179. Baseball Pain (1)

  

A man in Philadelphia is grieving over the approach of the autumnal equinox.  Because it tells him winter is approaching?  That his powers are declining, that his days are dwindling down to a precious few, that yellow leaves, or none, or few, are hanging on his life's bough?  No.  It's because it brings back memories of the Phillies' loss of a baseball game to the Cincinnati Reds on September 21, 1964.

That's 48 years ago.  One game.  No, narrower than that.  One play: Chico Ruiz, of the Reds, stealing home.  He heads his blog post with a picture of it: Ruiz with his foot in the air, starting his slide, Frank Robinson, the batter, standing back, looking at the plate where the foot is soon to go, Clay Dalrymple, the Philly catcher, one knee on the ground, looking (of all places!) at the backstop behind him.

This picture comes back to this man every year as, he tells us, it does to many Philadelphia fans. Those fans must have lived through pretty many other things by now.   He, a grandfather, has (by his profile) had a career as an academic, a theologian.  His Ph.D. thesis was on Paul's theology of justification.  Who knows how deeply he has been engrossed in philosophical problems.  And every fall, that play at the plate.

Well, I have some painful memories of those days in September, 1964, too, and so, I dare say, do some fans in St. Louis, and San Francisco.  It was a record year for pain.  Teams so close in the standings, so much depending on each game.  The last two weeks were like having a kidney stone.  And only one team would pass it.

Why would anyone ever want to relive a kidney stone?  Masochism? Maybe, but with fans of teams with a history of losing it's more likely to be pride.   A need to win at something, some way.   "You think you've suffered, listen to what I went through."  I've heard that enough to think it's pride.

It's sort of what I want this fellow in Philadelphia to hear now.  I see him over there crowing away (he'll call it moaning): "Nobody knows the trouble I've seen."  Well, buddy, I know it.  And my friend in St. Louis knows it.  And there are probably a lot of guys in San Francisco who know it. 

So there's one reason to display my pain: to get even with this theologian.  Another reason is to educate.  There are so many people, particularly in Europe, particularly in football cities, who still don't understand the appeal of baseball.  And I think that if they can just understand the pain of it, and how this pain is different from the pain of other games, and superior to it, and how it makes this game superior … but then I lose them.  How can degree of pain signify superiority?  I guess you have to feel it.

And you could feel it, if I could just recreate it in words.  That, though, is so difficult that I have pretty well given up — until now.  Now, thanks to the wonderful new statistics, and the passionate fans who, profiting from the cyber miracles of our age, have managed to fill them out, I have a chance.  Do you know that I can now expose my heart to the meeting, or not, of bat with ball in every plate appearance in every game the Reds have played in the last seventy years or more? 

These geniuses have come up with a way to quantify what every heart in every stadium is doing.  To graph it.  They can give you a line representing, batter by batter, your team's progress to victory or defeat.  Up or down, sloping or sinking, soaring or diving, there it is.  And of course, since victory or defeat is everything to a fan, there's his heart.

You might take a look at this line, examples of which you can find at http://www.baseball-reference.com/boxes/.  Go to 23 September, 1964, the game between the Cardinals and the Mets.  I hope you see how much the line conveys.  It's like the line some teachers put on the blackboard to show a moral defeat.  Like (for me) the defeat of Eve by Satan in Milton's Paradise Lost:  down as she's tickled by Satan's praise, up as she recognizes it as flattery, more steeply down as she accepts his lies about the tree, up as she asserts the truths she has been taught, then vertically down, off the cliff, as she shows, by eating the fruit, that she doesn't believe those truths.  You can't see it on the board without realizing what a process moral defeat is.  The line at baseball-reference.com does the same thing for you.

Look at it now for 23 September, one of the days in my period of agony, squiggling along the center line for six innings at Shea Stadium, nobody scoring, few men getting on base.  There's the Cards' high point in the seventh, Ken Boyer's single after Bill White's home run.  One run in, nobody out, maybe a multi-run rally starting.  Win Expectancy 73%.  Now look at the change.  The line teeters at the top, as Boyer is sacrificed to second, descends some as the rally fizzles (McCarver and Javier ending the inning by grounding weakly to the pitcher) and then plunges as the Cardinal pitcher gives up two straight doubles and throws away a sacrifice bunt in the eighth.  The line shows it all.  Long inaction and uncertainty, then prosperity, crash, and a wiggling depression.

All right, in the '64 season we've seen our four teams emerge as contenders in June, then seen Philadelphia take a four-game lead in mid-August (worry in the other cities), raise it to five and a half on September 1 (big worry), and to six on September  15 (near despair).  By September 20, with the lead at six and a half, the rest of us have pretty well given up (or told ourselves we have given up).

Before I go ahead with my project, to relive, with the help of the new statisticians, the fans' last two weeks of the season, I want to make sure non-baseball people understand how rational our despair was.  Games ahead in the standings represent what has to happen for the team behind to catch the team ahead.  If you're one game behind entering the last day you have to win and the other team has to lose.  That has to happen six straight times if you are six behind with six days remaining.  As the sun rose on 21 September the Reds were six and a half behind with 13 games left to play.  The Phils had 12 left.  That meant that if the Phils won just six games the Reds would have to win all of their games.  Any Reds fan (or any St. Louis fan, whose team had the same record the Reds had) who wasn't in despair was crazy.  As for the Giants fan, he was even crazier, though only by a little bit.  His team was seven back, with 12 to play.

Very well, the next post will relive the game that has burned itself into the Philadelphia theologian's memory, first in his skin and then in my skin, in Cincinnati.  After that I will relive, with commentary, some of the other games played by these teams, to the extent that they contribute to our understanding.

178. Absolutism in Congress

 

It isn't often that we get to see three cases of thought-stopping absolutism play out at the same time but that is now our privilege.  The Norquist pledge, the Second Liberty Bond Act (debt ceiling), and the Budget Control Act (fiscal cliff) are all about to do just what our Philosophy 101 instructors were trying so hard to do: teach us to bear the pain of critical thinking.

Carefully assessing the present situation, making your best projection about the future, weighing all the options, and finally striking a workable balance — that was mentally painful.  But, if you wanted to find the best solution to a problem and a good grade in the course, there was no way to avoid it.

Not that freshmen didn't have a way.  My instructor called it "the absolutist escape."  Any time you declared that there was one value, one course of action, one thing that you would never do or always do, you were taking it.  And yes, you'd get a period of ease.  No more thinking, no more pain.  "That's settled.  Whew!"  But, sure enough, there would be the instructor (or the textbook) with a case that unsettled you.  "Non-violence, you say?  Well, here's this monster whose greater violence your violence can prevent."  There went your declaration.

Absolutists were, in the card-playing analogy my instructor liked to use, one-card-trumps-all people.  They were a drag in any complicated game, like morality, or politics, or life.  Among other people they contributed little.  Among themselves they wound up with solutions that seldom fit the problem.  It could hardly be otherwise.  As soon as they said, "X, whatever the situation," they doomed themselves to a misfit for every situation that wasn't exactly like the situation in which they said X.

Grover Norquist, who has been to college (Harvard BA, MBA), must have known this.  Yet with his offered pledge he was willing at the start of the 112th Congress, to turn 238 members of the House and 41 members of the Senate into absolutists.  "I will not raise taxes, whatever the situation."  We college teachers have to wonder.

The debt ceiling operates a lot like Norquist's pledge.  It says, "You will not budget more than X whatever the situation."  Only in this case X is an exact number, declared first in 1917.  That has been a misfit so many times that by now you'd think the absolutism would be clear, but apparently not so.

Who can miss the absolutism in the Budget Control Act?  "Budget cuts will be made on this date whatever the situation."

See who the absolute authority is in both of those last two?  Members of Congress.  Only at an earlier date.  Both are acts saying, "Congressmen in a different situation are wiser than Congressmen in the middle of the situation that has to be dealt with.  Accept their authority."

The debt ceiling will, according to Timothy Geithner, kick in sometime in February or March.  The Budget Control Act takes effect on January 1.  The Norquist Pledge hangs over the whole period — about the length of a college quarter.  Plenty of time to measure the pain of absolutist playout against the pain of critical thinking.

177. "Conquered territory" vs. "occupied territory."

Oh how much depends on the word you use for land your country's armed forces have won.  Call it "conquered territory" and nobody objects (with words, anyway) to what you do with it.  Call it "occupied territory," though, and you're in the stew.  "Hey, that land belongs to somebody else."  Occupation, unlike conquest, is not legitimate.

Conquest is legitimized by history.  This is the way the world has gone. The conquering country is a member of a very large, very ancient class.  Challenge what it's doing and you're challenging all of them.  Hell, you're practically challenging the foundations of the earth.  Very few of today's people are living on land that hasn't, at some time, been conquered for them.

The Israelis are paying the price for accepting "occupied" as the word their newly acquired Palestinian Territory in 1967.  Constantly being criticized.  Why didn't they insist on "conquered territory"?  They'd have freed themselves of so much flak.  Besides, isn't "conquered" a better fit with the way they have been treating the land, or have shown, by their tolerance of the settlers, the way they want to treat it?

Well, there were a lot of reasons they didn't use "conquered," beginning with the fact that conquest would have incorporated enough non-Jews in their country to make the Jews a minority, but a very big reason was that by 1967 conquest wasn't legitimate any more.  International law had changed.  In the early days of the Zionist movement "conquest" was in international law recognized as a "right" — meaning, like most things in international law, "something we're not going to argue about."  Unless you were willing and able to take the land back from the country that took it there was no point in opening your mouth.  The word "right" gave nations victorious in war the feeling of legitimacy that people victorious in lawsuits had.  It was a very useful term at the end of the 19th century, when Europeans were taking African land.

But "right of conquest" didn't hold up.  Though it was riding high in 1897, when Theodore Herzl first envisioned a homeland for the Jews in the Middle East, and still had plenty of momentum in 1917, when the British government blessed Herzl's vision, by 1946, at the Nuremberg Trials, it was dying and by 1974, with United Nations resolution 3314, the word was dead.  The "right" of conquest became the "crime" of conquest, called "aggression."

If only Israel had won the Palestinian territory 70 years earlier!  Things would have been (linguistically) so simple.  "We got it, boys.  Legitimately.  Might as well quiet down."

That's words for you.  You get one you can take shelter under and, whooosht, somebody takes it away.  Who took "right of conquest" away?  Well, grandchildren (this blog isn't just for profs), they are called "humanitarians" and they have taken a lot of the old words away.  They did it by changing our attitude toward the thing the word referred to.  Invading a country was bad.  And not just bad where it had always been bad, in the eyes of the invaded country, but in the eyes of the world community. If that community thought something was bad you couldn't use a good word, like "right," for it.  Not for long.  

The world community had begun to count for something at the time the humanitarians got together (the 18th century) and they made use of it.  Get those first public intellectuals, get those gabby philosophes, get everybody in the Republic of Letters, talking in a disapproving way about conquest (or slavery, or prisons, or insane asylums, or child labor) and you could change the attitudes of the literate world.  (That's what you finally had in the 18th century, a big, literate, middle-class world.)  The change succeeded, children, and we call the change "the Enlightenment."

I offer that name, not for your use on a quiz, but for your understanding of Israel's pain, its linguistic pain.  The words that fit its actions, and were once acceptable, cannot be used.  The enlightened community has replaced them with other, more humane, words, and Israelis must use them.  One must debate in the style (some would say "fashion") of the times.

176. Choosing a President: Prior Questions.

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Suppose we had to answer these two questions before we listened to another word, or had another thought, about this presidential election:

(1) How much can any President do about the economy?

(2) How much better off (or worse off) could I have been if somebody other than the incumbent had taken office at the moment he did?

I don't know how much a president can do about the economy but I'll bet it's a lot less than those now blaming or praising President Obama are assuming he can do.

As for having more or less money than you had four years ago, you might remember the fundamental forces like those at work right after World War II (all that pent-up demand), and if you did you might realize that in some four-year slices you would have been in clover no matter who was president.  Tarzan of the Apes could have been president from 1952 to 1956 and his economic numbers would have been good.

Downturns, incipient recessions or depressions, may be different.  A president's emergency measures can have an effect.  But what are you going to measure that effect (even if you can distinguish it) against?  Your projections (even if you can distinguish them from your hopes and dreams) of how your candidate's measures would have worked out? 

And speaking of your candidate's measures, was he ready with them?  Where was he when we were on the brink of a great recession, or maybe depression?  That's the moment you need to measure your "better off" question from.  Compare 2008 with 1956, when there wasn't a brink in sight.

A good year to think about is 1992.  George H. W. Bush is coming up for re-election after four pretty good years.  But there's been an interruption, a downcurve in the graph that, in the big picture we see now, keeps going up.  The nominal GDP, the one people pay attention to at the time, has gone from 6.6 and 6.9 in the first two quarters to 6.1 in the third — the quarter just before the election.  (It will go back up to 6.7 in the fourth quarter.)  No brink, not much of a recession (if there was one it lasted only eight months), but oh, what a big deal in the eyes of the opposition party.  George Stephanopoulos gets the press to notice James Carville's reminder on the wall behind his desk, "It's the economy, stupid," and we're off to the races.

Well, it wasn't the stupid economy, as we can see now.  Nobody looks back to '92 as a year of decision, much less a crisis.  All it gave us was a little swerve in the prosperity line.  But oh what it did to George H. W. Bush.  It knocked his approval rating down to 37%.  And you know what?  Within three months, after a little swerve in the other direction, it was back to 56%.  But the election had been taken care of.  What timing!  What a gift to Carville and Stephanopoulos! 

Well, the American public was a gift to them too, as it is to all campaign advisers.  I'm referring to its capacity, to every busy human being's capacity, to be swayed by little, twistable, sometimes falsifiable things.  In this case it was Bush's polite, unremarkable wonder at the powers of a supermarket scanner displayed at a Grocer's Association convention.  The public, following journalists' slant (starting with Andrew Rosenthal of the New York Times) and publicists' drums, saw a candidate who was "out of touch with ordinary Americans."  He hadn't even shopped at supermarkets, the rich bastard.

So there's one moral of the story:  Don't get so busy you become a member of the American public.