26 October 03

Baseball’s Paleontologist

We’re still celebrating the defeat of the New York Yankees here, and remain convinced that the only people who have any business rooting for the Yankees are those that actually grew up in New York. As the saying goes, rooting for the Yankees is like rooting for Microsoft.

One famous Yankee fan who did grow up in New York was Stephen Jay Gould, the Harvard paleontologist and prolific writer who died a little over a year ago. I just finished reading Triumph and Tragedy in Mudville: A Lifelong Passion for Baseball, which is a collection of his many pieces on baseball. I was happy to see this collection come out, which he left as a neatly organized manuscript before he died.

Gould grew up in Queens in New York in the late 1940s and 1950s, which was a golden time and place for baseball. There were three teams in town then: the New York Yankees, the Brooklyn Dodgers, and the New York Giants. Loyalties were quite divided depending upon the borough, but almost every boy and a good many girls were fanatical about baseball there and then. Gould rooted for the Yankees, and secondarily for the Giants. Of his intellectual attraction to baseball, Gould saw this as a contingent fact of his upbringing, and not of any inherent quality of baseball itself. (For a 1950’s childhood baseball memoir from the opposite side of town, see Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Wait Till Next Year. She was a Dodgers fan, and was heartbroken when the team left for Los Angeles in 1958, along with the Giants, who moved to San Francisco.)

I think the most analytic piece in the collection is the essay “Why no one hits .400 anymore”. The last batter to have a batting average over .400 was Ted Williams in 1941. Gould explains the absence of .400 batters these days as an outcome of the long-term trend towards there being much less variation in the quality of major-league baseball players.

Gould was a Yankees fan who held season tickets to the Red Sox, and had dual loyalties to both teams. Though he hated the introduction of wild-card teams to the playoffs (a change starting in 1995), he did see the Red Sox meet the Yankees once in post-season play in 1999, and I suspect he would have been thrilled to see the 2003 matchup as well—baseball at its finest, though the ghosts haunted the Red Sox in the end.

No ghosts appeared Saturday night though: I guess they forgot the game was on, and didn’t appear in time to rescue the Yankees.

Posted by at 08:17 PM in Baseball | Link |
  1. My first encounter with the writing of Stephen Jay Gould was in his book “Wonderful Life” which held me spellbound as I read of the exotic creatures of the Cambrian Era and the fascinating implications for our understanding of evolution. It was only after reading this book that I discovered his collections of essays, and there is certainly a strong theme of baseball in his writing. In fact your weblog, which also frequently refers to baseball, had already reminded me of his writing, even before today’s post. I confess to being culturally deprived in the baseball department as it is not a major sport in Australia, and I have never understood more than the basics of the game. However I have learnt now that it is not cool to support the Yankees.

    — Geoff    27. October 2003, 00:58    Link
  2. Geoff: I try to explain to people (Americans) that if they want to understand why the rest of the world is less than thrilled about Americans, it’s like the rest of the country being less than thrilled about the Yankees. Same strength (economic, individual), same arrogance, same entitlement, same drive to win, to always be the best, the biggest, the MOST. Then they get it. (Except Yankees fans.)

    I came to baseball through cricket. We don’t have much opportunity to watch cricket these days, though there’s a well-organized league in Northern California whose players are mostly from South Asia. And however emphatically naysayers might deny it, there are a lot of similarities between the two sports. Test matches go on for five days with multiple innings; World Series go on for seven, with multiple innings. It’s just that there’s a decision at the end of each game. They accumulate in the same way.

    Aussie players are starting to wander into baseball; Damian Moss was pitching for the Giants before he got traded to the Braves!

    — Pica    27. October 2003, 05:24    Link
  3. Now, I understand. Thanks.

    — Geoff    27. October 2003, 11:24    Link

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