma City…
Isn’t it time to talk
about MLB
expansion to
Australia, Cuba,
Japan, Korea,
Mexico… ?

Then again, we know baseball
doesn’t always foster such
warm feelings of universal
brotherhood, mutual
admiration, and common
cause.

“Only Yankees”
Asymmetry-Yanks/Red Sox... “the writer asked
whether Alice had heard about the city’s plan to
rename some of its luxury residences after
major-league baseball players: The Posada, The
Rivera, the Soriano. ‘The Garciaparra,’ said Alice.
‘No no,’ he said, stopping her importantly. ‘Only
Yankees.’”

“My allegiance to the Red
Sox is enthusiastic, but
cheerfully arbitrary and
undeluded. The Red Sox
aren't my team because
they are, in fact, the Best;
they are “the Best” (in my
eyes) because they are my
team.”
Well, once in a rare while
one’s arbitrary
partisanship actually
seems vindicated - like
Dennett’s in ‘04, and in
‘13…
but not in ‘67,
when it mattered
most to 10-year old
me.

It’s just a game — a
heartbreaking, heartwarming,
life-changing game that can
mean as much to you as you let it.
And please, never be shy to let it mean
something to you. It can give you so
much. It’s given me so much already.
Thank you for reading our coverage
for the past few years. It was an honor
to share them with you.
After four years covering the
Nats, goodbye for now
Baseball has been a part of my life since T-ball, a daily
ritual through middle school, high school and four
years of college softball. I never knew what I wanted to
be when I grew up, but I knew I wanted baseball.
Chelsea Janes

"“We love baseball,” poet Donald Hall says,
“because it seizes and retains the past, like the
snowy village inside a glass paperweight.”"
"I think a different metaphor is more apt.
Baseball is a scrapbook, idiosyncratic and at
times personal, elsewhere as theoretical and
abstract as the most arcane rule on the official
books."

"Nevertheless, the abiding theme of these reflections—the importance
of failure and error to human self-understanding—recurs… precisely
because of baseball’s ability, however indirect, to aid philosophical
heavy lifting. In particular, there is no better tutor of human
failure’s enduring significance than this strange, crooked game of
base."

"A game which embraces
failure as its beating heart
offers a significance beyond its
apparent pointlessness. In this
as in other ways, baseball
acquires a status akin to art,
genuine leisure, and those
other non-utilitarian pursuits
that Aristotle long ago
recognized as the highest and
most divine parts of
ourselves."

..."mattering is a matter of what a
thing teaches us, its ability to convey
insight. The genius of baseball is
the way it can be about so many
things that it is not, explicitly,
about. Its lessons are deep and
various, and the form I adopt here—
memories and arguments, these
interlocked sorties of history,
language, opinion, and statistics—are
my attempt to illustrate how the game
keeps on teaching us, with every
single at-bat and out. That is"
No, it’s really not. But it can
be all about life, can impart
life-lessons, can make it
onto your list of things that
make life worth living...

Willie Mays is #2 on
his list, right after
Groucho and just
ahead of the Jupiter
Symphony and Louis
Armstrong.
(I know he’s s not cool
or “correct” these days,
but it’s still a great
scene.)

"“The game doesn’t change the way you sleep or
wash your face or chew your food,” the narrator
notes in DeLillo’s story (“Pafko at the Wall”). “It
changes nothing but your life.”

“Another concept from Asian
philosophy, this time Chinese, is
relevant here: wu wei, a central
feature of Taoism, is the idea of non-
doing—a state of being that is so
natural and fluid as to seem
effortless, without struggle. Wu wei—
action without doing—is the
paradoxical goal of wise existence."

"Failure in achieving the perfection we seek
is our lot in life. Nothing else ever. How we
navigate the channels of earthly contingency,
including the biggest contingency of all, is
what makes human lives worthy of
celebration. Baseball is just one of many
routes to insight on these central points of
existence, but one with a privileged
democratic appeal. Which is to say: not all
philosophers are fans of baseball, but all
fans of baseball are, after their own
fashion, philosophers."
As William Carlos Williams knew...

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—
So in detail they, the
crowd,

“Baseball is a strange sport: it consists of long periods in which
little seems to be happening, punctuated by high-energy
outbursts of rapid fire activity. Because of this, despite ever
greater profits, Major League Baseball is bent on finding ways to
shorten games, and to tailor baseball to today's shorter
attention spans. But for the true fan, baseball is always
compelling to watch -and intellectually fascinating. It's
superficially slow-pace is an opportunity to participate in the
distinctive thinking practice that defines the game. If baseball is
boring, it's boring the way philosophy is boring: not because
there isn't a lot going on, but because the challenge baseball
poses is making sense of it all…”
But on the other hand, as Johnny Damon (cribbing from Yogi
Berra, no doubt) once said: if you think too much you just hurt
the team.
Infinite Baseball
Notes from a Philosopher at the Ballpark
Alva Noe

Johnny Damon actually turns out to
have been a bit more thoughtful than
that last observation might imply. He
once wrote, in a letter to his younger
self,
“just being athletic isn’t going to be
enough for the things you’ll want to
accomplish. You’ll also need to be kind,
and patient, but more than anything else,
you’ll need a work ethic. You can have all
the talent in the world, but without that,
you won’t reach your full potential.”
And: “Enjoy every cheer and every boo,
enjoy just being part of this thing so much
bigger than yourself.”

“Plato said that the gods love
what is good; things are not
good because the gods love
them.”
It’s the other way around when
it comes to baseball. It’s just a
game, but we make it good
through our love… It’s special --
it is special -- because we care
so much…”
That’s Dennett’s point again:
____ is not my team because
it’s the best, it’s the best (in my
eyes) because it’s mine.

A philosophical game
“...baseball itself really is a philosophical
game in the sense that it demands [that
we] participate in the distinctive thinking
practice that defines the game… baseball
has much to teach us about values, the
law, the nature of language, and the origins
of writing, action, freedom, and yes, the
meaning of life.’” Infinite Baseball

Finite games are the familiar contests of everyday life; they are played in order to be
won, which is when they end. But infinite games are more mysterious. Their object is
not winning, but ensuring the continuation of play. The rules may change, the
boundaries may change, even the participants may change—as long as the game is
never allowed to come to an end.
“A finite game is played for the purpose of winning, an infinite game for the
purpose of continuing the play.”
“Finite players play within boundaries; infinite players play with
boundaries.”
“Only that which can change can continue: this is the principle by which
infinite players live.”
“if we cannot tell a story about what happened to us, nothing has happened
to us.”
“It is, therefore, this fluidity that presents us with an unavoidable
challenge: how to contain the serious within the truly playful; that is, how to
keep all our finite games in infinite play.” gr

Life is a ball game
Bein' played each
day
Life is a ball game
Everybody can play
Yes you know, Jesus standing at
the home plate
He is waiting for you there
You know, the life is a ball game
But you've got to play it fast
The first phase is temptation
You know the second phase is sin
The third phase tribulation
If you pass, you can make it in…
Wynona Carr

Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy game-the
answer to life, the universe, and
everything…

Playing the Game of Life
Alan Watts
We have an absolutely extraordinary attitude in our culture, and in various other
cultures, high civilizations, to the new member of human society. Instead of
saying frankly to children, "How do you do? Welcome to the human race!" we
are playing a game and we are playing by the following rules...
But instead of that, we still retain an attitude to the child that he is on probation; he
is not really a human being, he is a candidate for humanity. And in just this way,
we have a whole system of preparation of the child for life which always is
preparation and never actually gets there. In other words, we have a system of
schooling which starts with grades...
Now I am not saying that, you know, the philosophy of carpe diem, “Let us drink today, for tomorrow we die”
and not make any plans. What I am saying is that making plans for the future is of use only
to people who are capable of living completely in the present. Genius
Videos: Is life a game?... Life is a game… Playing the game

How playing Wittgensteinian language-games can set us free
SoL

How do you see
it? Our language
games, in the
communal
contexts that give
form to life, have
much to do with
that. (See Alva
Noe on “Baseball
and the Nature of
Language,” which
concludes:
“Language is like
baseball.”)

“Using language is an integral part of the human condition.
We live within language, yet our way of life is something we
find hard to see... Indeed as long as there is language it will
bewitch us, we will face the temptation to misunderstand. And
there is no vantage point outside it. There is no escape from
language-games then, but we can forge a kind of freedom from
within them.” Sandy Grant
Within them and without them. Maybe there is an occasional
“escape”...

Like Wittgenstein, William James
emphasized the ways in which the
structured limitations and rules of language
both enable and constrain what we can
say, or need or want to. There are times,
James noted, when our deepest delight is
simply to stop talking and just enjoy
immersion in the immediate experiences of
life. “The intense interest that life can
assume when brought down to the non-
thinking level, the level of pure sensorial
perception,” is usually not extolled by the
baseball intelligentsia that tend to show up
at events like this. “Philosophy is
essentially talkative and explicit,” James
said. Academia is so.

“...we of the highly educated classes
(so called) have most of us got far, far
away from Nature. We are trained to
seek the choice, the rare, the exquisite
exclusively, and to overlook the
common. We are stuffed with abstract
conceptions, and glib with verbalities
and verbosities; and in the culture of
these higher functions the peculiar
sources of joy connected with our
simpler functions often dry up, and we
grow stone-blind and insensible to life's
more elementary and general goods
and joys.
But I think all true fans understand
exactly what James meant, and
have experienced at first hand the
multi-layered non-thinking primitive
sensorial delights of a day or a
night at the old ballpark. That’s our
remedy.
The remedy under such conditions
is to descend to a more profound
and primitive level…” Blindness

The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life,
Meaning, and the Universe Itself
By Sean Carroll
Part Six: Caring.
“It takes courage to face up to the finitude
of our lives, and even more courage to
admit the limits to purpose in our
existence…”

“The most important thing about life is that it
occurs out of equilibrium, driven by the second
law. To stay alive, we have to continually move,
process information, and interact with our
environment… We are built from the start to care
about the world, to make it matter.”
And that, of course, is why it’s crucial to go to live
games and keep score when we get there:
motion, information processing, and the
environment, all bound together… a triple play
that lights the game up for the attentive fan, that
holds the attentive fan’s attention.

People are not inanimate rocks, accepting what goes on
around them with serene indifference. Different people
might exhibit different levels of care, and they might care
in different ways, but caring itself is ubiquitous. They
might care in an admirable way, watching out for the well-
being of others, or their caring might be purely
selfish, guarding their own interests.”
(That’s one problem with Fantasy Sports…)
“But people are inescapably characterized by what they
care about: their enthusiasms, inclinations, passions,
hopes.”

“When our lives are in good shape, and we are enjoying
health and leisure, what do we do? We play. Once the
basic requirements of food and shelter have been met,
we immediately invent games and puzzles and
Competitions.”
Lucky us.

Why I care
● “Friendship is a slow-ripening fruit” (Aristotle)
● “Wherever you are, it is your friends who make your
world.” (William James)
Baseball brings me back to this annual gathering of friends
every year (since ‘09)... and a smaller group of my oldest
and dearest friends have launched a tradition of gathering,
from distant points (Tennessee, North Carolina, Virginia,
Alabama), at a different minor league venue within
convenient driving distance every summer. Nashville,
Chattanooga, this year Asheville…

… and then? Louisville? Birmingham? The Rocket City Trash
Pandas, maybe?

The Negro Southern League was created
in 1920 by a group of African-American
businessmen and baseball enthusiasts.
From 1920 until its demise in 1951, the
Negro Southern League served as a feeder
route for many great black baseball players
to go on to the Negro American League
and Negro National League.
The league was formed in a meeting in
Atlanta, Georgia. Frank Perdue of
Birmingham was elected the first president
of the league. Other officers were R.H.
Tabor, Nashville, vice president; Prof. W.M.
Brooks, Knoxville, Secretary; and W.J.
Shaw, Atlanta, treasurer.
Among the many players this minor league
sent on to the black “major” leagues are
five Hall of Fame members: Willie Mays,
Leroy “Satchel” Paige, Hilton Smith,
Norman “Turkey” Stearnes, and George
“Mule” Suttles… (continues)

A. Bartlett Giammatti (1938-1989)
“[Baseball] 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 all 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...”

...It breaks my heart because it was meant to, because it was meant to foster in
me again the illusion that there was something abiding, some pattern and some
impulse that could come together to make a reality that would resist the
corrosion; and because, after it had fostered again that most hungered-for
illusion, the game was meant to stop, and betray precisely what it promised.
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.
A. Bartlett Giammatti, “The Green Fields of the Mind”

Giammatti also said:
“Sports represent a shared vision of how we continue, as individual,
team, or community, to experience a happiness or absence of care
so intense, so rare, and so fleeting that we associate their
experience with experience otherwise described as religious or we
say the sports experience must be the tattered remnant of an
experience which was once described, when first felt, as religious.”
And,
On matters of race, on
matters of decency,
baseball should lead the
way.

But of course there will come a time when we
must call it a game. Doug Glanville, who spoke so
impressively here a couple of years ago, writes
that “at every spring training, players are quietly
wondering if this is it, the last time they will be
putting on the uniform as a professional... the
only way to extend time in this game is to deed it
to the next generation.”
Nothing, alas, is forever. We’re not infinite, nor at last is our beloved game.
But as to that next generation, and the next… ? Crash Davis said it best: “it’s a
long season, you gotta trust it.” And you gotta care… about something. Might
as well be a “green field of the mind.”

Who cares

Recommended

Recommended

More Related Content

Similar to Who cares

Similar to Who cares (7)

More from Osopher

More from Osopher (20)

Recently uploaded

Recently uploaded (20)

Who cares