Without Question

My brother looked at me like I was crazy. "Seriously, I'd like to leave now," I told him again. "I need to go to work tomorrow."

It was October 21, 2009. The Phillies were just beginning to celebrate their second straight National League Championship. Preparations were being made on the infield for postgame interviews and presentations. And there we were, in a standing room only area right behind home plate, facing each other in silence as Citizen's Bank Park rocked around us.

After a moment, he relented. But even as we made our way to the exit, he kept one eye on the field, desperately trying to drink in every last drop of the event as best he could. Would that I had decided to do the same. I suppose I could blame it on the fact that I was physically and emotionally exhausted from Game Four (which I was fortunate enough to attend).  I could even blame my brother for not putting up more of a fight to stay. But if I'm being honest, in the end, I blame myself.

Yes, we Phillies fans are a strange breed and our eccentricities manifest in different ways. For me, that one world championship after more than a quarter century of futility somehow made me numb to what I was witnessing.  It was as if - gasp! - I expected them to win. So what if I didn't stay and watch the NLCS celebration. There was a World Series parade still to come and I was saving my energy for that.

Only it didn't come this time.  Or the next.

And all the while I stood idly by offering neither intelligent commentary nor unbridled snark. Clearly the passionate ridicule I provided in 2008 was vital to the team's success. Plus, with FJM gone, those poorly written articles weren't going to make fun of themselves (although some come close, albeit unintentionally). So last week, as autumn and winter battled it out for control of the final week of November, I finally decided it was time I started contributing again - both to this blog and the success of the Phillies.

I was certain my brother would agree, which is why I explained all this to him when we saw each other over the Thanksgiving holiday. Instead, he simply looked at me like I was crazy.

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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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