Socrates and Baseball

Okay. So 2009 was not as successful as 2008 - for the Phillies or for the blog. Yet, with the 2010 season a week away, I'm willing to take another shot at this. Unfortunately, if it's possible, I am even more busy this year than I was last year. But I'll see what I can do.

Leading off, I just thought it might be fun to take a brief tour inside my head, which simultaneously holds tremendous respect for both baseball and philosophy. Relax. As the two or three folks who read the other blog can attest, very few of my posts are like this. Nevertheless, the following paraphrased excerpt (from here) does a pretty good job of describing what I see as an important link between the two seemingly unrelated subjects:

Baseball asks questions about balls and strikes that encourage both player and fan to reflect on bigger questions about life. To stand in that batter's box and stare down the pitcher on the mound is to ask a question of oneself. Not just the baseball quesion, "Can I hit this ball?" but the character question of, "Am I up to the challenge?"

Billy Beane admitted to facing the possibility that he wasn't up to the challenge, unlike his roommate Lenny Dykstra. "Lenny was so perfectly designed, emotionally, to play the game of baseball," he said. "He was able to instantly forget any failure and draw strength from every success. He had no concept of failure. I was the opposite."

Winning a baseball game may be meaningless in and of itself, because what players and fans really desire is to be the kind of person who can achieve that goal. We want to be able to face up to the challenges presented by the game, because hitting a ball with the stick demands virtues that can be applied to life's more meaningful challenges.

Ultimately, to answer baseball's questions about success, a player must stand in that batter's box and risk the possibility of failure. Likewise philosophical questions require us to risk being wrong. Embodied in the sincere asking of any question is the allowance on the part of the questioner that he or she does not know the answer. This admission of fallibility, so familiar to athletes, engenders a kind of humility in a man like Socrates.

One story goes that Apollo's divine oracle at Delphi once declared that no one was wiser than Socrates. But rather than gratifying the philosopher, this threw him for a loop. He knew that what the oracle said must be true, but he knew just as surely that he wasn't wise at all. "Whatever does this god mean?" he thought, "What is this riddle?"

Eventually he solved the puzzle by understanding that wisdom is the admission of ignorance. The oracle, he concluded, was using him as an example, as if to say, the wisest among you understands that his wisdom is worthless.

Just something to keep in mind. You never know when it might come in handy - especially at this blog.

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