Whose On Third?

It is an axiom of organized competitive sports that the more difficult a feat, the more it is rewarded. In football a touchdown is more difficult to score than a field goal, and earns six points as compared to the field goal’s three. After a touchdown, a PAT kicked through the uprights nets one point, while the more difficult two-point conversion, in which a team must “punch it in” from the two-and-a-half yard line, is rewarded with twice what you get for the PAT. In basketball, a typical bucket gets you two points, while one from beyond the arc, or “downtown” if you are Brent Mustburger, is worth three. In figure skating a quadruple jump is judged superior to the triple. In darts you get more points for hitting the bullseye. We are drawn to sports because they are an island of logic in an otherwise irrational world, and that logic is precisely that the winning player or team is the one who is best at achieving what is most difficult within the given rules of a sport, i.e. would you rather be a birdie or an eagle?

And then there is baseball. Baseball is largely incoherent. Baseball starts off okay, as the easiest offensive feat, the single, is rewarded the least; it, of course, only gets you to first base. But the rewards for the other three possible base hits in baseball, the double, triple, and home run, make no sense at all, when judged based on their comparative difficulty. The best doubles hitters hit doubles at about the same rate that the best home run hitters “go yard.” From 1989 to 2009, the MLB league leaders in doubles hit anywhere from 40 to 59 doubles. These numbers are comparable to the range found for home run leaders during the same era, 35 to 73 (the somewhat broader range for home runs is explained by the “steroids era”; things seem to have gotten back to normal, as last year the MLB home run leader tallied a more human total of 47). In essence, a double is roughly as difficult to achieve as a home run. But the home run is rewarded with a tangible run, while a double only gets a player half way home, and merely affords a player an opportunity to score a run. Why should a double be so poorly rewarded if it is just as hard to hit as a home run?

Things come into even starker relief when we look at triples. From 1989 to 2009 the annual MLB league leaders in triples compiled anywhere from 9 to 23 triples, with most league leaders compiling triples in the low to mid teens. Triples are clearly more difficult to hit than home runs and doubles. But while you get closer to a run with a triple than a double, you still get less than a home run for your more significant accomplishment of hitting a triple. This makes absolutely no sense whatsoever.

When I shared this insight with my friend Jason he looked at me as if I had suggested that humans regress to walking on all fours, i.e. he thought I was batshit crazy. Jason is both a baseball fanatic, (he is a near-genius practitioner of fantasy baseball, which empowers him to make and win fantasy baseball bets requiring the loser to engage in public acts of humiliation usually involving a combination of nudity and food) and a traditionalist. Like most traditionalists, a category which encompasses approximately 99.9% of baseball fans, he is blind to the irrational elements of baseball, a blindness resulting from acculturation to the baseball mythos, which for almost 150 years has regarded business as usual as perfectly normal. Which of course it isn’t. Baseball traditionalists freak out over obvious, yet relatively minor corrections to the game. Because it is boring to watch someone attempt to do something that they can’t, which is why the WNBA dunk contest doesn’t exist, some reasonable baseball folks came up with the designated hitter. Traditionalists acted as if this was the baseball equivalent of the Pope marrying Liberace. So imagine the traditionalist reaction to the suggestion that baseball’s entire scoring system is irredeemably flawed. To paraphrase baseball’s great Yogi Berra, Jason was 90% appalled, and the other half of him thought I must be joking.

Yet I am perfectly serious; we must fix baseball. But first, to Jason’s critique of my basic argument that the triple is more difficult to accomplish than the home run, and should be rewarded with an outcome commensurate with its degree of difficulty (it was only later through a painstaking 5 minute process of Google research when I learned that the double is just as hard to accomplish as the home run, so Jason’s critique focused on the triple). Jason’s primary argument is that the triple is a byproduct of luck or chance, that skill is not involved. Were this the case, however, one would expect to find different players atop the leader board of triples from year to year in the big leagues. Unless, of course, some players are inherently luckier than other players. Until we can isolate the good luck gene, however, we must accept that the repeated appearance of the same players atop the triples leader board reflects a specific skill set on the part of the players in question. And the last ten years of baseball history are enough to convince us that triples have little or nothing to do with luck: Carl Crawford lead the AL in triples for three consecutive years from 2004 through 2006, Curtis Granderson lead the AL in consecutive years in 2007 and 2008, Jimmy Rollins lead the NL in triples in 2001, 2002, 2004, and 2007, and Jose Reyes lead the NL in triples in 2005, 2006, and 2008. Ask any player of a game of chance and he or she will tell you that luck comes and goes. What we observe in the records of Crawford, Granderson, Rollins and Reyes is consistent excellence. If luck is in any way involved then it is in the form of the old cliché that you make your own luck.

So what are the skills involved in hitting a triple, the skill set that enabled Jimmy Rollins, for example, to lead the NL in triples four times? The first skill counters another of Jason’s arguments, that baseball players do not attempt to “place” the ball when they swing at a pitch. But there are a number of situations in baseball when “placing” the ball is exactly what a hitter is attempting to do. “Placing” the batted ball is a huge part of baseball strategy. To wit, when a runner is on second with less than two outs, a batter will often be instructed to hit towards the right side of the field, so that a ground ball hit in this direction will result in the runner being able to advance to third. Or, a batter will make every effort to hit a fly ball deep enough to allow a runner to tag up and advance , whether from second to third or from third to home. There is even an official baseball term for this “placing” of the ball, the sacrifice. The sacrifice is considered such an important skill that it is tracked as a statistic; e.g. in 2009 Bengie Molina lead the NL in sacrifice flies with 11. And don’t think for a minute that when it is contract negotiation time that Molina’s agent isn’t pushing for more money based on this particular skill in “placing” the ball. Being from Baltimore, Jason and I both know about the “Baltimore Chop”, a batting strategy propagated by Baltimore Orioles legendary manager Earl Weaver in which the batter purposely made contact with the ball in a chopping fashion such that the ball hopped up extremely high, allowing time for the runners on base to advance safely. The “Baltimore Chop” is textbook “placing” of the ball. And, of course, the bunt is nothing other than the strategic “placing” of the ball in the field of play. Just as a successful bunt or “Baltimore Chop” depends on the successful “placing” of the ball, so does the triple. As the great Willie Keeler put it, “hit ‘em where they ain’t.” That, in a nutshell, is the skill involved in the batter’s greatest art, the triple.

Which brings us to another of Jason’s arguments, that no one tries to hit triples. This rebuttal implies that players do attempt to hit home runs. But any baseball man (or woman) worth his salt will tell you that the surest way for a batter to enter a prolonged hitting slump is to go up to bat trying to hit home runs. Swinging for the fences will get you a lot closer to the Mendoza Line then to the warning track. Professional batters, then, generally take the approach of trying to make good contact. Baseball presumes that the best result of making good contact is the ball that flies the furthest in the air. But is this necessarily so? It is just as easy to make a case that the best result of making good contact is putting a ball in play that is the most difficult for the opposition to field. The home run’s dirty little secret is that it would never be a chore for a defense to field a power hitter’s long ball were it not for the well placed fence; power hitters just hit a lot of long fly balls, i.e the power hitter is simply the disguised master of the sacrifice fly. The triples hitter is the true master of “hitting ‘em where they ain’t”, i.e. the true master of hitting.

The home run hitter also benefits from another bias, the misguided belief that power trumps speed. Invariably, the most gifted triples hitters combine the art of hitting with preternatural speed. The home run hitter’s work is done once he wallops the ball; all that is left is to waddle around the bases. The triples hitter doubles the home run hitter’s accomplishment, as his work has just begun once he has “placed” the ball. He must then combine a track star’s speed with the courage of the poker player whose chips are all on the table. The triples hitter’s athleticism and derring-do lends him a panache inaccessible to the lumbering slugger.

The strange thing is that everyone already knows the triple is the most difficult hit to obtain in baseball (barring the inside-the-park-homerun, which we shall return to shortly). It is a baseball truism that the most difficult phase of hitting for the cycle (hitting a single, double, triple, and home run in one game) is getting the triple. Any time a player is getting close to hitting for the cycle the announcer will invariably either, a) point out that the hitter already has a triple, the most difficult part of the cycle, or b)note that the player has not yet hit a triple, the most difficult part of hitting for the cycle. And everyone accepts this as valid precisely because the triple is the most difficult hitting feat in baseball. The missing element in achieving one-year greatness in baseball hitting is referred to in the title of that very feat; by naming the act of leading the league in average, home runs, and RBI’s the “Triple Crown”, baseball is unconsciously acknowledging that the greatest player is not the one who leads in any of those (lesser) categories, but he who is the king of the triple.

With the preeminence of the triple now established, before we address the changes necessary to fix baseball, we must return to my earlier assertion that baseball must needs be fixed. Why bother? One might argue that in focusing on the difficulty of the triple I have overlooked the fact that the home run is judged most important because it accomplishes the object of the game, scoring runs. But this response is simply advancing the argument that since baseball has always had a flawed and illogical scoring system, than it must continue to do so. Which brings us to the core reason that baseball must be fixed, which is quite simply in order to save it. Baseball was the most popular team sport in America for at least the first half of the twentieth century, as along with horse racing and boxing it dominated the sports scene. This is largely because baseball is the perfect hybrid of individual and team competition. The showdown between pitcher and batter rivals the two greatest individual sports, boxing and tennis, for mano a mano thrills. But baseball, at the same time, offers everything that comes with great team sports, most importantly the beauty of watching men (or women) function as a unit and the joy inherent to participating and witnessing that unity in multiplicity. Despite these attractions, the illogical structuring of baseball’s scoring system puts it at odds with the driving force of sports as entertainment, which I touched upon at the beginning. People watch sports for many varied reasons, but the primary reason men (and some women) watch an ungodly number of hours of sports broadcasting is that sports holds the illusion of a world that makes sense. Unlike real life, which is largely irrational and incoherent, in sports there are clear rules with definitive winners and losers. Men deeply long for the world to be like this, although it obviously isn’t.

Baseball, with its rules that reward the easy over the difficult, is far too close to real life to hold our interest as we cope with the irrationality of a world that accelerates as rapidly as our technology advances. Football, the king of American sports, long since surpassed baseball in popularity. It did so in the 1960’s, as the world shifted, we landed on the moon, and things made less sense than they ever had before. Things continue to make less sense every year, which is why football, which makes perfect sense, grows in popularity every year. If baseball is to survive, it has to reverse the Talking Heads and start making sense.

So, how to fix baseball? A simple adjustment to the scoring system should suffice, leaving intact everything beautiful about the game. Home runs will still be rewarded with a run. Doubles will now also be worth a run. Triples will be worth one and a half runs. And, to prevent runners from stopping at third, and to reward the only feat more difficult than the triple, the inside-the park-homerun will now be worth two runs. These simple changes in baseball’s scoring system will give us back our national pastime. In Baltimore we used to yell out “O” as loud as we could during the “O say does that star spangled banner yet wave” line of the national anthem. We used to really care. We might not be able to make Peter Angelos sell the Orioles to Cal Ripken and save our team, but we can still save our sport.

What Does a Woman Want?

Freud famously expressed a frustration born from his inability to fathom the feminine mystery: “The great question that has never been answered, and which I have not yet been able to answer, despite my thirty years of research into the feminine soul, is ‘What does a woman want?’” That Freud, one of the most insightful thinkers ever, failed to answer this question satisfactorily speaks less to the difficulty of the question and more to the thickheaded nature of men when it comes to women. Because this is actually not in the least a difficult question to answer. A woman’s core desire is to have a desirable partner of her choosing, and, more importantly, to be the most important thing in the life of her chosen partner. There are of course individual exceptions, but by and large if you spend any time with women and listen to them talk it becomes clear how central the desire for this ideal union is to almost all of them. Women may want more out of life than this, but never less.

And yet we all go around acting as if the answer to Freud’s question remains a mystery. I think that we do this because we focus on the “more” that women may want out of life, while ignoring the foundational desire common to almost all women. The “more” will of course be unique to each woman, and certain patterns may emerge in the female collective. The great mistake is to look at these patterns as if the answer to the question of what women want is to be found there, rather than in their (mostly) uniform central desire. Women themselves make this mistake, too. Carol Queen, noted author on female sexuality, wrote an essay in which she lists top five things that a woman wants, and the entire list consists of trends that exist in the “more” of female desires: 1) Equal pay for equal work, 2)Respect, 3) Trust, 4) Communication, 5) Sexual Permission. While each of these desires is reasonable, and while numbers two through five would be elements of a harmonious partnered relationship, a woman with all five of these elements in her life but who lacks a partner for whom she is the most important thing of all, would still exist in a state of fundamental discontent. Whereas a woman who has a desired partner for whom she is the most important thing of all, but who lacks one of these five elements, is still likely to feel a core of contentment that is unavailable to a woman who has a fabulously high paying job that has burst through the glass ceiling, and even has a desired partner who gives her respect, trust, communication, and sexual permission, if, for example, this partner’s career is more important to him or her than the woman in question.

Everyone knows this, but we like to pretend we don’t, so the obvious question is why? Freud posed the question well before feminism had achieved its greatest accomplishments, so we can’t lay the blame for our collective faux-beffudlement at the feet of the feminists, but they may play a role in its current version. Feminism, rightly, demanded the right of women to pursue the “more” that had been denied to them down through the ages. So when a feminist like Carol Queen thinks about what a woman wants she is going to emphasize those aspects of female desire that have traditionally been denied to women. A feminist who responded to the question of “what does a woman want” with the real answer would risk rolling back all of the triumphs of the past century which allow women to pursue the “more.” So, by definition, a committed feminist is someone who can’t correctly answer the question, “what does a woman want?” Of course, that does not stop women, feminist and otherwise, from constantly talking about what they really want, the aforementioned chosen partner for whom they are the most important thing of all. They just can’t have this discussion in the context of the question, “what does a woman want?” If asked what they want, feminists must provide answers that only provide “the more”, or, if they reveal their desire for a chosen partner who values them more than anything else, this desire must be portrayed as an ingredient to satisfaction in life, thereby disguising its true status as the sine qua non of female happiness.

Men take this opening and run with it as an excuse not to do the hard relationship work involved in valuing their female partners above all else. The cost of doing business paid by the feminists is that they have allowed men the stance that as long as they are respectful, trustworthy, etc. towards their wives/partners, then they have done their best to give women what they want, even if they have not made their women number one. It is, as one of my astute female colleagues pointed out to me, easier for a man to stay late at work then it is to come home from work and take equal responsibility for helping to raise the three children and do a fair share of housekeeping. But it is only by doing the latter that a man will communicate to his female partner that he values her above all else. This is called doing the dirty work, and men too often like to keep their hands clean under the cover of career advancement or by simply spending too much time attending to their own set of interests. But the price paid for this is to never experience the truly adoring female partner, which is the best that life has to offer (straight) men. Nothing in the world glows like the woman who feels that her chosen partner values her above all else, because nothing comes close to a woman who has her central desire in life met consistently. The selfish man pretends that he doesn’t know what women want in order to avoid the labor necessary to achieve relationship greatness. Labor is a term not coincidentally connected with giving birth, that other greatest thing that life has to offer, which underscores the fact that anything in life worth having requires labor. The love of a man’s life should be his central labor. I would argue that what you choose to labor for most intensively should be something that can love you back.

Perhaps we are also all invested in maintaining the “mystery of woman.” This element of mystery could be seen as a necessary ingredient for the sexual dance, and as such our blindness to the lack of mystery as to “what does a woman want” could be seen as biologically determined. But I’m not so sure. I believe that it is us humans, men and women alike, who are mysterious, and that this mystery comes from the “more” that each of us wants out of life that is so individualized and can be so inscrutable to the other. Every individual on Earth wants something different, but all women want the same thing, and all men (or women who love women) would be wise to give it to them; it is our surest route to happiness, “more” notwithstanding. Another astute married female colleague of mine taught me the phrase “happy wife equals happy life.” These are words to live by. The real mystery is why we so often don’t.

Oh Lord, It’s Hard to be Humble

Nietzche’s infamous challenge to belief, “God is dead,” along with his impassioned arguments against Christianity, has always lurked around the edges of my faith. I have always felt that an encounter with Nietzsche, perhaps the Judeo-Christian tradition’s greatest critic, was inevitable. What value faith if it can’t withstand Nietzsche’ penetrating scrutiny? A layman rather than a Nietzsche scholar, I have turned for help in my encounter to Baltimore’s own H.L. Mencken (killing two birds with one stone, as I had never before read Mencken, one of my adopted home town’s literary giants) . Mencken penned The Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche, a remarkable summation of Nietzsche’s thought, recently republished and thankfully available at the local biblioteque. (It is important to note that, like Nietzsche, Mencken was a gifted thinker and writer, but also, like Nietzsche, fell into the trap of racial determinism. Put more bluntly, Mencken was an overt racist, as exhibited in The Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche when Mencken touts the inherent superiority of European Americans to their African American countrymen. We shall return to the shadow cast by Nietzsche’s philosophy, a darkness which haunted Mencken’s thought and continues to trouble humanity today, but this caveat should be noted from the start, as warranted by the worst chapters of our recent human history.)

Because Nietzsche’s thought has the breadth and depth befitting a great philosopher, it will serve our purposes here to simply jump in where Nietzsche’s critique of Christianity goes off the tracks (for a proper overview of Nietzsche see Mencken). Mencken captures the core of Nietzsche’s assault on Christianity: “Nietzsche maintains that Christianity urges a man to make no… efforts to insure his personal survival in the struggle for existence. The beatitudes require, he says, that instead of trying to do so, the Christian shall devote his energies to helping others and shall give no thought to himself.” This reading of Christianity leads to the necessary conclusion that if a man were to follow Christianity’s urging, then (again here Mencken interpreting Nietzsche) “his activity is restricted to one of two things: standing perfectly still or deliberately making himself inferior.” Mencken provides Nietzsche’s own words to clarify this stance, with Christianity understood as “the tendency hostile to life”, and that which “thwarts the law of development , of evolution, of the survival of the fittest.”

Nietzsche was philosophy’s first great Darwinian. His rejection of Christianity is the necessary counterpart to his embrace of Darwin’s theory of natural selection. Per Mencken, Nietzsche “proposed, then, that before it was too late, humanity should reject Christianity, as the ‘greatest of all imaginable corruptions,’ and admit freely and fully, that the law of natural selection was universal and that the only way to make real progress was to conform to it.”

Nietzsche has misunderstood both Christianity and humanity’s relationship to Darwin’s theory of natural selection in one fell swoop. It is necessary first to treat of Darwin’s reductionist views on Darwinian theory. For Nietzsche, as seen above, Nietzsche’s theory of natural selection, with its emphasis on survival of the fittest, applies to humanity in the exact same fashion as it does to every other variety of flora and fauna. Per Mencken, “Nietzsche says that the thing which best differentiates man from the other animals is his capacity for making and keeping a promise.” I would argue that, instead, the most important difference between humanity and other animals is that, unlike animals, we humans are capable of destroying the world right along with ourselves. It is this crucial difference between humans and other animals, one that is overlooked by Nietzsche, which creates a separate framework for our relationship to evolution.

It is in this separate framework in which the teachings of the world’s great faith traditions, including Christianity, attain to heights of wisdom unavailable to Nietzsche in his reductionist stance of equating humans with all other creatures. But before we go any further, it is important to correct Nietzsche’s key misunderstanding of Christian teaching. While the gospels are replete with Christ’s insistence that his followers become less obsessed with their daily welfare, by, for example, pointing out how well cared for are the lilies in the field, these are primarily teachings to reframe his followers understanding of creation as a place of abundance. Of course, it is no mystery that even in the most abundant of settings one must still put in the requisite labor to reap the bounty, and I don’t believe that Jesus’ basic teaching that God will provide in any way denies the need for the labor required to access those provisions. Nietzsche would argue that a good Christian would be too busy looking after his neighbor to put in the necessary labor. In making this argument Nietzsche has misread the second in the pair of central commandments on which all of Christianity rests; this commandment states “Love your neighbor as yourself,” not “Love your neighbor instead of yourself.” The central point here, and one lost on Nietzsche, is that in order to do a good job of loving your neighbor you must be loving yourself an equal amount. And, if I am not mistaken, the love of neighbor will grow out of an abundance of love for one’s self, such that there will never be an inadequacy of love for self that might prevent one from reasonably seeing to one’s own welfare in the normal every day ways that no one else can provide. There is work that one can only do for one’s self. Part of loving your neighbor is letting her do this work while you take care of your own business. (The first in the pair of central commandments, to “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind” {Matthew 22: 37) is simply a translation of the greatest gift of Nietzsche’s philosophy, his “Yes to life!”)

It might help here to consider another wisdom tradition. I once went to a conference about working with troubled youth at which one of the speakers (see reclaiming .org for the speaker’s website) described his youth program’s approach as based on a central tenet of a particular American Indian tribe’s wisdom tradition. This tradition held that all individuals require four basic opportunities to prosper. The opportunity to experience, respectively, achievement , autonomy, altruism, and attachment; they are easy to remember when you name them the “Four A’s”. You would naturally pair the more individualistic pursuits of achievement and autonomy, and also pair the more communal elements of altruism and attachment. Jesus’ teaching of “Love your neighbor as yourself” is simply a pithy phrasing of how to achieve a life affirming balance of the Four A’s. Nietzsche’s will to power, however, is but the exclusive emphasis of achievement and autonomy, and a complete denial of the need to balance them with altruism and attachment. Perhaps, in the long history of Christian influence on western civilization, altruism and attachment were emphasized as spiritual virtues more-so than their counterparts of achievement and autonomy. To the extent that they were, than Nietzsche’s contribution can be seen as reawakening us to the need for achievement and autonomy in a healthy human individual. But mistaking Nietzsche for a prophet of truth rather than knowing him as a balancing corrective, is to invite disaster. One need look no further than the co-optation of Nietzche’s philosophy by the Nazi party to witness the dangers of misunderstanding Nietzsche’s contribution.

But a Christianity informed by Nietzsche would be a reinvigorated force for good. When Christianity loses its balance and overemphasizes attachment and altruism, when it does teach “Love your neighbor more than yourself,” it’s values are warped. An example of this is the Christian value of humility. A Christianity uncorrected by Nietzsche, skewing towards attachment and altruism, elevates humility to an end unto itself; one is to practice humility simply because it is good to be humble. But humility understood as an end unto itself is warped beyond repair. I’ve never liked Ralph Lauren Polo garments, largely because of the Polo logo affixed prominently to the left breast of every Polo shirt. My distaste for the Polo logo is based on my contempt for the act of wearing the Polo logo as an expression of socioeconomic status. But my refusal to don Ralph Lauren is an act of neurotic humility, because by refusing to wear Polo, based on my judgment that people who wear Polo are snobs, I necessarily conceive of myself as superior to the Polo consumer because of my humility. When humility becomes an end unto itself then all acts of humility based on this value are just another way of being better than other people, thereby rendering this warped form of humility neurotic. (Speaking of neurosis, after reading Nietzsche I realize that the father of all things neurotic, Sigmund Freud, was just a Nietzchean. Freud’s theory of dreams as wish fulfillment and his theory of guilt as the aggressive drive pointed inward both appear first in Nietzsche. Nietzsche also wrote eloquently about the unconscious, a concept with which Freud built the entire edifice of psychoanalysis.)

The true, non-neurotic function of humility comes into focus when Christianity is balanced by Nietzsche’s reemphasis of achievement and autonomy. When achievement and autonomy are as important as attachment and altruism, there must needs be a mediator between the individualistic and the communal elements of human life. Humility is that mediator. This function of humility is seen clearly in the old cliché “keep your feet on the ground while you reach for the stars,” i.e. the only way to stay grounded while you strive for the heights of individual excellence is through displays of humility. We display humility not because it is important to be humble in order to be “good people”, but because humility allows us to maintain attachment, often by way of altruism, while we pursue achievement and autonomy. Humility strikes the necessary balance for us to keep the commandment of loving our neighbors as ourselves.

In closing it is important to return to the crucial difference between humanity and the rest of creation, which is nothing other than our ability to destroy all life on the planet. Unlike all that came before us, which evolved according to Darwin’s theory of natural selection, humanity is that which must evolve to the state of loving our neighbors as ourselves, if we are to survive. We must temper our Nietzschean need for achievement and autonomy, our will to power, with equal consideration for attachment and altruism. Doing so is the only true way to say “Yes to life!”; not doing so will end all life as we know it. I would say that this is the true meaning of Jesus’ promise of eternal life for all those who follow him. Humanity can choose to follow the teachings of our great sages by loving our neighbors as ourselves, or not. Whether humanity lives on eternally depends precisely on this choice.