Triumph and Tragedy in Mudville

by Stephen Jay Gould

  Above all, the commitment and professionalism of these splendid men shines forth, teaching us that excellence transcends any particular subject, and demands the same discipline for both body and mind. The primary value in eliminating the myth of the invincible “natural athlete” should lie in the possibility of fellowship—in the recognition that some form of excellence is accessible to anyone who can bring will and discipline to opportunity.

  But I must quibble with Will’s overextension of his observations on baseball to a program for American rejuvenation in general. (Of course, we all know that life imitates baseball, so I have no objection to Will’s general attempt, only to this particular version.) Will actually advances two related claims in his central thesis. First, the quality of play in professional baseball has improved markedly through time, in opposition to more mythology from the other face of Janus—this time, the legend of past Golden Ages. Will writes:

  Human beings seem to take morose pleasure from believing that once there was a Golden Age, some lost Eden or Camelot or superior ancient civilization, peopled by heroes and demigods, an age of greatness long lost and irrecoverable. Piffle. Things are better than ever, at least in baseball, which is what matters most.

  Second, this increasing excellence narrows the range of disparity among professional players (by relative equalization at higher summits) and makes the tiny edges supplied by obsession, practice, and intelligence all the more important. Perhaps Ruth could excel by brawn, and shun conditioning while feeding his insatiable gustatory and sexual appetites. Modern competition will not permit such laxity. Will writes:

  The fundamental fact is this: For an athlete to fulfill his or her potential, particularly in a sport as demanding as baseball, a remarkable degree of mental and moral discipline is required.

  We speak of such people as “driven.” It would be better to say they are pulled, because what moves them is in front of them. A great athlete has an image graven on his or her imagination, a picture of an approach to perfection.

  And finally, bringing both arguments together:

  What spectators pay to see is a realm of excellence, in which character, work habits and intelligence—mind—make the difference between mere adequacy and excellence. The work is long, hard, exacting, and sometimes dangerous. The work is a game that men play but they do not play at it. That is why they, and their craft, are becoming better.

  I am a card-carrying (dare I utter the word?) liberal, Will an equally self-identified writer of conservative bent. On baseball, however, we differ little, for most fans are deeply conservative in this jewel-like world where legacy is so precious (as Seymour shows) and where you do not die when age drops you from this realm of true and appropriate laissez-faire. I applaud Will’s curmudgeonly conservatism on all issues of baseball practice. His diatribe against aluminum bats alone should inscribe him in the writer’s Hall of Fame, for a deep understanding of the details that count, and the issues well worth a trip to the stake if necessary. Aluminum bats, he asserts, would destroy both the sound of baseball and the precious continuity of statistical comparability:

  Allowing aluminum bats into the major leagues would constitute a serious degradation of the game, and not just for aesthetic reasons. But let us begin with them. Aesthetic reasons are not trivial. Baseball’s ambiance is a complex, subtle and fragile creation. Baseball’s sounds are important aspects of the game, and no sound is more evocative than that of the thwack of wood on a ball. It is particularly so when it is heard against the background sizzle of crowd noise on a radio broadcast, radio being the basic and arguably the best way to experience baseball if you can not be at the park. To a person of refined sensibilities, aluminum hitting a ball makes a sound as distressing as that of fingernails scraping a blackboard.

  On the statistical point, Will notes that aluminum bats “would dilute baseball’s intensely satisfying continuity and thereby would render much less interesting the comparison of player’s performances. Those comparisons nourish interest in the game as it passes down from generation to generation and they sustain fans in the fallow months of the off-season.”

  Nor do I dispute Will’s assertion that play has improved through time (especially since the evidence comes partly from my own statistical work on the history of batting averages, particularly on the elimination of .400 hitting as a paradoxical mark of improvement). I only question his upping of the ante in extending his two-part argument to a basically conservative, individualist solution of America’s current social and economic ills—the dissociable and more contentious “baseball imitates life” part of his thesis. Will argues that if we, as a nation composed of individuals, could only imitate the gumption and drive of high baseball achievers who prevail by dedication and obsession more than by natural gifts, then we would regain our national power and purpose. This drive cannot be granted by governmental gift or program, but must come from within:

  I believe that America’s real problem is individual under-stretch, a tendency of Americans to demand too little of themselves, at their lathes, their desks, their computer terminals…. I will not belabor the point but I do assert it: If Americans made goods and services the way Ripken makes double plays, Gwynn makes hits, Hershiser makes pitches and La Russa makes decisions, you would hear no more about the nation’s trajectory having passed its apogee.

  I don’t even dispute this claim. But I do quarrel with the premise that major league baseball, as a totality, represents an island of self-motivated excellence that could save us by extensive emulation. I think that Will has made an error in confusing parts for wholes. He has chosen four exemplary human beings at the summit of their profession—and these four share the qualities that he imputes to the entire enterprise at this level. But I doubt the validity of such a generalization. He has taken the best, but they cannot stand as surrogates for all. They are best because they have conjoined a basic intelligence and a fine body with a fierce inner drive. I don’t doubt that major league baseball features more such people than you might find in your average factory or college faculty lounge. Such are the fruits of highest selectivity. But all of us who work in elite institutions of their chosen profession know that cynicism, submission, and dead wood exist at all levels. Baseball also contains its journeymen and its losers, its men of superb talent who never grow up or never catch fire. Major league baseball is not a priesthood of unflagging commitment, but an institution far more selective than most, yet still containing all kinds of folks with all manner of problems and modes of life. Major league baseball may precipitate out the losers more quickly, but we cannot so proceed in life (where consequences include death and starvation), and this oasis of unbridled laissez-faire doesn’t even produce Will’s universal, internally driven excellence in its own house.

  My best evidence for this variety in attitude among major leaguers comes from the last of the three books reviewed here—Heiman, Weiner, and Gutman’s When the Cheering Stops. These extended interviews with twenty-one players of the late forties through mid-seventies present a very different picture from Will’s four paragons. These twenty-one include a few genuine stars, but most were journeymen who spent careers on yo-yos of trading and demotion to the minors. Some showed the obsession that has pushed Will’s men to success, but most lost the drive to injury and disappointment, or never had it at all. They admired the heroes of their own age, and they recognized the zeal as well as the talent of Warren Spahn or Mickey Mantle, but could not play at this level.

  These men played baseball in a different age of less intense strategy—the fifties game of “put some men on and hope for a bases-clearing homer,” rather than the highly intellectual “little ball,” or one-run-at-a-time (and much more exciting) baseball recaptured from the age of Cobb and Wagner and now again in vogue. These journeymen of the fifties often make too many excuses for their own abbreviated careers. (I cannot quite accept Al Weiss’s argument—if only because I loved him so much after his heroics won the 1969 World Series for the Mets—that
this moment of greatness wrecked his career because he could never again play to a level justifying his salary increase after his day in the sun, and he soon lost his job as a result.) They also clearly demonstrate that continuous intellectual struggle does not pervade the pinnacle at all moments. Consider these two identical assessments of Bucky Harris’s managerial style, from one who loved and one who hated this successful skipper. First, from Chuck Stobbs:

  My favorite manager…was Bucky Harris. We’d have two meetings a year. On opening day he’d say, boys, you know we’re glad you’re here and whathaveyou. Then, at the end of the year we’d have another meeting and he’d thank everybody for doing the best they could and say he’d hope to see us all next year.

  And this, from J. W. Porter:

  On opening day…he got everyone around him at the mound. And here’s exactly what he said. He said, “Guys, you’re major leaguers. If you don’t know how to play this fucking game now, you never will.” And he dropped the bag of balls on the mound, went and sat in the dugout and stayed there for two years until they ran him off.

  I rather suspect that major league baseball imitates life pretty well—by including its share of flakes, kooks, goof-offs, and cry-babies. We can isolate a core of splendid exemplars, probably a larger core than in most professions because competition is so much stiffer. But when you probe deeply enough into the totality, all the foibles and frailties of human life emerge. Which brings me back to Janus, god of our beginnings and the “play ball” call of this essay. In his poem “A Coat,” W. B. Yeats wrote of the uses of mythology:

  I made my song a coat

  Covered with embroideries

  Out of old mythologies

  From heel to throat….

  But others misuse his pretty covering, and he discards it:

  Song, let them take it,

  For there’s more enterprise

  In walking naked.

  This review has been dedicated to defending the virtues of such nakedness—in truth value, even (for I will grant Will this) in moral instruction. This nakedness of reality is the second and less familiar face of Janus. But it’s cold out there in our markedly imperfect world. So I guess we need the conventional showy face of Janus as well—the world of baseball myth and legend. And why not? In what other world is myth so harmless? Great battles kill and maim; great homers and no-hitters are pure joy or deep tragedy without practical consequence (no one, in my presence, must ever mention Bill Mazeroski’s 1960 homer against my beloved Yankees). Life is inherently ambiguous; baseball games pit pure good against abject evil. Even Saddam Hussein must have committed one act of kindness in his life, but what iota of good could possibly be said for aluminum bats or the designated hitter rule?

  As a skeptic and rationalist, I prefer the second face of Janus; as a fan, I acknowledge the power of his first and legendary visage. I began with a mythic home run of this first face, and I end, for symmetry’s sake, with another, perhaps even more famous, as described by the hitter himself in When the Cheering Stops. The New York Giants (my National League club in my youth) stood thirteen and a half games behind the Brooklyn Dodgers in August 1951. Charlie Dressen, manager of the Bums, pronounced the immortal line: “The Giants is dead.” The New York papers debated his grammar, but did not doubt his conclusions. Yet Durocher’s Giants persisted, and miraculously tied the Dodgers on the last day of the season. The two teams split the first two games of the playoff. In the last inning of the third and final game, with the Giants trailing by two runs and all apparently lost, Bobby Thomson came to bat with two men on and hit the most famous homer in baseball history. I was nine years old, home alone after school and glued to the tiny TV screen that we had just purchased—a family first. I was never so purely and deliriously happy in all my life. Thomson, it seems, was pretty pleased as well:

  The Shot Heard ’Round the World: The New York Giants swarm Bobby Thomson after his three-run, ninth-inning home run beats the Brooklyn Dodgers—and wins the Giants the National League title—at the Polo Grounds on October 3, 1951. Credit: Bettmann/Corbis

  To this day, I can never adequately describe the feeling that went through me as I circled the bases…. I can remember feeling as if time was just frozen. It was a delirious, delicious moment and when my feet finally touched home plate and I saw my teammates’ faces, that’s when I realized I had won the pennant with one swing of the bat. And I’d be a liar if I didn’t admit that I’ll cherish that moment till the day I die.

  Janus has two faces because we need to look both ways toward transcendence and reality—somehow titrating both to forge a reasonable approach to life. As Bucky (Fuller, not Dent of the glorious 1978 home run) said: “Unity is plural and, at minimum, is two.” And as Amos (the prophet, not Rusie the Hall of Fame pitcher) proclaimed (Amos 3:3): “Can two walk together, except they be agreed?”

  The H and Q of Baseball

  Books reviewed:

  A Whole Different Ball Game: The Sport and Business of Baseball by Marvin Miller

  Ted Williams: A Portrait in Words and Pictures, edited by Dick Johnson, text by Glenn Stout

  My Favorite Summer, 1956 by Mickey Mantle and Phil Pepe

  The Home Run Heard ’Round the World: The Dramatic Story of the 1951 Giants-Dodgers Pennant Race by Ray Robinson

  Reprinted with permission from the New York Review of Books. Copyright © 1991 NYREV, Inc. First published October 24, 1991.

  If you wish to divide Americans into two unambiguous groups, what would you choose as the best criterion? Males and females, east and west of the Mississippi? May I suggest, instead, the following question: “What was Justice Blackmun’s worst decision?” Anti-abortionists, and conservatives in general, will reply without a moment’s hesitation: Roe v. Wade. Liberals might need to think for a moment, but if they like baseball as well, they will surely answer: Flood v. Kuhn. For, in 1972, the same Harry Blackmun who gave us Roe v. Wade also wrote the 5–3 decision (with the usual trio of Douglas, Marshall, and Brennan in opposition) denying outfielder Curt Flood the right to negotiate freely with other teams following the expiration of his contract with the St. Louis Cardinals, and upholding the admittedly illogical exemption of major league baseball from all antitrust legislation (on the preposterous argument that this game alone—for none other enjoys such a waiver—is a sport and not a business).

  Curt Flood was one of the best ballplayers of the 1960s, a fine outfielder with a nearly .300 lifetime batting average. Following the 1969 season, after twelve good years with the Cards, he was traded to the Philadelphia Phillies—and he didn’t want to go (or at least he wanted the option, available to any free man, of placing his services on the market and negotiating with other teams). But major league baseball, by explicit judicial sanction, had always enforced a system of peonage based upon the reserve clause. This statement, present in all contracts, “reserved” the player’s services to his club for the following season, even if terms had not been reached on a new contract. (That is, the player could be “reappointed”—without his approval, take it or leave it—for a following year at the same terms as the last season.) In effect, the reserve clause provided a perpetual contract because owners granted themselves the power of indefinite extension, year after year. Thus, teams owned players and could pay and trade them almost at will. A player had but one “recourse,” really a death warrant, rather than a weapon: he could refuse to sign, but to what avail? No other team would hire him.

  Owners insisted that they needed such a provision to prevent baseball’s wreckage by bidding wars—an odd argument that management must be protected from itself by oppressing workers. In two previous rulings, in 1922 and 1953, the Supreme Court had upheld baseball’s exemption from antitrust legislation, thereby depriving players of any judicial remedy for abuses of the reserve clause. (The Court did not present a constitutional defense of management, but rather passed the buck, stating that any regulation of baseball’s traditional ways must be instituted by Congress.) Blackmun’s regre
ttable decision of 1972 includes a mixture of platitudes about the sanctity of our national pastime, combined with a third passing of the buck.

  All Americans not living in a hole know that circumstances have since reversed dramatically: the reserve clause is history and players now have adequate power and fair representation in negotiating contracts. Consequently, players are coequal with management, and their gargantuan salaries hog more news than their accomplishments on the field. (I don’t want to bore you with figures so endlessly repeated in the press that they have become a litany.)

  Two other points are equally obvious to all fair-minded observers, but not so frequently stressed. First, contrary to the doomsday predictions made by owners for more than a century, baseball remains in good health. Owners insisted that free agency would lead to an unfair concentration of talent, but free bidding has increased interest and competition on the field by reducing the differences among teams and giving most a chance for a championship. Between 1949 and 1964 a New York team played in the World Series in all years but 1959. The Yankees alone won nine World Series during this period. These were blissful years for a Yankee fan like me, but not good for baseball and the rest of the country. No such dynasties exist today; talent is too mobile and this year’s last can become next season’s first.

  Second, effective unionizing of players had produced this more equable distribution of baseball’s immense revenues. (The vast increase arises from TV and radio contracts, and remarkably effective merchandizing—but owners wouldn’t have shared the bounty voluntarily.) I doubt that a better success story for trade unionism can be told in our times. Dave Winfield, a great veteran player and one of the most thoughtful men in the game today, said it all: “I have been a part of the best union for workers in this country. I don’t think that baseball players have been greedy, or that the union has been greedy or nasty. The owners used to make all the money. Now they share it.”