I started rereading Xenophon’s Anabasis in Greek about a month ago: I felt like tackling something in prose which wouldn’t prove too taxing in my present state of divided attention.  Immediately I began to be struck by the sense of how little anything has really changed in that part of the world throughout recorded history.  Well over a millennium before the Koran was written down, the royal pretender Cyrus has rendered his nook of Asia Minor safe for travel by rather Procrustean means: Xenophon notes the wealth of loiterers whose hands or feet have been cut off for an attempted malefaction.  When Cyrus is slain and the Greeks must retreat through the mountains, they encounter inhospitable natives known as the Chordoi—our Kurds of today—who hate the Persian Empire but also hate Persian-hating intruders.  It has occurred to me (and others) many times in recent years that we could have done worse in Iraq , following the deposition of Saddam Hussein, than to sponsor a Kurdish state in the north and allow the rest of Iraq to settle into its chosen density of internecine carnage.  Perhaps we could have done better, too… but it doesn’t seem as though we did.  Our last best hope in the Arab world rests with monarchies— Morocco , Jordan , perhaps even the House of Saud—and not with the will of the people.  The classics would have taught us this; indeed, they taught our forefathers to be very leery of democracy in creating a constitutional republic.

     The heavy hand of déjà vu (it becomes much heavier with age, as one’s “alreadies” multiply) descended on me, likewise, as I read Steve Kogan’s long rebuttal of the neo-Marxist critical establishment’s assault on Melville.  Professor Kogan is vastly more patient than I.  One of the reasons I desisted from seeking a full-time academic career was a complete dismay at the prospect of having to chastise such patent folderol as Steve identifies in his essay.  One wonders if such “critics” have any genuine affection for literature at all—or, for that matter, if they have ever actually read the works about which they publish voluminously.  Some day, when a sober history of our cultural meltdown is written at arm’s remove (and, of course, the strength of that meltdown renders the dawn of that day very doubtful), we will see a brilliant analysis of why our best-read vomited forth the lessons and habits of literate life.  Can it be as simple—and as sordid—as ruthless ambition?  Did everyone praise the emperor’s new clothes because everyone wanted promotion to the emperor’s council?  I, for one, can testify that in many private Christian institutions around the nation whose catalog(ue)s and PR are replete with Western-friendly traditionalism, aspirant English professors are at this moment grinding out conference papers salted with the latest critical jargon—or even the not-so-latest: for Deconstruction in some diluted form often passes for the first wave where its rancid effluvia are finally seeping in.

     O tempora, O mores!  Even my own prying into the history of our long-past pastime, baseball, has confirmed me in the sentiment that things are falling apart.  I have been researching the question of race in the game a few seasons after Jackie Robinson’s momentous appearance in a Dodger uniform, and I find much reason to conclude that we have not so much become a more tolerant society as  a less thoughtful one.  Stereotypes abound in our electronic Quik-Mart approach to life—not maliciously intended, but perhaps the more persuasive on that account.  Nor am I a member of that prolific tribe of academics, the Enemies of Generality (whose bloodline runs through Marxism and other species of anti-orthodox orthodoxy)—but it is surely preferable that we reflectively choose our operative models rather than let them be forced upon us by the way machines think.  In my opinion, the soft racism of dull assumption has grown out of the same cultural (or anti-cultural) movement as has ruined baseball itself at the Major League level, where most of you are likely to perceive the game.  The home run is a kind of grab-and-go, rogue-hero conquest of victory by one man with a bludgeon… and I promise you that you would be shocked to know what degree of duplicity, mendacity, chicanery, and downright criminality has gone into marketing the long ball.

     I felt that my piece was justified by a) summer, when baseballs are hurled and hit; b) Dr. Kogan’s piece, which was my sole submission for a long time and which an excerpt from my book promised to balance in length while offsetting in subject matter; and c) recent issues of Praesidium, which have delved deeply into that  most ludicrous of oxymora, “popular culture”.  If you loathe the game, fear not: my excerpt has far more to do with the collapse of human systems than with spitballs and bunts

     Many thanks to Ralph Carlson—again—for volunteering his superlative poetry, and to Dr. Singleton for sharing an unusual experiment in writing fiction for the literacy-challenged.

J.H.

back to Contents

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A Synthetic Meditation on Baseball, Racism, Closed Systems, and Spiritual Rigor Mortis

by

John R. Harris

Ού δεϊ την πενίαν έκβάλλειν άλλα το δόγμα.

 “It is not poverty which we should cast out, but our teachings about it.”

                                                                                     Epictetus, 3.17.9

a) Inflexible systems and racial bias

     I began looking more closely at my old baseball cards to find out if black players after Jackie Robinson were consistently short-changed in seeking fair rewards for their abilities.  They were.  I might now uncork  a sanctimonious diatribe against those of my own skin color who are not as enlightened as I—the favorite liberal pastime of scourging yourself and your entire community for a collective sin which (you make sure to imply repeatedly) you personally have never committed.  I don’t like such generous hypocrisy.  What would be the good, in any case, of apologizing for abuses half a century old, whose victims are either no longer among us or else have created new lives in the meantime?  Would Bill White get to be shuttled back in a time machine for the few thousand at-bats of which he was robbed?  Would Floyd Robinson, or Wes Covington?  Can they be placed on a Hall of Fame ballot for what they might well have done but never had the chance to do?  Can Vada Pinson, even—who probably should be in Cooperstown, probably would be if the forces against which he struggled were as well publicized as they have become in Orlando Cepeda’s case… can Vada Pinson, I ask, even be resurrected from the huge bone pile of “also ran’s” whom the Veterans’ Committee has long forgotten?

     If this book does anything of the sort, I should be more than delighted.  As for the broader social outrage of segregation, I do not have it within me to masquerade as my grandfather’s ghost and repent of a crime which someone of my generation can grasp neither with real profundity nor in full context.  Who can calculate the tragedy of a ten-year-old artistic genius sent to work in a field or a factory for the rest of his life?  Which of us can appreciate the pressure of familial and local attitudes in an age when single parents are often the norm and when households move to another neighborhood every five years?  I could express my deepest regrets—and I do—but not my artificial contrition on behalf of those I never knew to those I can never know.  Such treaties are hammered out in heaven and in hell, not on keyboards like mine.

     I suspect, besides, that most people of darker skin recognize the white-man-in-sack-cloth for the self-indulgent poseur that he is.  All sin, in fact, is personal—intensely personal: none is collective.  This is the most basic of moral truths.  The soldier who machine-guns a bunch of civilians on his officer’s order is guilty of murder: personally guilty, because his finger pulled the trigger.  The proud car-owner who takes unnecessary joy-rides around town just to show off his sporty possession is guilty of wanton pollution (not to mention silly vanity).  On the other hand, no soldier is guilty of a massacre just because he happened to be in uniform on that dreadful day; and the man who simply drives himself to work need not tear his hair about participating in a wicked Western practice which is poisoning the air.  As long as the soldier shares his food with a street urchin, and as long as the driver resourcefully strives to minimize his driving, they’re doing their bit.  You need soldiers if you don’t want other soldiers kicking your door in: the world can be an ugly place, and the human heart a tangle of vipers.  You have to pay your bills, and few of us can walk to work in our sprawling urban society.  I tried when I was younger: it didn’t last very long.  We do what we can.  Each of us does what he can.

     Enough of this non-apology.  Frankly, as I have written more than once, I received the distinct impression in putting this book together that the men most victimized by the circumstances it describes are least interested in dredging the whole thing up again after all these years.  I have noticed, as well, that many white people are as sensitive to being charged with racism as a recent bruise is to a soft touch.  They don’t want to hear about it any more.  They’ve heard about it all their lives, even though most of them have tried to live in a manner directly opposed to the past’s bigotry.  They would never deny a black person a fair crack at a job—and they grow restless and fidgety when the suggestion is floated that the past’s vices are not entirely buried.  They grow impatient, even… and even angry.

     This often makes the Caucasian-on-the-streets deaf to genuine cries of victimization raised by genuine sufferers of prejudice.  If you beat a bruise long enough, it becomes a callus.1  On extraordinary occasions such as the immersion of New Orleans in Hurricane Katrina’s waters, middle-class white Americans may be forced by the ubiquity of anguishing images to acknowledge misery’s reality.  At such times, they are apt to pour out a torrential flow of cash so as to sleep a little easier.  This is their response to misery in general, and not just to racism specifically, since most Americans, in a profound paradox, keenly register both the guilt of excessive comfort and the unease of extreme risk.  They (and I might as well say we) lead lives that are at once materially luxurious (plush minivans, video games, air-conditioning, the Internet) and beset by insecurity (lay-offs, career changes, rising taxes and insurance rates, powerlessness to influence government at any level).  Generous cash gifts in times of tragedy are like rubbing a rabbit’s foot, or sacrificing the best heifer to the unknown gods of fortune.  They show that one is aware of one’s own exposure, and hence—perhaps—they avert the evil eye.  Procul a mea tuus sit furor omnis, era, domo: “Goddess, may all thy fury stay far from my house!”

     But black kids without fathers are still waiting, just on the other side of town, for someone to show them how to throw a baseball.  White kids, too—but probably, in most towns, more black kids than white.  They don’t really need the money: they need good neighbors.  The readily bandied charge of racism, it seems to me, makes everything too easy—and also too hard.  Pay a few bucks and send your accuser on his way.  (Anyone who has ever been to a country where beggars roam the streets knows this complex feeling of guilt and resentment: “Okay, that’s all I’ve got—just go away!”)  Our children don’t need handouts and buy-offs—our neighbors’ children don’t need our checks, and our own don’t need video games to keep them out of our hair.  They need our attention.  We need our attention: the state of our souls needs attending to.

     So at last I’ve come to it: the life of the spirit.  As I look back over all I have studied and written about struggling black ballplayers, I see nothing so clearly as a classic case of the human spirit being crushed within a system.  Racism was part of the system back then, yes; but the system created racial prejudice every bit as much as prejudice created the system.  More so, I believe: for bigotry was not nearly well organized enough to launch a vast conspiracy throughout the whole baseball establishment.  On the contrary, it is the essential nature of systems to become suspicious of intruders.  In this case, the intruders happened to have skin of a different color.  Yet even when insiders were able to overcome with reasonable effectiveness their mistrust of dark skin, they remained leery of the “alien style”.  They didn’t like new arrivals from the Negro Leagues importing a more flamboyant kind of play—a more original kind of play, consisting of unusual hitting techniques, audacious base-running, and a lot of other things which they decided were “clownish” or “childish”.  They seemed to be deeply convinced that their new black players just didn’t get it, and probably couldn’t get it.  The game was sober and… well, systematic, like besieging a city.  You blasted away with heavy artillery and neutralized counter-attacking sorties by falling back on prefabricated defensive strongholds.  (That this sketch also evokes a football game is no accident: football is the system-adoring society’s diversion of choice—about which, more anon.)  Blacks couldn’t understand the middle-infield positions (the reasoning went), and they certainly couldn’t lead an entire team from the dugout as managers—a type of prejudice which I have not much discussed, but whose reality is self-evident.  They could get the “heavy artillery” part right, and they could run fast… but their wild antics were otherwise more suggestive of an unruly child than of a responsible adult.  Stealing home, indeed!

     What I’m about to say is rather complicated, and I despair of getting it all out in a coherent manner.  It has to do with what might be called “primary racism” and “secondary racism”.  The most elemental racist baldly and stupidly dislikes or dreads someone for his or her skin’s color (primary variety).  Such blunt prejudice may be contrasted with the secondary racist’s discomfort around people of a physical appearance visibly different from his group’s because those animals are suddenly working what has always been his side of the street.  The secondary racist, to be sure, still notices the tint of the epidermis and the profile of the nose.  He won’t dispute, however, that someone with such a complexion or such a nose might be handsome or beautiful—he just doesn’t welcome the competition which has accompanied these exotic features into a once-sealed community.

     Even within secondary racism (which I would guess is far the more abundant kind), there is the keen hostility of those who directly stand to lose their jobs to the newcomers… and then there is the passive but enduring suspicion of well-heeled, heavily invested traditionalists who don’t want to rock a profitable, comfortable boat.  These latter, of course, are the ones most involved in shaping and sustaining the system.  In all the accounts authored by black ballplayers which have passed under my eye, the fat-cat decision-maker is the villain hardest to forgive.  The sweat-soaked rednecks afraid of being sent to the soup kitchen are relatively easy to understand and overlook.  In many ways, their angst about mere survival sounds a very sympathetic note to the black teammates they shun.

     The heart of racism as a social and economic impediment, then, nestles among the second species of the second variety: the successful lord-of-the-manor who doesn’t want to jeopardize profits by discarding a tried-and-true formula.  In baseball terms, we’re talking about owners and general managers.  Managers, too, had much more power over their players’ careers in the fifties than they do now;2 and though a manager of those days, as a former player himself (more often than not), might well have harbored a grudge against black “intruders” over having once competed with him for a job, he might also have been a sincere “conservative”.  Perhaps he really believed that the techniques of the Negro Leagues would end up losing his team games.  After all, he himself was most certainly produced by a different, somewhat rival system.  The more genuine this commitment to old techniques, the less severe the racism from a purely visceral standpoint—which is ironic, because systematic rigor screened far more blacks from success in baseball, I have concluded, than hatred of dark skin ever did.

b) A parallel from the Ivory Tower

     Let me try to illustrate my intent by having recourse to a world I know far better than the clubhouses and front offices of baseball: academe.  For the past half-century or so—throughout my adult life, at any rate—the Ivory Tower has turned very competitive and cliquish in a very topsy-turvy fashion.  The Old Guard of the fifties had been set in its ways.  It had honored time-worn theories and had taught about and from the same old texts.  (This was certainly so in the humanities: the sciences were usually more creative.)  The New Guard which ushered in my generation during the late sixties and imparted its free-floating values to the rest of the century would have nothing to do with a literary canon of “classic” works.  The books you were “supposed” to read merely reflected which group was holding the reins of power and deviously trying to manipulate you through propaganda.  Professors started teaching movies, TV shows, comic books, and even graffiti as “texts” instead of Dante and Shakespeare.  They started grinding out tomes and tomes of indecipherable gibberish to explain their rebellion—and also, when rarely cornered by some high-placed reactionary or other, to explain that no explanation was really possible since all meaning is undergirded by prejudice, leaving only honest gibberish (like theirs) and disguised gibberish (like the classics) to compete for people’s attention.  The new professors wore their shoes without socks, preserved their hair from combs, refused to give exams, slept openly with their students, and assigned easy A’s to anyone who parroted their flaccid ideas (preserving plenty of D’s and F’s, naturally, for those who didn’t).  How well I remember it all!

     You wouldn’t think that a bevy of anarchists like this would found a new system on the grave of the one it had just so ostentatiously subverted.  You might not even think (if you are a naïve soul) that a collection of such devout social liberals would be capable of replicating a Klansman’s behavior.  Yet it all came to pass.  By the time I entered the job market as a professor, anti-systemic thinking had been rigidly systematized.  With so much of my course work and scholarly writing directed toward Homer, Virgil, Kant, and various other dead white guys, I need not have applied for most openings.  When I did somehow manage to wrangle an appointment in an English department (usually because the Old Guard had just barely fought off the New Guard for the moment), I witnessed bizarre happenings.  I found that the generation which had no use for socks craved feverishly—enough to lie, to steal, and maybe to kill—the kind of achievement demarcated by promotion and tenure.  I observed that women, especially, having been brainwashed by sixties cant that they were worth nothing without a successful career, would not be denied success.  Some of them, when we would form “search committees” to fill new positions, didn’t even want to hire another woman because they saw in their exclusive claim to minority status an inside track to the top.  I’m sure no black player ever wanted to be the only black on his team; but I wouldn’t be surprised, based upon what I’ve learned of the human heart, to discover that some minority employees enjoy being “one of the few” because the company will almost necessarily advance them if it wishes to avoid embarrassment.3

     All these starry-eyed revolutionaries, meanwhile, were busily shifting the theoretical jargon of their unfathomable publications every year or two so as to make their game less comprehensible to outsiders who wanted in—that is, so as to limit the number of people who could compete for their jobs.  The young bucks were becoming old boys.  Many feminists even insisted that a writer should be precluded from acceptance by any of their hermetic reviews if she turned out to be a “he”.  I’ve no doubt that some of these “old girls” genuinely detested men; but I think it likely that the majority simply wanted, once again, to narrow the field of competitors.  Like an aging second baseman with a bad knee, they didn’t need a sudden flood of talent from a totally new quarter.  On the contrary, they needed to throw up sandbags wherever possible.

     So much for ideologues and “idealists”.  The very same kind of behavior, I hasten to add, was fully evident on the most “conservative” campuses ever to have their ivory thresholds darkened by my shadow.  I saw it in how I was treated, and I saw it in how others were treated: the reigning emotions were fear of being ousted (on the part of junior professors with no real security) and fear of innovation (on the part of senior scholars who had clambered to the top by honoring certain “values”, such as teaching only British works rather than admitting a French novel into the mix).

     When you’re young, you always consider that you have been hired fair and square to do the job specified by your interview and your contract.  (In fact, this is seldom true: you’re hired because one campus coterie or another sees you as a potential ally in some political tussle.)  Being conscientious, you dedicate yourself to doing the best job possible.  You produce extra work for yourself by assigning—and grading with ample notations—essays which challenge the students at a high intellectual level.  You bring works into courses which the weary anthologies have overlooked (and no anthology grows wearier faster than the anything-goes generation’s, wherein stories and poems appear just because their authors were not white males).  You refuse to curtail necessary lectures and meaningful discussions for the sake of videos and ignorance-sharing rap sessions.  In a word, you teach.  You do your damn job.

     And how is your success received by your compatriots?  Well, let me underscore the parallel with baseball as I answer.  Some colleagues are merely lazy, and the precedent set by your labor-intensive assignments makes them nervous.  These were the “wits” who teased their new black teammates to the point of harassment and spread stories about them behind their backs.  Such rivalry does little observable damage to a well-motivated worker, but it can grow quite demoralizing after a while.

     Some colleagues are more malign.  Aware that no administration likes to tenure a large percentage of its faculty, they recognize you as a life-or-death challenge and apply themselves to undercutting you subtly.  I suppose the baseball equivalent would be a player of real talent who was nonetheless insecure about his position on the team when the first blacks arrived.  He didn’t run off at the mouth loosely: he just shook his head without a word—but being certain that the manager saw him—when Jackie or Willie ended a rally by being caught in an attempted steal.  When Billy homered, he pumped his fist with the rest of the team; but he also sidled up to the skipper, pretending to go for a drink of water, and muttered behind his smile, “Too bad he couldn’t have done that when we had runners on base.”

     Some of your Ivory Tower “team”—especially the more powerful—are vain, and begrudge you your long hours of paper-grading at home because you are less available to grin and fawn at their innumerable endless soirées.  These, of course, correspond to the coaches and managers who like to “hold court” after the game over a round of beers.  They egg on those of their black players who are more easily finessed to drink a few too many a little too often.  Those who see through them are branded as “not team players”: talented, yes—but obviously not happy here in Bean Town , and maybe better off being traded.  Better off for everyone—as if a trade would be a favor to them.  I heard that from a superior once: “I have a feeling you’d be happier somewhere else.”

     A few number-crunching cynics in the front office (and academe has large front offices) may or may not understand your professional ardor as sincere: they see only the gripes on student evaluations about being bored and having to work too hard.  They begin to fret over retention issues.  In the baseball front office, executives would carefully mull over the number of black citizens attending games now that “one of their own” was wearing the uniform, and counterpoise to this gratifying figure the distressing outbreaks of violence and foul language among Caucasian fans.  It’s a crying shame that certain members of the lower class have to be so crude and retrograde, but… “But baseball is a family event.  We want our fans to know that they can bring their kids to the ballpark.  Too many of these incidents spells big trouble.  We have to think of the women and children.”

c) The futility of specific corrections

     I reiterate that I am not trying to reduce the anguish of racial segregation to just one more example of workplace bullying.  I am proposing an analogy, not an equivalence.  The plight of black players in the later fifties and early sixties resembled that of other people caught within a vast system’s cogs in two respects.  First (as I have said above), all such cases involve numerous insiders perceiving a handful of outsiders as a threat—a threat to compete for and take away jealously guarded employment, and also a threat to drag complacent employers through a disruptive and unpredictable series of changes.  In isolating the threat and holding it at bay, the status quo may seize upon any irrelevant detail which seems to characterize all the outsiders superficially.  This detail may be skin color, or gender, or age, or language, or place of origin (and I might note that an aspiring professor from the northeast or the West coast is much more likely to find work in academe than a professor from Alabama or Oklahoma, all other factors being equal).  To be sure, after the harassed outsider leaves the workplace to take a walk in the park or eat at a restaurant, he will probably not continue to face suspicion and rejection as a black player would have done in 1954 after showering and heading off into the streets of Cincinnati or St. Louis .  In the previous section, I was not analogizing the entire social phenomenon of racism, but only the part of it which intrudes into baseball.

     The second way in which baseball’s cold embrace of black players resembles the inertia of a huge system exposed to change is that specific adjustments almost always fail to have a significant long-term impact.  If the boss circulates a memo demanding that all nude photos and Playboy calendars be removed from the office, then the photos and calendars will come down.  If the workplace environment is profoundly crude, however, the same old atmosphere will cling in low-lying pockets.  Salacious jokes around the coffee machine will be theatrically broken off when someone sees Julie, although Julie’s appearance within earshot was the cue to begin the jokes.  Julie will sit down at her desk and find a porn site running on her computer, though—of course—no bystander will admit to having seen any tampering.  If the old boys can rattle Julie enough, she may even fly into a rage or break into tears; and then the case can be made that she was unhinged from the start.  If, on the other hand, Julie files a lawsuit, then the boss may actually suspend or fire some trouble-makers as he fumes over paying the settlement.  Yet the next time he has a choice between hiring a male or a female, enlightened though he is, he will remember that fat settlement; and, unless required by some quota system, he will avoid inviting the trouble-makers to make trouble.

     Quota systems: have they ever worked?  You might say that the pressure to bring two blacks up to the big team by 1960 (and it was always two or four: somebody had to room with the guy on road trips) constituted a de facto quota for Major League baseball.  It worked, yes… and then again, it didn’t.  I have argued (as have others) that certain particularly recalcitrant organizations added black players who were not the best qualified of their race to receive the promotion, precisely so that integration might be discredited.  Even when the new players were top-notch, they could be handled so as to undermine their effectiveness.  They could be benched most of the week, so that their one start or their two pinch-hit appearances would find them as stiff as the boards they usually sat on.  They could be played out of position, or moved to relatively unimportant positions which dozens of other qualified players stood ready to fill.  In the event of success, their disposal in a trade could be fully justified—with plenty of farewell praise for public consumption—as necessary to get four or five younger players (and one of these might well be black, just to put up a good front).  In a bitterly cruel irony, quotas addressing such superficial attributes as skin color or gender sometimes diminish the individual minority member’s chances of success.  The establishment can always point to its satisfactory ratios, diverting attention from how each human being composing the ratio has been treated personally.

     The human spirit is as resourceful as it is perverse.  Tolstoy said it about Napoleon and the Grande Armée: as long as the French wanted to follow their emperor, they made him a legendary conqueror.  When they got tired of following him, neither his orders nor his pleas could keep them from turning back.  People will find a way to do what they’re inclined to do.  Those inclined to be bigots will find a way to slight their targets.

d) The Great War: a study in systematic rigor

     Yet my major theme in this concluding chapter is that people are inclined, above all else, to trudge around in the circle which they have already worn.  The spirit is inclined to go to sleep—to turn away from its higher destiny and embrace a lethal comfort.  Writing about a different war from Napoleon’s, Arnold Zweig made one of his characters observe, “As water inevitably gathers at the deepest point, so the human spirit will collectively find the shallowest place where it can rest undisturbed.”4  Zweig was a veteran of World War I, and his novel sees the fighting through German eyes.  Abject obedience to a system was perpetually tossing young men into the trenches like logs into a sawmill.  Systems-within-the-system kept cropping up along the Maginot Line’s moldy trenches and shell-blasted villages: lieutenants intent upon feathering their own financial nest, soldiers intent upon avoiding the front line’s risks, liaison officers intent upon telling the high command what it wanted to hear.  Overtly criminal acts arose unquestioned from these strange sodalities in modest extension of the reigning logic.  A group of officers in Zweig’s novel actually posts a young NCO where he is certain to be killed so that he will not blow the whistle on their cozy profiteering racket.

     As in little things, so in big things.  The Great War was undoubtedly a major catalyst of the West’s invincible demoralization throughout the twentieth century.  Cynicism, absurdism, nihilism… death camps, ethnic cleansing, mutually assured destruction… it all really got under way when the well-oiled socio-political machine at the turn of the century demanded to be fed with millions of human lives and limbs.  In Zweig’s account, a “closet” Marxist within the ranks reflects upon the situation’s homicidal efficiency at handling what José Ortega y Gasset would one day call the “rebellion of the masses”—and the assessment, let us admit, is not devoid of accuracy:

In order to hold the masses in check, the very coalescence of these masses became serviceable.  Every year in Germany and neighboring nations, hundreds of thousands of unemployed men were drilled in combat gear, practicing the lessons taught in schools whereby they turned their back upon their own interest and were ready to shoot themselves in the person of other workers.  In peacetime, this would remain a mere possibility: in wartime it became a grim, shocking reality.5

     So well, indeed, did World War I confirm the Marxist scenario of a privileged class eliminating its roused proletarian rabble that the popularity of communism spread through Europe like wildfire in the twenties.  The Marxist’s answer to a corrupt system is yet another system, already rigid and exclusive before it leaves the drawing board; and the Bolshevik zealots who carried the new system forward were very clear about the fate of recalcitrant hold-outs.  Culturally traditionalist elements, facing literal extermination by blood bath, felt compelled to strike an unholy alliance with fascism… which created enough adversarial friction for another world war, which further disgusted survivors with whatever cultural relics had survived the onslaught of tanks, bombs, and missiles… and Cold War Western Europe proceeded to melt down into its present toxic brew of incoherence and nullity.

     Insane.  How could it all have happened?  To this day, European intellectuals remain in shell-shock.  Some of them are actually Bourbonists, hoping that the restoration of the monarchy will turn the clock back, make the nightmare go away, and burrow warmly into a paternal system which would spare puny individuals the trauma of decision-making.  My purpose here is not to sort through any culture’s past choices or to argue for or against the human right or obligation to make choices.  I seek to underscore, rather, the present ineptitude for choosing in which a rigorous adherence to system has left the cradle of human freedom, the birthplace of constitutional republics and of individual conscience.  The controls have frozen, and no corrective procedure is advised by the repair manual.

     French novelist Jules Romains, in writing a classic account of the Battle of Verdun, stresses Europe ’s incapacity simply to conceptualize events as The Great War raged.  Most of his expressions could just as well be applied to the rest of Europe ’s twentieth century:

The indeterminate, the unknown, and the accidental were thus nestled into either end of the event: into the end where a worldwide convulsion was taking place, and into that where tiny, pitiful men were fighting in the smoke.  On the scale of the astronomical and of the molecular.  Nobody knew to any great extent the minute degree to which ghastly acts composed the war; there were plenty of witnesses, but all so embroiled in what was happening that they could scarcely draw back and see it—and, in any case, the impression they received from twenty paces was dulled like a lantern in a fog.  Nobody, on the other hand, knew that the event could assume the gigantic face—like that of a planet on fire—which it would present to the Night of Ages, that Night of Ages which includes not only the past, but is also the eternal envelope of a medium wherein history floats like a meteor.6

One of the French officers whose activities Romains tracks briefly lulls himself to sleep each night with “realistic” fantasies—scenarios distinctly different, that is, from the hell he lives daily, and yet still just hellish enough to justify his hoping in them.  He imagines himself, for instance, liberated from the trenches with his company to wander among the mountain forests.  His men would establish some loose base of operations—a barn, say—where they could receive orders; but they would otherwise be free to forage for themselves.  They would become what we now call guerilla fighters.  This is the extent of one bright young man’s ability to foresee a future beyond the system’s bounds: a salutary near-anarchy resulting from the practical impossibility of keeping the troops stocked in food and clothes.

     I contend that “the indeterminate, the unknown, and the accidental” are precisely what any successful system must accommodate—by not trusting itself fully, by remaining open to minority (even “crackpot”) opinion, by constantly reconstructing its orderly conclusions to suit a less orderly world.  The Great War was fought with tactics that dated back to the days of cavalry charges and cannon balls.  The geometric progression in destructive power which modern weaponry had described failed to occasion a radical review of strategy.  Among the civilian population, too, attitudes which had always been stirred before by national struggle cheered on the effort without remotely divining an imminent cultural catastrophe.  “Nobody knew….”  The actors had rehearsed lines for the wrong play, and nobody—no leading figure—could tap sufficient spontaneity to improvise effectively from various fragments of experience.

     An entire generation of young men was lost in the Great War—the “absent” to whom Edwin Muir addressed the poem which gave me this book’s title.  Because treaties had been signed, national pride staked, hands shaken, and honor pledged, two thousand years of civilization based on energetic, creative sacrifice and belief in every person’s sacred spark dissolved in smoldering ruins.  Europe ’s leaders played at the “game” of honor without duly considering whether their ends were honorable.  The old boys incited their children—others’ children, and often their own—to volunteer for the slaughterhouse because “death for the fatherland is sweet and fitting.”7

     If men will thus fling their own sons into the fiery furnace in an obsession with making the system go, what hope is there that a mere game—a true game, a joyful pastime—will liberate itself from systematic rigor to increase the quality of play or to allow more players on the field?

e) The Texas Rangers: baseball’s version of epochal folly

     Dr. Thomas Bertonneau recently reflected in these pages NASA’s change-resistant, “circle the wagons”.8  He concluded his thoughts by directing them to the etiolated bureaucracies which run our public schools.  Another person might note how reminiscent is such inflexibility, devoted first and last to preserving the system rather than accomplishing what the system was created to do, of certain church hierarchies confronted with such devastating scandals as clergy-related child-abuse.  Any long-running, many-branched human organization is likely to illustrate the same phenomenon.  (If it doesn’t, there’s something new under the sun.)  This institutional hardening of the arteries is one of the most frustrating aspects of human society.  Once in a while, starry-eyed reformers attempt to rectify flaws by creating a board or committee to review existing boards and committees.  The review board, in turn, generates a protocol which soon grows rigid… and then we savor the unpleasant irony of an anti-bureaucracy wrapping itself in red tape rather than making things honest and open.

     Again, one has to wonder how a silly little game of hitting a round ball with a round bat—a very difficult silly little game, where success is often measured in small fractions—can hope to overcome the stifling effects of dogmatism if the destiny of civilizations and the advance of pure knowledge cannot crawl out from under the “old boy” shadow.  Everything we think, do, and are seems to be blunted, as if by a narcotic drug, somewhere along the orderly corridors of the systems which have led us this far.

     But maybe this is looking at the problem upside-down.  Maybe a mere game is exactly the place where we should discover how to keep from becoming enthralled to our well-functioning organizations the way a bricklayer absorbed in his work might accidentally wall himself into a tomb.  For that matter, baseball may be the one game above all others which punishes inflexible thinking.  Ballplayers adjust, or they perish.  A pitcher who hurls bullets but has no change-up will eventually be pounded.  A hitter who can catch up to the league’s best fastballs but can’t wait on a change-up will eventually never see a fastball in the strike zone.  Such remarks as these are platitudes to baseball people.  In fact, one of the main qualities scouts look for in young talent is a certain humility—an ability to listen to and profit from suggestions.  The game is humbling by nature: failure is always sitting on your shoulder.

     So why don’t more teams value the dynamism of creativity?  I use the present tense, because, to this day, the dazzling style of play which Jackie Robinson brought to the Major Leagues is highly suspect in many organizations.  For some reason, coaches and managers often refuse to accept that the same inflexibility so toxic to an individual can be just as lethal to an entire line-up.  Teams like the Texas Rangers seem to believe that socking home runs is the prescription for victory, even though they complete season after season in the second division.  As I sit writing these words (at the end of the 2005 season), the Rangers have just set an all-time record for the most solo homers by a ball club in a year.  Not surprisingly, they have also failed to finish above .500, and they have barely managed to stay out of the Western Division cellar.  The number of sacrifice bunts successfully executed by the Ranger offense was dead last in all of baseball: nine, another all-time record for inflexibility.

     Is it an accident that the Rangers ended the 2005 season carrying just one African-American player on the roster (Gary Mathews, Jr.)?  One-dimensional slugging preoccupies the front office even as the pitching staff is routinely reviled for failing to hold the other side down.  Within recent years, the franchise has had on board such promising hurlers as Kevin Brown, Rick Helling, Aaron Sele, John Thompson, Darrin Foster, and Brian Driese.  Trade bait, every one—and almost always for another slugger.  In the 2005 season, it was deemed necessary to acquire Phil Nevin.  In past seasons, the answer to fans’ prayers was to be Alex Rodriguez.  Before him, it was José Canseco.

     Why don’t the Rangers get it?  Maybe it’s the name.  Historically, the Rangers were created by the young state of Texas as what we would call a para-military organization charged with applying irresistible force speedily to settlements under attack by Comanche hostiles.  After Reconstruction, the Rangers turned their energies to chasing down bandidos in the Nueces strip—an objective which they interpreted rather liberally, sometimes resettling local Mexican ranchers on the far side of the River Styx.  Nowadays (having successfully fought an initiative to abolish them in the seventies), Texas Rangers cruise interstate highways in search of particularly heinous crimes to ponder.  It has never been entirely clear to me how their current function differs from a state trooper’s—or why it ought to differ.

     In baseball, too, you don’t want duplication: you don’t need heavy hitter upon heavy hitter.  An 11-3 victory is just one more victory: you don’t earn extra points for piling on runs.  An 11-3 loss, likewise, is just one loss—humiliating, but every team has its share of them.  Where baseball’s Texas Rangers consistently fail to make up vital ground is in close games: games, that is, which require a multi-pronged attack, a flexible approach.  The franchise’s 2-1 and 3-2 losses stack up, season after season… and the pitchers in these little tragedies, of course, make easy targets for a shallow fandom and a shallower press.  But the cause lies just as much with the offense’s “home run derby” mentality.  When you confront an adversary with good pitching, you usually don’t prevail with power.  It is reasonably easy for skilled pitchers to work around free-swingers.  What you need in the bottom of the ninth when down a run is not Mighty Casey, but Speedy Gonzalez: someone who knows how to draw a walk and steal a base.  And then you need two guys behind him who know how to put the ball in play.  The Rangers lose nail-biter after nail-biter because they don’t acquire such players, don’t coach their youth to turn into such players, and unload any such player who happens to stumble into their clubhouse.

The Willies (and a Chuck).  One sometimes gets the feeling that white baseball wanted every black kid named Willie to become the next Mays—and one of them did.  In the early sixties, it looked as if they all might.  Kirkland (out of the Giants’ organization) actually had several second chances, despite his poor average.  Tasby and Hinton were better rounded but drew little interest when they didn’t homer at Mays-like rates.

f) The black ballplayer, spontaneity, and neglect

     Is it mere coincidence that teams like the Texas Rangers (for there are others—just study the second division) have so few black players?  Is there not for some reason a substantial connection between black players and base-stealing, gap-hitting, using the whole field, taking the extra base, and a whole range of razzle-dazzle offensive maneuvers as bewildering to the observer as shadow ball?  I know that it’s politically incorrect to suggest that something like the “African physique” might be responsible for such prowess—and I certainly don’t know enough about physiology, in any case, to judge the merits of the claim (assuming that the politically correct would allow us to judge anything by merit).  I suspect, however that the underlying causes of baseball à la Negro League are indeed more nurture than nature.  My evidence is as follows.

     I have coached both black kids and white kids, and I assert with some dismay that the white kids have far more often been rigidly instructed rather than tossed a ball and allowed to play.  They have been subjected to expensive machines of the most outlandish varieties for teaching the fine arts of hitting, pitching, and fielding—but especially hitting.  Black kids, sadly, tend to know the game of baseball less well by the age of ten, yet many of them take to it gleefully if not at once overwhelmed with minute instructions.  Once upon a time, after a single session of tutoring my ten-year-olds in how to beat a run-down and advance to the next base, I found that my black kids wouldn’t stay put during the next game.  They were so devil-may-care that my hands spent most of the evening in my hair.  (Yet not a one of them was ever tagged out.)  On the other hand, I had a couple of white kids—fast runners, too—who wouldn’t even take off for second on a passed ball.  They were scared of failing, or perhaps horrified at the sense that they were doing something beyond the bounds of routine structure.  I rather doubt that they had much fun, on that night or any other, and I should be surprised to see them playing ball five years from now.

     Since black children, at least in my part of the country, tend to live in less affluent circumstances, they have less gear and equipment, fewer machines and tutors.  They improvise better.  In a sense, they also tend to have less supervision around the home, or to be supervised more often by siblings than parents (though supervision for affluent white kids now consists largely of enthrallment before video games).  As a result, perhaps, the black child may be more apt to try something new or do something bold, while the white child is more likely to hang back and think, “Are we really allowed to do that?”  I might as well say that I believe many children in my demographic bracket (the Caucasian, professional, two-parent household) to be excessively supervised, if by that may be understood rigid scheduling of free time and even recurrence to Ritalin when the child seems to rebel rather too often.

     The factors I have just described are all environmental.  Anyone who takes a casual drive through a predominantly white neighborhood and a predominantly black neighborhood in a small southern city will instantly see where more kids are outside riding bikes.  When the kids who stay inside—the white kids—are finally released from their electronic cells, it is to fall in and drill at the ball park under the dictatorial eye of half a dozen coaches.  And the drilling has its effect, all the way from the humblest Dixie League team to the exalted squadrons of millionaires who appear on TV every summer evening.  The contempt for the unchoreographed move is apparent in everything from the absence of drag bunting to the easy lope toward second base on a “gapper”.  Spontaneity is not encouraged, nor are those who practice it best the most rewarded.  Is the slight overtly racist?  No, of course not.  But because black and Latino players, for environmental reasons (let us stipulate), are and have long been the masters of the unpredictable and the unrehearsed, they suffer the most neglect in a milieu which begrudges free-style performance.  They suffered in the fifties and sixties, years after Jackie Robinson had supposedly broken down the color barrier; and, ironically, they suffer now, years after patent prejudice on the field (if not in the organization’s hierarchy) has been eradicated.  They suffered before because they were black, but also because they constituted a threat to chess-match, station-to-station baseball.  They suffer now exclusively for the latter cause, since kids in the Dominican Republic still grow up using broomsticks for bats and black kids in Memphis or Akron import their feints on the basketball court to base-running.

     The phenomenon deserves to be called discrimination, but not racial discrimination: call it, rather, discrimination against the resourceful individual who redirects the flow where nobody anticipated its going.

g) The incredible homering hulk

     At this point, I cannot avoid mentioning the home run again.  Of all the players I used to stop and watch on TV, no matter what I was doing, the one who commanded my attention most imperiously was Tony Gwynn.  I would stand and gape at his every move, even if a baby were screaming or the phone were ringing.  Tim Raines and Wade Boggs were not far behind.  I have realized painfully that the players who inspire that same devotion in my son are the Sheffields and the Bondses.  Now, Gary and Barry are both black, and many of the game’s most exciting home-run hitters continue to be dark-skinned, just as they were in the days of Aaron and Mays… but Barry Bonds, especially, represents the game’s degeneration to me.  As a youngster, Barry was the kind of “five-tool” player who would frequently stroke doubles and sometimes stretch them to triples.  Now he is a somber monument to home-run obsession.  He has dedicated himself, by fair means and foul, to doing one thing.  His body has morphed physically, in the process.  Even if Bonds truly didn’t understand just why it was doing so, he was clearly pleased with the result.  He transformed himself into a mountain of muscle, a heavyweight machine which could no longer produce bunts or triples.  Henry Aaron, though age thickened him as it does all of us, remained essentially lean and svelte.  Not Barry: no hammer, he, but a pile-driver.

     Something about the game of baseball, and about our society more generally, has nursed this monomaniacal commitment to bullying the ball out of the park.  For the home run is the most systematic of hits: its results are the most predictable and controlled.  Once the ball sails over the fence, it’s out of play, and the base-runner need merely trot.  (Indeed, contemporary home-run hitters like Bonds have signature trots as finely tailored as Willie’s basket catch.)  Organizations like home runs, and always have.  They are decisive, final.  They dispense with the need for on-the-spot creativity.  They can be instantly entered into the ledger as assets.  Far be it from me to imply that Aaron and Mays were not exciting when they clubbed a long one—but Aaron and Mays did a host of things magnificently.  The status quo awarded them primarily (especially Aaron) for hitting home runs, and rewarded them very well compared to the treatment given other black players who were no more than potential base-stealers or batting champs.  Hank and Willie were not forged by The System, but one aspect of their multi-faceted play particularly appealed to The System’s obsession with regularity and reliability.

     Now we are allowing the system to make robots out of us in ways that are scarcely even metaphorical.  We allow technology to sculpt our bodies into something no longer quit human, knowing all the while (or maybe not knowing, in a few tragic cases) that, like Achilles, we will die young in return for our day in the sun.  Players use bats today which are no longer remotely capable of a .400 season, should a throwback magically appear who has the skill to achieve such a number.  The damn things snap in two unless you hit the ball squarely on the oversized barrel—no one-and-two pitch has any chance of being fisted over the infield.  In any case, hitters make no notable adjustment in their swing with two strikes: the third swing is one last chance to go for the downs.  Even after Ichiro Suzuki comes into our midst from an entirely different culture and shatters a season-hits record which none of our home-grown talent could ever approach, we merely shrug and turn our attention back to A-Rod or David Ortiz.

     And that raises a question about us who watch: the fans.  As much as the organization craves the money-in-the-bank solidity of the home run, we fans seem to crave its majestic arc and foot-on-the-throat triumph even more.  Why is that, I have often wondered?  What role have fans played in the rigidification of baseball around the long ball?

h) The home run’s past: a system-designer’s systematic edge

     I don’t think we spectators were always the guilty party.  Naturally, fans thronged to see Mantle and Maris chase after Babe Ruth’s single-season home-run record in 1961, both because of the record’s seeming impregnability throughout baseball history and because the two men seriously assailing it were on the same team.  Yet Yankee games were perennially well attended, and the crowds which packed Yankee Stadium in the fall of ’61 often appeared more interested in harassing Roger than admiring the arc of his long flies.  During the years of my study, I do not believe that fans were the driving force behind home-run mania.  The rate of home-run hitting had risen more-or-less steadily throughout the fifties, and not just because of the influx of black sluggers.  Mantle, Mathews, Mize, Musial… the letter “M” could already account for about 2000 home runs in this era without Mays’s even being added to the tally.  Kluszewski reached or surpassed 40 home runs in each of the three seasons from 1953 to 1955.  Roy Sievers hit a total of 81 during 1957 and 1958.  Rocky Colavito walloped an even 200 homers in the five years from 1958 to 1962… and so it goes.  Not since the 1930’s had so many sluggers racked up so many “taters”.

     I have argued that the fifties and early sixties may have been big home-run years for whites precisely because black ballplayers were steadily trickling into the Major Leagues’ ranks.  That is, I suspect that management may have fallen back conservatively on the Ruthian technique of cashing in lots of chips at once because this formed a distinct contrast with Negro League baseball.  I am not insinuating that any concerted plot was hatched, and I hope none of my earlier remarks has been read as implying anything so absurd.  I simply think that greater emphasis of the home run was a natural way for white baseball to circle the wagons.  That Aaron and Banks and Mays and Robinson ended up beating the white establishment at its own game proves how little of the genuine conspiracy was behind this long-ball fever; for black home-run kings were not only rewarded with salaries and playing time approximate to a white slugger’s—they inspired many organizations to give marginal stars like Willie Kirkland a good taste of limelight in the hope that they, too, would start belting a shot every other game.

     As home-run champs, these players did more than any others of their generation to carry Jackie Robinson’s vision forward.  White management was only too happy to discover that blacks could indeed play long-ball: what made it most nervous, I suspect, was that blacks might capture the Majors with bunts and steals.  Caucasian players must have feared that they could not compete on such terms: Caucasian owners probably feared that they could not win on those terms.

     I’m going over old ground, for clarity’s sake.  I shall be adding no great revelation to say that contact hitting and steals did at last become central to the game in the latter sixties and throughout the seventies and eighties.  Home-run hitters continued to serve their vital purpose, as they always have—but a couple in the heart of the order sufficed.  Bert Campaneris and Billy North gave Sal Bando and Reggie Jackson runs to bat in: Pete Rose and Joe Morgan did the same for Johnny Bench and Tony Perez, as did Vince Coleman and Willie McGee for Jack Clarke.  The offenses of these years were far more balanced, more difficult for an overpowering pitcher to shut down entirely.  They produced fewer lopsided games, but also fewer shut-outs.  These were the very years, of course, when the percentage of blacks in the game was at its highest, and also when the variety of skills which black players could bring to the game was most manifest.  With Carew and Gwynn came Stargell and Dick Allen; with Coleman and Henderson came Winfield and Andre Dawson.

i) The “Home-Run Derby ” Scandal: TV programs the audience

     So what happened?  Here, I believe, is where the fans came in—or the television, to be precise.  Brainwashing by TV.  I wouldn’t be the first one to point out that highlight reels always privilege the home run.  ESPN SportsCenter’s capsulizations of ball games seem to consist of little except sluggers “going yard” and pitchers recording critical “K’s”… maybe a bench-clearing brawl tossed in once a week.  To the extent that such quick takes are most of what the casual fan ever sees of any given ball game, it’s small wonder if he considers such events to be, indeed, the game’s greatest moments.  Similarly, kids who grow up feeding on home-run replays in our “instant gratification” society naturally want to hit homers when they take the field at school or in Little League.  We imitate what we observe: that’s how we learn.

     Yet televised highlights are actually not the medium’s most influential message, in my opinion.  I believe the effect of television on how we watch baseball has been far more subtle  (just as the enforced passivity of TV-watching has done more to make us a violence-tolerant society than shot-’em-up cop shows).  Consider the camera man’s dilemma.  If you try to cover the whole field, the players become too small on the viewer’s screen to be of any interest.  If you zoom in on just one or two players (and the center-field camera allows you to zoom in on three, the maximum possible), then the flow of play escapes your lens as soon as the ball is hit.  Contemporary broadcasting has been incredibly resourceful about resolving the dilemma.  With multiple cameras rolling all the time, the director can switch instantly to the shortstop once a ground ball is hit, then track the throw over to first.  On a ball smacked into the gap, however, all we see—all we can see—is a couple of outfielders chasing the bounding dot to the wall.  We only pick up the runners circling the bases when a switch is made to another camera, one of the outfielders having hurled the ball back in.  Even then, we follow only the lead runner: we can’t see for the moment how far the hitter has advanced behind him.

     In a real ball game, a live ball game, you see all of this going on as it goes on.  Human peripheral vision is so superior to any camera’s lens that you can actually follow the ball to the base of the left-center field fence while being aware that the lead runner is going to try for home and that the hitter will make second easily.  To me, a double in the gap with several runners on base is the most exciting play in the game—but it’s only so if you are sitting in the stands and watching it.  Television is forced to leave far too much of the play out as it unfolds.  A televised home run is an entirely different matter.  You really don’t miss anything on the screen; in fact, you see the home run infinitely better than you would “in person” if, like me, you’re a little near-sighted.  With the announcer’s voice rising to clue you in that this one has a chance, you follow the left fielder to the wall… and see a little white orb land five rows back.  You haven’t really missed a thing on the infield, because the runners had to linger near their bases lest the left fielder make a sensational leaping grab.  The camera picks them up an instant later as they plod home, then turn around to high-five the conquering hero.  The same scene beheld live in the ballpark is often the least bit disappointing to me.  I hear a crack of the bat, I see the outfielder sprinting back… and then, everything decelerates into a kind of slow-motion.  The ball’s out of play: we just sit and watch Casey circle the bags. </