Is Baseball the Fairest Sport?
posted by Frank Pasquale
As Spring Training continues, the Boston Review recently published a letter from John Rawls to Yale Law Prof. Owen Fiss singing the praises of baseball. It’s not hard to see the connections between Rawls’s theory and his criteria for excellence in a sport:
The game does not give unusual preference or advantage to special physical types, e.g., to tall men as in basketball. All sorts of abilities can find a place somewhere. . . .
[A]ll plays of the game are open to view: the spectators and the players can see what is going on. Per contra football where it is hard to know what is happening in the battlefront along the line. Even the umpires can’t see it all, so there is lots of cheating etc. And in basketball, it is hard to know when to call a foul.
[B]aseball is the only game where scoring is not done with the ball, and this has the remarkable effect of concentrating the excitement of plays at different points of the field at the same time.
Finally, there is the factor of time, the use of which is a central part of any game. Baseball shares with tennis the idea that time never runs out, as it does in basketball and football and soccer. This means that there is always time for the losing side to make a comeback.
No sudden death OT for philosophers! And let’s not forget George Will’s observation that baseball is an ideal meritocracy because of its long season.
Nevertheless, I wonder if Rawls would have revised his views in light of the steroid crisis, a topic with some philosophical overtones.
Photo Credit: D.F. Shapinsky.
UPDATE: As the first commenter notes, Rawls does not claim these views as originating with him; rather, the letter from which they are quoted recalls a conversation Rawls had with First Amendment scholar Harry Kalven. As Rawls puts it in the letter, “although I only saw Kalven once to talk to . . . . I distinctly recall the conversation because he brought out to me many splendid features of the game which, though obvious, require his sort of brilliance to see the significance of. For example, he gave these reasons for why baseball is the best of all games.”
March 21, 2008 at 8:39 am
Posted in: Jurisprudence
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Responses (6)
Matt - March 21, 2008 at 9:29 am
I guess the arguement was originally made by Harry Kalven and Rawls was restating it to Fiss in a letter about Kalven shortly after Kalven’s death. I’m not sure if Rawls meant to endorse it or not but he certainly doesn’t seem hostile. One hopes, of course, that it’s all done in good fun, and not too seriously. (It seemed so to me.)
Patrick S. O'Donnell - March 21, 2008 at 9:46 am
I think the “steroid crisis” arose from problems within the larger culture and surrounding society and do not reflect something intrinsic to baseball as baseball, thus I doubt Rawls’s views about the sport would have been altered by steroids (no more than by previous scandals, incidents of cheating and so forth). Thus the steroid crisis, not unlike labor issues, might be considered contingent or accidental features of the game, the necessary features or essential qualities of which survive and flourish in spite of such things…or so I like to tell myself at this time of year, anticipating the saintly Vin Scully announcing the play-by-play of the “boys in blue” (one-time symbol of the working-class and the first major league team to break the color barrier).
Regardless, philosophers, any philosopher, ruminating about baseball: heavenly, although my late teacher and dear friend, Ninian Smart, would probably have made an equally compelling case for the game of cricket (As a reader wrote in comment to the Boston Review piece, ‘From a British point of view, these seem very parochial considerations.’ I suspect the same could be said from an ‘Indian,’ or ‘Pakistani,’ or a number of other points of view as well).
John C - March 21, 2008 at 10:30 am
“As Rawls puts it in the letter, ‘although I only saw Kalven once to talk to . . . . I distinctly recall the conversation because he brought out to me many splendid features of the game which, though obvious, require his sort of brilliance to see the significance of. For example, he gave these reasons for why baseball is the best of all games.’”
Ugh. Let’s tamp down the pretention, shall we? Every kid I grew up playing T-ball with knew this same stuff. Small kids could play, bottom-of-the-ninth comebacks, everyone could be an umpire . . . maybe every kid on the school yard had a “sort of brilliance,” or maybe this is just something that is stunningly obvious to the rest of us and never occured to Rawls. Oy.
ex-baseballer - March 21, 2008 at 1:14 pm
“Tamp down the pretension” basically means that you’re on the wrong blog.
The US has an unhealthy obsession with baseball, but few manifestations of it as unhealthy as when intellectuals try to wax eloquent about it. See, for example, the Justice Blackmun baseball masturbation opinion for the Supreme Court.
Also, most of the advantages identified in the post aren’t unique to baseball. They also describe chess and a bunch of other things. The uniqueness of baseball comes from the fact that it’s low-intensity and boring and has more in common with golf or croquet than with basketball/football/hockey, yet people insist that it’s a sport.
Also, I’m not sure what this business is about “all sorts of abilities can find a place somewhere…” If your abilities don’t include throwing and catching, you’re pretty much out of luck. Baseball players nowadays are either big and strong like Barry Bonds, fast and agile like Ichiro, some combination of both, or they’re pitchers. Every other “sport” has a roughly equal number of preferred body types. Basketball needs Kobes as much as it needs Shaqs.
For whatever reason, baseball has become part of American culture in a way that no other sport is. Because of that, there will always be a group of people who think that it’s some kind of transcendent embodiment of all that is right and good in the world. Few things trigger the gag reflex more quickly than when these people speak up about it.
bill - March 21, 2008 at 10:21 pm
Test cricket is way way better.
Horst Graben - March 25, 2008 at 7:43 pm
Baseball is the least discriminating US Sport among the major races: White, black, brown, yellow and portly.
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