Men at Work

by George F. Will

  Permutations of one word permeate players’ conversations when they talk about their sport of the 162-game season. The word—as both noun and verb—is “grind.” Players speak of the season as a grind. They praise players who are grinders—who bear down pitch by pitch, inning by inning, game by game. Grinding out stubborn at bats, grinding down starting pitchers, and walking to first—these achievements strike some people as unheroic and hence unworthy of admiration. Which brings me to the essence of this book.

  When I publish a book—Men at Work was the sixth of my (so far) thirteen—the title usually is the last thing I consider. With this book, however, I had the title before anything else. I embarked upon this writing project with one certainty: baseball has had quite enough books of romance, nostalgia and gush.

  Ballparks are not, in fact, “cathedrals;” they are places where work—demanding and dangerous work—gets done. The workers are not “boys of summer” because they are not boys; they are men—hard and disciplined by a profession that punishes laxity and is unforgiving of mistakes. My determinedly unromantic and unsentimental—but unfailingly appreciative and enthusiastic—way of thinking about baseball drew a good-natured but deeply serious rebuke from a learned friend. In an article written for the sober and intellectually formidable quarterly the Public Interest, Donald Kagan, a professor of classics at Yale, had the temerity to come at me from the right. Ouch.

  The gravamen of Kagan’s elegant “George Will’s baseball—a conservative critique,” (Fall 1990) was that my title, Men at Work: The Craft of Baseball, was “ominous.” His forebodings were confirmed when he reached my judgment that “games are won by a combination of informed aggression and prudence based on information.” Kagan charged that I said “as little as possible” about “physical ability and natural talent,” stressing instead the role of mind in the competition. “This,” he wrote, “is the fantasy of a smart, skinny kid who desperately wants to believe that brains count more than the speed, power and reckless courage of the big guys who can play.” Well…

  I may be puny, but my argument, which Kagan misstated, is not. I do not deny that extraordinary (literally: not ordinary) physical ability and natural talent are prerequisites for playing baseball at the major-league level. But neither do I believe that those gifts are sufficient. The history of baseball is littered with stories of failures by players who thought that their natural physical endowments would be sufficient.

  There are seven hundred and fifty players on the thirty Major League teams’ twenty-five-man rosters. There are a lot more than seven hundred and fifty physically gifted “natural” athletes. I nowhere argue, and do not believe, that brains count “more” than speed, power and courage. I do, however, believe that brains matter too.

  Kagan wrote that today’s game is “much more boring” than “the lost grandeur of baseball in the 1950s,” when the New York Giants and Brooklyn Dodgers challenged the supremacy of the New York Yankees, who ruled the baseball world “as the Olympian gods ruled theirs.” Gosh, yes: in 1951, all three New York teams finished first, as the Giants and Dodgers ended the regular season tied. But for those fans who did not live in New York—bulletin for Kagan: the vast majority of baseball fans have always lived elsewhere—New York’s dominance of the game was not so swell.

  Kagan’s roseate reveries about baseball in the 1950s were, apparently, undisturbed by the fact that in 1958 the Dodgers and Giants decamped to California because New York fans, oblivious to the grandeur of it all, were not making the turnstiles hum. In 1955, when a wonderful Dodger team defeated the Yankees for the franchise’s first World Series win, attendance at Ebbets Field during the season averaged a paltry 13,423 a game, a lower average than the team with the worst attendance in 2009 (Oakland Athletics, 17,392). And in 1958, when the Yankees at last had the city to themselves, their attendance declined. The baseball that enthralled Kagan was driving fans away by the millions, even in New York.

  But what made Kagan most cross was his judgment that, in the choice of my four subjects, and especially in my selection of Tony Gwynn as my hitter, I was celebrating the “antihero” at the expense of demigods. An antihero, Kagan argued, is someone “who knows his limitations and accepts them, who shuns the burden of leadership, who goes his own way and ‘does his own thing.’” But acknowledging limits is, surely, the essence of conservatism (and of realism, which conservatives consider much the same thing). And is facing facts, such as the reality of limits, incompatible, as Kagan suggests, with leadership?

  Besides, what is leadership in baseball? It is real, but it is limited by the nature of the game. Unlike in football, where the quarterback starts almost every play with the ball in his hands, in baseball the defense (the pitcher) initiates the action on every play. Furthermore, in football you can give the ball to the same running back one down after another. In baseball, a hitter, no matter how heroic, gets only one of every nine of his team’s at bats. A Tom Brady or LaDainian Tomlinson can “take over” a football game; a Kobe Bryant or LeBron James can “dominate” a basketball game. No one except a pitcher can take over or dominate a baseball game.

  Kagan was particularly displeased by my saying (see pages 168–169), ‘“Stay within yourself is baseball’s first commandment.’… A player’s reach should not exceed his grasp.” Kagan wrote, “If Mighty Casey came to bat at a crucial moment today, George Will would want him to punch a grounder through the right side to move the runner to third and leave things up to the next batter.” Speaking for George Will, on whose thinking I am world’s foremost authority, I say: not necessarily. The heavy hitters do have heavy responsibilities. Nevertheless, they have a responsibility to stay within themselves. If Mighty Casey, instead of swinging for the fences and striking out (stranding two runners, not the one Kagan indicates), had hit a scratch single, he would have earned no praise from Kagan, but there might have been, at the end of the game, joy in Mudville.

  It is—and I mean this—a pleasure to be taken to task by a reader with Kagan’s intellectual weight and wit. My intellectual spanking, although undeserved, felt like a compliment. It is also an honor to baseball that it can engage the mind and passions of such an admirable man. However, this too must be said: Kagan says his idea of a hero is Roy Hobbs, who performed what Kagan calls “magical” feats as the protagonist of Bernard Malamud’s novel The Natural. But Hobbs is fictional. Gwynn is real, which is a virtue when there is work to be done.

  Alas, let us get back to the fact that the enjoyment of any sport is enhanced by knowledge of its nuances. This is especially true of baseball. The pleasure a baseball fan derives from following the sport is, to an unusual degree, a function of the engagement of the fan’s mind as well as of his or her eyes. The barely controlled—and sometimes uncontrolled—violence of the NFL, the kinetic energy of the collisions between cat-quick 300-pound linemen and running backs who are as big as linemen were a generation ago is spectacular. Football fans can relish it while understanding next to nothing about the complexities of the thinking—and there is a lot of it—that, on every play, sets twenty-two men in choreographed motion. The beauty of the astonishing balletic grace of the NBAs big men—and almost all the supposedly small players are much bigger than almost all NBA fans—pleases the eye even if the mind does not understand the plays and game plans that the players are executing. And there is another way in which baseball is different: statistics enhance the fans’ enjoyment. Most baseball fans who are more than merely lukewarm in their interest will recognize these numbers:

  511

  0.406

  56

  60

  61

  1.12

  130

  1,406

  Such fans will know that those statistics represent, respectively,

  The number of games Cy Young won

  Ted Williams’s batting average in 1941, when he became (so far) the last .400 hitter

  The number of consecutive games in which Joe DiMaggio got hits in 1941

 
The number of home runs Babe Ruth hit in 1927

  The number of home runs Roger Maris hit in 1961

  Bob Gibsons ERA in 1968

  Rickey Henderson’s single-season (1982) and career stolen-base records

  Now, present the following numbers to even an intense NFL fan:

  18,355

  2,105

  69,329

  5,084

  497

  50

  208

  31

  2,544

  186

  I would wager dollars against doughnuts that not many self-described NFL fanatics will know that those numbers represent

  Emmitt Smith’s career record for the most yards gained rushing

  Eric Dickerson’s single-season rushing record

  Brett Favre’s record for career passing yards

  Dan Marino’s record for single-season passing yards

  Brett Favre’s record for most touchdown passes in a career

  Tom Brady’s record for most touchdown passes in a season

  Jerry Rice’s record for most career touchdowns

  LaDainian Tomlinson’s record for most touchdowns in a season

  Morten Andersen’s record (he was a kicker) for most points scored in career

  LaDainian Tomlinson’s record for most points scored in a season

  There is a reason why baseball fans are more likely than football fans to be acquainted with the most important records in their favorite sport. The reason is not that baseball fans are, in general, more intelligent and thoughtful, although I suspect that they are. Rather, the most important reason that statistics generally mean more to baseball fans than to their football counterparts is that baseball is a cornucopia of especially revealing data. It is so because it has uniquely measurable conditions of competition. It has a symmetry that baseball writer Alan Schwarz calls in his book The Numbers Game a “double-entry personality.” Every hitting event is, as Schwarz says, “part of a pitcher’s record and every pitching event part of a hitter’s record.” Which is why no other team sport leaves such a satisfying statistical residue of coherence. “A ten-yard run by a halfback or a point guard’s breakaway layup cannot,” Schwarz acutely notes, “be assigned against any particular defensive player…. Baseball, however, is the most individual of team sports: in perfectly discernible packets the game reduces to one batter versus one pitcher, with each assuming responsibility for the other.”

  I dwell here upon statistics, and their special importance in the savoring of baseball, because about a dozen years ago—1998 stands out as the year when numbers suddenly became garish and, strictly speaking, incredible—it became clear that chemistry was disrupting the game’s treasured arithmetic. The twenty years since the publication of this book will be remembered as two decades tarnished by steroids and other performance enhancing drugs (PEDs). It is to be hoped that, from today forward, this era will be remembered as the steroid parenthesis in baseball’s history—a closed episode.

  Until the PED epidemic, fans had the relatively uncomplicated pleasure of making meaningful comparisons between players from different decades. This was possible because modern baseball, meaning the game since 1900, had only had two distinct eras, the dead-ball era, which ended around 1920, and the lively ball era since then. Now fans must make another calibration when comparing players’ achievements: is a particular achievement suspect because it occurred during the last decade of the twentieth century or the first decade of the twenty-first?

  Some people say that baseball’s record book should be flecked with asterisks denoting suspect numbers. That is not necessary. The only people who care deeply about baseball statistics are baseball fans, and they know how to read the record book. They know, for example, that something odd happened—probably to the ball—in 1930 (see page 134) and they turn a jaundiced eye on the gaudy batting numbers of that aberrant year. They will do the same for the parenthesis period.

  Because baseball is held to higher standards than other sports—for which compliment, baseball should be proud—the problem of PEDs is thought to be primarily a problem in baseball. This is not true. Perhaps no sports have been as perversely affected as bicycle racing and track and field, where many recent achievements have been tainted. It was, after all, a track coach who blew the whistle that announced the arrival of the BALCO scandal that soon ensnared Barry Bonds. And only the incorrigibly innocent can believe that some remarkable recent changes in football are unrelated to chemistry.

  In 1966, coach Bear Bryant’s University of Alabama football team went 11–0 and won the Sugar Bowl. Only nineteen of the ninety-two players on this powerhouse weighed more than 200 pounds. The two heaviest players weighed 221 and 223, respectively. The quarterback weighed 177 pounds. Today, it is not unusual for the linemen on a good high school team to average 250 pounds or more. Today, a 213-pound running back in a big-time college-football program would be considered cute and plucky. Today, a 175-pound quarterback would have to be thin as a blade of grass : most quarterbacks now are well over six feet tall because they must be able see over linemen who are often at least six feet five inches tall.

  In 1980, only one NFL player weighed more than 300 pounds. By 1994, 155 did. By 2004, there were 370 players over 300 pounds—and ten over 350 pounds. By 2005, thirty of the thirty-two teams had offensive lines whose members averaged at least 300 pounds. One line averaged 323 pounds.

  For a number of reasons, the most important of which is better nutrition, the human race has been becoming bigger for a long time. You know this if you have visited the Tower of London and seen there the suits of armor, which seem to have been made for children but in fact were worn by adult warriors. Surely, however, the rapid increase in the size of football players cannot be entirely explained as a result of smarter eating and better training.

  It is more than merely possible to hope, it is reasonable to believe, that baseball has now closed the PED parenthesis that has blighted the game. That judgment must, however, be—if you will pardon the expression—asterisked for this reason: The financial rewards that accrue to athletic excellence are already enormous, and as our increasingly affluent society increases its leisure time and discretionary income, those rewards will increase. As they do, so will the incentives to cheat. This means that baseball probably is condemned to an unending competition between the bad and good chemists—those who concoct new PEDs that cannot be detected and those who devise tests to detect them.

  Still, as the financial rewards for athletic excellence increase, so do the financial costs of being caught cheating and being suspended without pay or permanently banished. And the shame that attaches to cheating, at least in baseball, can be a powerful deterrent—can be. That depends on baseball fans caring about more than winning. It depends on them caring about winning the right way.

  The moral price of PEDs is that performance is devalued by being enhanced. The conditions of competition change, stealthily and unequally. Lifting weights and eating spinach enhance the body’s normal functioning. But many chemical infusions cause the body (and the mind) to behave abnormally, while jeopardizing the user’s physical and mental health.

  Chemical cheating will be decisively routed when fans become properly repelled by it. They will recoil in disgust when they understand that athletes who are chemically propelled to victory do not merely overvalue winning, they misunderstand why winning is properly valued. Professional athletes stand at apexes of achievement, but their achievements are admirable primarily because they are the products of a lonely submission to sustained discipline of exertion. Such submission is a manifestation of good character. An athlete’s proper goal is to perform unusually well, not unnaturally well. Drugs that make sport exotic by making it weird drain sport of its exemplary power. That power draws people to be spectators of excellence. Drugs that make sport a display of chemistry rather than character degrade sport into a display of some chemists’ virtuosities and some athletes’ degenerate characters.

  As I
said above, I began writing Men at Work as a guidebook to the craft of baseball. It was not until I was done writing that I realized that the book had acquired, for me at least, a moral dimension. It had become an illustration of two of my most deeply held convictions: Character is destiny. And people of good character demonstrate in their daily lives the fact that, by being attentive to the small details of their vocations, big problems can be largely banished.

  I am not conflating craftsmanship and character; a craftsman can be an unsavory person. I am, however, emphatically saying that there is an ethic of craftsmanship. G. K. Chesterton, with his penchant for paradoxes, had a point when he said that anything worth doing is worthy doing badly. He meant that anything worth doing is worth trying to do, even if you cannot get the hang of it right away. (Brain surgery? Financial counseling? Piloting airplanes? There are exceptions to Chesterton’s axiom.) But there is an ethic of craftsmanship—the moral imperative to respect standards. It is said that being moral is doing the right thing when no one is watching. The categorical imperative of the ethic of baseball is playing conscientiously, even on a muggy August night in front of a small crowd when neither your team nor the one you are competing against is going to place in October. Sport is play, but play has a serious side. It can elevate both competitors and spectators. PEDs divide a sport in two ways. They separate the cheaters from the honorable and admirable competitors. And cold, covert and unfair alterations to the conditions of competition divide the competitors from the spectators, draining sport of its value as a shared activity for a community.

  If I could wave a wand and wish one thing for each fan it would be that he or she could just once stand in a batter’s box and see—and hear the sizzle of—a major-league fastball passing close by. Or have a major leaguer’s ground ball hit sharply to their right at shortstop and then have to make the long throw to first. Everything is more difficult than it looks. There is no greater testimony to major leaguers’ skills than how easy they make things seem.