Enchantment Remains: On Baseball and Modernity
Baseball Players Practicing 1875 by Thomas Eakins. The Museum of Art at the Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, RI
In A Secular Age, Charles Taylor argues that the transition from pre-Modernity to Modernity involved a paradigm shift in how the self was imagined. In the pre-Modern world, the self was “porous,” meaning that it was “vulnerable, to spirits, demons, cosmic forces.” The Modern self is “buffered:” there is a boundary between the self and the outside world, making the self impermeable to outside forces. In the pre-Modern world, a world not yet disenchanted by the Reformation, the Enlightenment, the Scientific Revolution and the like, there exist powers outside us that can impact both us and the objects around us:
[I]n the enchanted world, the meaning in things also includes another power. These “charged” objects can affect not only us but other things in the world. They can effect cures, save ships from wreck, end hail and lightning, and so on. They have what we usually call “magic” powers. Blessed objects, e.g., relics of saints, the Host, candles, are full of God-power, and can do some of the good things which God’s power does, like heal diseases, and fight off disasters. Sources of evil power correspondingly wreak malevolent ends, make us sick, weaken our cattle, blight our crops, and the like.
Taylor is not simply setting up a dichotomy, with disenchantment and buffering only occurring in Modernity and enchantment and porousness a thing of the pre-Modern past. Instead, our world is one in tension. Various claims to truth are constantly being made—often irreconcilable with one another—and individuals and communities must decide: what is reality? Perhaps nowhere is this tension more observable than in our national pastime: baseball.
Consider this: numerous baseball teams have been “cursed” by prior bad acts, preventing them from winning the World Series, including the Boston Red Sox from 1918 to 2004 with the “Curse of the Bambino”; the Chicago White Sox from 1919 to 2005 with the “Curse of the Black Sox”; and the Chicago Cubs from 1945 to 2016 with the “Curse of the Billy Goat.” Consider also the following rituals and superstitions: Moisés Alou peed on his hands to toughen them, rather than wear batting gloves; Jason Giambi wore a golden thong to break out of batting slumps; Nomar Garciaparra, Bryce Harper, and many others had or have elaborate choreographed rituals before stepping into the batter’s box; Yasiel Puig licks his bat between pitches; baseball players refuse to step on foul lines when entering or leaving the stadium; it is obligatory to turn your baseball cap inside out and into a “rally cap” to have any chance of overcoming a late inning deficit; many players have lucky bats, lucky jerseys, lucky hats, lucky gloves, or, in the case of Mark McGwire, a lucky protective cup; and, of course, you can never, ever, ever speak to a pitcher during the middle of his no-hitter. These examples, and dozens of others, reveal that the metaphysics of baseball accepts at least some version of the enchanted world and the porous self.
But of course there is a more modern strain in baseball, one that laughs at all the curses, superstitions, and holy objects. This strain is perhaps best associated with Bill James, who has been widely influential in disenchanting baseball through the use of statistics and “sabermetrics.” And yet, even though statistics and sabermetrics have changed the game—the Tampa Bay Rays making it to the World Series this past season with a minimal payroll and few high-profile stars, but with a front office composed of young sabermetric-geniuses—the old ways have not died. Enchantment remains. The very soul of the game seems up for grabs, with mystery, enchantment, and superstition on the one hand, and science, disenchantment, and statistics on the other.
This conflict over the soul of baseball is wonderfully portrayed in Christopher Beha’s recent novel The Index of Self-Destructive Acts, which is set in New York City in the early aughts. While the book deals with many issues—faith, family, politics, war, money, greed, sex, etc.—it also deals with baseball as a metaphor for two fundamentally different approaches to life, reality, and human existence. On the one hand is the view that stories matter; that the world is enchanted; that there is a mystery beyond us that can never quite be touched. This view of baseball (and life) is held by patriarch Frank Doyle, a consummate 80s liberal who has spent a lifetime writing newspaper columns about politics and baseball. Although Frank is Catholic, he is not a particularly religious person. But his is a worldview still deeply enchanted, and this enchantment is seen most clearly in his reverence for baseball.
The competing view is held by rationalist Sam Waxworth, a young man from Wisconsin who has just come to the city for a new job with a popular online magazine set to disenchant the world through statistical analysis (think Nate Silver and FiveThirtyEight). Sam, raised by a Fundamentalist mother, utterly rejects faith, enchantment, and mystery. For him, the only meaning in life is that which can be deduced from numbers. Sam first made a name for himself in college by developing a statistical algorithm for predicting every significant category for every single major league baseball player (Wins Above Replacement on steroids). His predictions were so good, that his website began generating thousands of hits and was eventually purchased by a large online entity.
Frank the Elder and Sam the Younger’s worlds collide when Sam’s first assignment with the magazine is to write an editorial about Frank. Frank agrees to the interview, thinking:
The numerarchy ruled everything now. It had long ago taken over his wife’s world, the world of finance, convincing everyone that computer modeling could eliminate risk, an idea that had led to some of the most irrational behavior in human history and taken the whole economy down. It had half ruined the first love of his life—baseball—and now it had set its sights on the second—politics. These people were the enemy. How could he pass up the chance to spend nine innings with one of their kings?
When they meet at a Mets game, their conversation exposes the conflict between Sam’s disenchanted and Frank’s enchanted view of life (and baseball). After the anthem is sung and a fighter jet flies over the park, Sam asks Frank whether this spectacle was all a bit too much. Frank responds that what Sam sees as “just extraneous bits of jingoism are secretly the purpose of the entire event. The game exists to be a ritual in the nation’s civic religion.” The game begins and the two continue their verbal sparring over, of all things, scorecards. They both keep score, but Frank sees it as quasi-sacramental and ritualistic, whereas Sam views a scorecard as a “form of data entry, a kind of computer.” Frank questions Sam’s database theory of the scorecard, but Sam pushes back, claiming that no matter how good Frank imagines shortstop Reyes is in his imagination, Sam can “quantify how many runs [Reyes] saves over a replacement in a season, and I know he’s below average, no matter how spectacular he is in your memory.”
This hits a nerve with Frank, who responds “You’re taking all the beauty out of the game.” Here is Frank, again appealing to the transcendental, to something immeasurable, to baseball (and life) as holding some sort of meaning that is not quantifiable. But again Sam pushes back:
Why do we need to tell lies about the world in order to make it beautiful? What an impoverishing idea. The sky is beautiful as the sky. We don’t need to pretend there’s a God in His heaven up there. Babe Ruth did some astonishing things on the field—actually did them. We don’t need to tell fanciful stories about the time he called his shot.
We see the stark difference between these two worldviews: mystery, the need for stories, the beauty of the uncertain, the love of individuality on the one hand; and mathematical precision, cold rationality, and disenchantment on the other.
And then a cat walks onto the field, delighting Frank. The ensuing argument between Frank and Sam perhaps best captures Beha’s set-up between the old and the new; the remnants of the pre-Modern versus the Modern; faith versus pure reason; enchantment versus disenchantment:
Frank: You don’t think it’s a bad omen to have a cat run onto the field during the first game at the park? You know that it was a black cat that doomed the Cubbies in 69?
Sam: A bad omen? Are you serious?
Frank: Granted, this one wasn’t black. Maybe it’s a good omen, then?
Sam: So if they do well, then it will have been a good omen. If they have another collapse like the last two seasons, it will be a bad omen. And what if they just have a mediocre season?
Frank: Then it won’t have been an omen after all.
Sam: You don’t really believe this stuff—curses and omens and jinxes and all that?
Frank: Why not believe in it?
Sam: Because it’s not true. There’s no evidence for it.
Frank: Who gets to decide what counts as evidence? The cat came on the field. You and I both saw that. You say it won’t have any effect on the outcome of the game, but there’s no way of knowing if you just pretend it never happened.
Sam: I don’t want to pretend it didn’t happen. It’s fun. It’s part of the games’ charm. You can tell nice stories about it. I just don’t want to pretend that it means anything. As for whether it goes in the box score—let’s say we did note the cat on the field. That’s easy enough to record. If it had any effect, it would be a measurable effect, at which point we could try to figure out some explanation for it.
Frank: Of course, everything can get turned into a number. The Feline Quotient. Value over Replacement Pet.
Now we are at the heart of the matter: truth, meaning, reality. Is the meaning of the world and everything contained in it found within the world itself? Self-contained? A riddle solvable by itself? Or, as Frank believes, citing Wittgenstein, is it true that “the sense of the world must lie outside the world”?
The chapter ends with the Mets losing, having blown the game with a three-base error and a balk. Frank rides homes on the train, thinking that to someone like Sam, such a manner of losing was “an outlier, a statistical anomaly to be safely discarded.” And while perhaps the cat did not cause the loss, Frank knows that “to the humble fan, who felt things in his bones he could hardly articulate, let alone justify numerically, it could only portend trouble to come.”
Ah yes, the trouble to come. And trouble does come for pretty much every single character in the book, Frank and Sam included. At the end of the book, Frank lies on his deathbed, a public disgrace, the target of cancel culture, and hopelessly unable to finish, or even really begin, his planned magnum opus. Sam too is publicly disgraced, fired from his job because of self-plagiarism, his book deal called off, his marriage in shambles, and his affair with Frank’s daughter a comical debacle. For all his confidence in rationality and statistical predictability, Sam’s own life is a fiasco. Why? He reflects: “We had more and more information, which ought to make our decisions better, but all we did with this information was find new ways to fuck up.”
Perhaps Bill James’s model “The Index of Self-Destructive Acts” can document and measure a pitcher’s own capacity for self-destruction. But what about human behavior? Why this propensity to act so counter-productive to our own well-being? Why, in Saint Paul’s words, do we not do what we want, but instead do the very thing we hate?
Sept. 9, 1969. A black cat stands in front of the Chicago Cubs’ dugout.
As Walker Percy was apt to say, modern science has figured out everything, except how to live. Was Sam a victim of a cat’s jinx? Or possession by the devil? Or some other enchanted force outside the disenchanted world? Probably not. But he does seem subject to the same mystery that everyone else is and always has been—pre-Modern, Modern, or even, egad, post-Modern—the mystery of what it is to be human. For Beha seems to loudly shout, we are a mystery unto ourselves. Call it The Fall; call it Original Sin; call it an Evolutionary Mis-wiring; call it what you will, but we humans are a mystery unto ourselves. And any attempt to predict the vagaries of the human heart perfectly will only end in comedic absurdity.
Which is probably why people love baseball so much. For even with Bill James and all his sabermetric-inspired disciples, there will always be another strain in baseball, a deeper strain, that not only acknowledges mystery, wonder, and imperfectability, but revels in it. A strain that is not surprised—and actually delights—that Clayton Kershaw, indisputably the greatest pitcher, and arguably the best player, of our era, was cursed in the postseason, posting a pedestrian 11-11 record with a 4.23 earned run average until this past World Series. And yet, for all those baseball players cursed out there (and perhaps for us ordinary, fallen humans as well) there is hope. Kershaw broke his curse this year, leading the Dodgers to a World Series victory with two wins and a 2.31 ERA. How’d he do it? Perhaps it was his enchanted dirty cap.