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Late last week, as I stepped into a faculty meeting a few minutes early, a colleague told me it had been 9 degrees when he'd arisen that morning to feed his chickens. But then, after the collective groan, he gripped a yardstick, swung it a few times in slow motion, and used the phrase "quick wrists." Ah, news of Spring Training has reached the barren north! In the media this news has been bittersweet, but I have vowed I will not lament the coming of the baseball season—like Jason Giambi at his press conference, I will not even mention the "s" word that hovers over the game. Nor will I mention Juiced, nor the Bash Brothers, nor syringes, nor "the Cream," nor "the Clear"—no! Fie on it, I say! This is the time of hope, of rebirth, perhaps even of a finite sort of redemption (read: A-Rod) or recompense (read: Carlos Beltran) or, dare I say it, reconciliation (read: Washington, D.C. and baseball in the beltway—Pres. Taft, where are you, throwing from the crowd in a bowler hat?). As my remedy, I will instead ascend to the sphere of metaphysics: to wit, Baseball and Philosophy: Thinking Outside the Batter's Box, edited by Eric Bronson, the latest volume in Open Court's Popular Culture and Philosophy series. Ah, metaphysics, the pleasing retreat from the darkness of flawed particularity.

But I've found, in reading this volume, that baseball resists Cartesian reduction. If the philosophic task is to address the universals, and the literary task to celebrate the particulars, then the close and enduring connection of baseball to literature makes sense. So also does the resistance of baseball to philosophy, except the anti-philosophies of a Yogi Berra or a Casey Stengel.

Hence, this volume feels a bit contrived, an intriguing idea that doesn't quite measure up to the magnificently simple complexity of the game itself. I didn't get a good feel about the fit of this volume when I saw among earlier titles in the series The Matrix and Philosophy and Buffy the Vampire-Slayer and Philosophy: Fear and Trembling in Sunnydale. It's an interesting enterprise—to explore the cogency of pop culture—but does baseball, the grand pastoral game, really belong in such company?

The volume is structured in nine "innings" of paired essays loosely linked by a theme for every inning, followed by a rather diffuse set of "post-game conference" hot topics set up in point/counterpoint format. No central theme emerges, except the attempt by the various authors to bring some aspect of their philosophical training to bear on some aspect of the game of baseball. This confluence often seems unwieldy, with some of the discussions forbiddingly jargon-laden (and not baseball jargon, which would be welcome more often). Strangely, the essays that are most engaging are those that fail to keep the philosophical agenda, and that dip down into the particulars that make baseball so beloved.

One highlight occurs in the "Bottom of the Third" (an inning devoted to umpires), in the essay "Taking Umpiring Seriously: How Philosophy Can Help Umpires Make the Right Calls" by J.S. Russell. When he leads off his argument by claiming that "What umpires do is philosophically fascinating," I must admit that he has opened new ground for me to ponder that problematic role. I'm intrigued by the notion of different interpretive levels at work here, such that "a call in baseball is also a witness's report or description of events. It is, in effect, a first-hand statement about a fact or an event, as well as a call." But Russell's appeal to the legal philosopher R.M. Dworkin and his notion of the law's integrity doesn't really elucidate the shadowy endeavor of umpiring. Instead, it is the account, still vivid in my memory as a virulent teenaged Yankees' fan, of the Pine-Tar Incident, wherein Billy Martin forced the umpire Joe Brinkman to function as a legalist in disallowing George Brett's home run. Ah, here was great theater, and the quote of Brinkman's that Russell offers here—"'It didn't seem right to take away Brett's homer because of a little pine tar, but rules are rules. Rules are all an umpire has to work with"—is perfect baseball-ese, plain but cryptic. So also the overruling decision of AL President Lee MacPhail that, as Russell paraphrases, "following the rules was not in the spirit of the game in this case." The maddening rightness of all this seems to trump Russell's attempt at deeper philosophical exposition. The particulars hold up on their own here.

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March (Web-only) 2005, Vol. 49