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Oh how well we clear thinkers
understand games. We know
(preceding post) that they are pure tests of ability, that humane feelings gum
them up, and that if you don't get rid of them you'll look as foolish as those
who let Oscar Pritorius run with a metal foot, Renée Richards play women's
tennis with men's muscles, and thousands of handicapped people think they have
really won something when they come in first at the Special Olympics.
And where might this superior
thinking lead us? I think the
experience of Cincinnati and the players on its baseball team, much of it
detailed in my posts on Baseball Pain (#179 through #192), gives us a good
idea.
For the players I think right
thinking would lead to their shutting out, on the field, every thought of the
dying Fred Hutchinson. That means,
distant analyst, that in every at-bat during those thirty-three innings when
all they needed (to bring home the runner who would give them victory) was to lay
the bat firmly on just one ball, they would be saying to themselves, as each
ball came out of the pitcher's hand (see it, analyst, get up close), "Here
comes a ball, like any other, that I am going to swing at, or not, according to
its position (high, low, out, in) and appearance (spin, little spin, no spin),
judged by my experience with other balls leaving pitchers' hands." That would follow from their knowledge
of the game, and indeed from their coaches' instruction. To win you keep your poise; you don't
heighten your determination. You
do not say, it would be fatal to say,
"Here comes a ball I'm by God going to hit for Hutch."
And what are you saying if you are
a clear-thinking fan? "Way to
go. Keep it up. No Hutch." And if you are a clear-thinking analyst
you're saying, "Yes, that's the right thing, for player and fan."
Us now. What do we
say? We know the full story. We know what a great job these players
have done maintaining their poise.
It's almost unbelievable.
For months they have watched Hutchinson lose weight and sag, and walk
more and more slowly out to relieve his pitcher. They have followed him as he went out of uniform and
into the stands. They have seen
him up there as a spectator, and they have managed, apparently, to put that and
all those other pictures of him out of their minds as they made their plays and
swung their bats and climbed in the standings. And then, during a road trip that removed the pictures, when
there remained only the temptation to think of him at home, listening on the
radio, they had continued to keep their balance, on and on, through now nine
straight victories.
Sure, in the last six of those
wins, in these days when the visible finish line tightens the tension in every
pennant race, the schedule had blessed them with the advantage of playing out
of sight (and, often, radio range) of Hutchinson, in distant cities, and that
must have made it easier. But now
they are in their home town, with Hutch's hospital close by, and his picture in
the papers. We know that the fans
know that. They know that the
preceding tests are small compared to what the players are going to face in the
coming games.
What most of them don't know, and
won't learn until later (as I did, from Doug Wilson's book, Fred Hutchinson and the 1964 Cincinnati
Reds), is that Hutchinson, within six weeks of his grave, was in the
midnight crowd at the airport waiting to greet the returning team, and that he
would make his way to them, and hug each of them.
That's a test we have to imagine,
before we face our own test. Say
you're Deron Johnson, clean-up man, counted on to bat runs in. You know you have the best chance of
being up at bat with the game on the line, maybe the season on the line. You know that you have the best chance
of coming through if your mind is empty.
And you, by this time, know how much effort it takes to keep
Hutchinson's image out of it. You
know the odds, and what your emotions will do to them. OK. You see Hutchinson coming down the line giving hugs. Do you bail out? Sneak off, go home, try to forget
him? Or do you risk the hug?
That's Johnson's problem, and we,
forgetting what we know about the actual outcome (that Johnson, with one out in
the fourteenth inning of the crucial game, with the winning run on third,
struck out), have to imagine what Johnson faced at that time, feeling what he
knows he would feel in that hug — the looser grip, the closer face, the bone in
the sagging shoulder. Our problem,
our test, is whether or not we want him to do it. Wanting is what
makes the spectator complicit with the actor. Don't object that the test of the
fan here, wanting or not wanting a hug, is microscopic. Trace elements are good enough. One small slide and there it will be:
character!
What we will have a trace of may
be small but there will be no mistaking it. One kind of character says, "No! No! No hugs! Go the
other way. Ignore him. Forget
Hutchinson. Do anything, callous
or not, to win."" The
other says, "Forget winning, forget the game, forget logic. Feeling for a
suffering human being comes first."
It's a small test and we baseball
fans are, culturally, small people, but it's a test to be taken seriously. Here is our chance to share in the
decision-making of the great — Ulysses Grant counting the number he will have
to sacrifice at Antietam, a scientist like Gottlieb (in Arrowsmith) anticipating the deaths in his control group, Tennessee
Williams foreseeing the suffering of the sister he will abandon, Doris Lessing
seeing the same in the children she will leave in Africa, all great generals and
scientists and artists, really, all who have to be ruthless to succeed. We can share in their decision-making
by reading about it but that doesn't really test us, not like getting into a
baseball season (or a novel, or a play) and being forced to decide, up close:
do I really want this ruthlessness?
There's so much supporting either answer, whatever the grandeur of the
outcome. Say No and in our culture you've got Christ behind you. Say Yes and you've got the Greeks, the
Romans, and Machiavelli.
And there's so much to lose,
either way. Yes and you lose your
humanity (in older terms, your soul).
No and you lose your reason, the faculty that told you what a game was,
and distinguished it from parties and treatments, and made your words fit into
a logic — in short, put things in conceptual order.
Try to go both ways, want both
success and humanity, and you lose your reputation with analysts. You get
called a "coward," one unwilling to pay the necessary price, or a
"dullard," one unable to see the connection between success and
price, or, both together, a "sentimentalist," one who wants "every
idea without its sequence and every pleasure without its consequence."
These are the hazards once you
throw yourself into spectating or reading, and quit just filling a seat. Do that, become a fan in the old full,
sense ("fanatic"), follow your passion one way or the other, and, by
the experience of the fanatics in Cincinnati, I think your imagination will
carry you well beyond the season — or the novel, or the play. Did I make the right decision? Do I have the right character? We all want to be justified.
So some of us will have Johnson,
after he has avoided the hug, meeting Hutchinson in Heaven. "Hell, Hutch," he says, "my
mind was on the next game." We
are seeing Hutchinson's character
tested. If he is the good manager
we think he is he will understand perfectly. He'll forgive Johnson as Billy
Budd forgave Captain Vere. You do
what you have to do to win. Superior ballplayers, superior beings, don't make a
big deal out of hugs.
And some of us will have Johnson,
after he has hugged, meeting Socrates, who will understand and sympathize, but
who yet will say, "Yes, you have seen the injury you might have done to a
man, but do you see the injury you have done to the laws, the laws of
thought? Logic. The ordering of our concepts." And he will go into the consequences of
that for later generations, including his own children and grandchildren, who
will look to his example.
Since those who give in to their
hearts can track consequences in the same way, though, and we don't know how it
will come out, we are left pretty much in the air. It looks like a lady-or-the-tiger kind of choice. I myself choose the hug-avoiders, but
I'd be interested in hearing from others.
My email: hswardson@yahoo.com
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