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March 6, 2013

Pebble Hunting

How Baseball Returns Our Investment

by Sam Miller

In 2010, a writer named David Bentley Hart wrote an essay about baseball for the theological magazine First Things, in which he argued that baseball “captures traces of eternity’s radiance in fugitive splendors here below.” That is to say, as I understand Hart’s piece, baseball reflects God and is Godly. It’s a beautiful piece with big and hopeful ideas, but that’s not to say that it isn’t also pompously romantic. For instance:

What could be more obvious? The game is plainly an attempt to figure forth the “heavenly dance” within the realm of mutability. When play is in its full flow, the diamond becomes a place where the dark, sullen surface of matter is temporarily transformed into a gently luminous mirror of the “supercelestial mysteries.” Baseball is an instance of what the later Neoplatonists called “theurgy”: a mimetic or prophetic rite that summons (or invites) the divine graciously to descend from eternity and grant a glimpse of itself within time.”

No—seriously.

No—seriously.

Baseball writers, and serious non-baseball writers, love to write grandiloquently about why baseball is great. You’re already thinking about George Will, aren’t you? George Will is the Grand Old Geezer of the genre. His description of baseball as “heaven’s gift to mortals” has echoes of Hart’s essay, and at some point, he has touched on many of the standard explanations for why we like the thing:

The uniqueness of it:
"It has no clock, no ties and no Liberal intrusions into the organized progression."

The daily ritual of it:
"Baseball is a habit. The slowly rising crescendo of each game, the rhythm of the long season--these are the essentials and they are remarkably unchanged over nearly a century and a half. Of how many American institutions can that be said?"

The metaphor of it:
“Correct thinkers think that 'baseball trivia' is an oxymoron: nothing about baseball is trivial."

The failure inherent in it:
“Baseball's best teams lose about sixty-five times a season. It is not a game you can play with your teeth clenched."

Bart Giamatti explained its meaning in the co