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Authors: Stephen Jay Gould
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there.
The All-Star Game itself is a spectacle, not a sporting contest (for no manager out to win a meaningful game would remove his best players early and use his final substitutes for a last comeback attempt). But spectacles serve the different function of showcasing excellence and affirming traditions worth preserving in a volatile and increasingly commercialized world, where material quantity becomes confused with ultimate worth, and where we seem unable to recognize and honor our older standards of human quality.
Mark McGwire’s baker’s dozen dingers in Monday night’s home run derby scarcely belong in a human league. His shortest shot over the Green Monster almost exceeded the longest single ball hit by any of the other nine contestants. (In the most awesome Fenway homer I had ever seen in thirty years of attendance, Jack Clark once hit the second row of lights in the left field tower that soars above the Green Monster; one of McGwire’s shots hit the very top of the same tower, while several others went higher and farther.)
Then, to begin the game itself on Tuesday night, our own Pedro Martinez struck out five of the six batters he faced, including, in order, Larry Walker, Sammy Sosa, and the same Mark McGwire.
American League starting pitcher Pedro Martinez pitches in the first inning of the All-Star Game at Fenway Park on July 13, 1999. Credit: AP/Wide World Photos
Above it all (spiritually, as he linked my middle age to my childhood passion for baseball; materially, as he firmly threw out the first ball with the one side of his body that the ravages of stroke have spared; and literally, as he then watched the game from his left-field sky box), Ted Williams presided as the closest surrogate for God that such activities can muster.
Ted may not have been a “nice man” during his tumultuous playing days in Boston; and, although he didn’t starve, he never amassed a monetary fortune from baseball either. But Ted Williams directed all his maniacal dedication, and his gifts of body and mind, to pursuing—and achieving—his own dream of transcendence. He did not submit to the rules of corporate blandness or false modesty (now so essential for a lucrative life of commercial endorsements) in stating the driving goal of his choice in life.
As he has said so often, he “simply” wanted to become so good that when people saw him on the street they would turn their heads and say: There goes the greatest hitter who ever lived. And so he is. And so is Mark McGwire in the different art of power hitting, and Pedro Martinez in pitching finesse. And this—may we never forget, and never cease to practice—is the true significance and essence of enthusiasm, which literally means “the intake of God.”
Times to Try a Fan’s Soul
I n 1949, when Joe DiMaggio became my hero and the Yankees my passion, the Boston Red Sox led the Yanks by one game as the teams met in a final confrontation at the season’s very end. The Yanks won both and then took the World Series against their second-greatest rivals, the Brooklyn Dodgers.
A generation later, in 1978, my son (matching my own age in 1949) and I watched in delight as Bucky Dent’s flyball over the Green Monster (an out almost anywhere else, but a dinger in Fenway Park) beat the Red Sox in the only postseason episode—a one-game playoff to resolve a regular-season tie—of the greatest rivalry in the history of baseball.
First published in the Wall Street Journal , October 15, 1999.
The classicist Emily Vermeule, a colleague of mine at Harvard and an ardent Sox fan, wrote that destiny had deep-sixed the Sox because their drama with the Yanks had to unfold within the rigid norms of Greek tragedy. Roger Angell replied, in the greatest one-liner ever written about sports, that the pathways of history cannot be so foreordained. Mr. Angell offered the alternative view that—just as Yaz, representing the potential winning run, popped to third to end the
The All-Star Game itself is a spectacle, not a sporting contest (for no manager out to win a meaningful game would remove his best players early and use his final substitutes for a last comeback attempt). But spectacles serve the different function of showcasing excellence and affirming traditions worth preserving in a volatile and increasingly commercialized world, where material quantity becomes confused with ultimate worth, and where we seem unable to recognize and honor our older standards of human quality.
Mark McGwire’s baker’s dozen dingers in Monday night’s home run derby scarcely belong in a human league. His shortest shot over the Green Monster almost exceeded the longest single ball hit by any of the other nine contestants. (In the most awesome Fenway homer I had ever seen in thirty years of attendance, Jack Clark once hit the second row of lights in the left field tower that soars above the Green Monster; one of McGwire’s shots hit the very top of the same tower, while several others went higher and farther.)
Then, to begin the game itself on Tuesday night, our own Pedro Martinez struck out five of the six batters he faced, including, in order, Larry Walker, Sammy Sosa, and the same Mark McGwire.
American League starting pitcher Pedro Martinez pitches in the first inning of the All-Star Game at Fenway Park on July 13, 1999. Credit: AP/Wide World Photos
Above it all (spiritually, as he linked my middle age to my childhood passion for baseball; materially, as he firmly threw out the first ball with the one side of his body that the ravages of stroke have spared; and literally, as he then watched the game from his left-field sky box), Ted Williams presided as the closest surrogate for God that such activities can muster.
Ted may not have been a “nice man” during his tumultuous playing days in Boston; and, although he didn’t starve, he never amassed a monetary fortune from baseball either. But Ted Williams directed all his maniacal dedication, and his gifts of body and mind, to pursuing—and achieving—his own dream of transcendence. He did not submit to the rules of corporate blandness or false modesty (now so essential for a lucrative life of commercial endorsements) in stating the driving goal of his choice in life.
As he has said so often, he “simply” wanted to become so good that when people saw him on the street they would turn their heads and say: There goes the greatest hitter who ever lived. And so he is. And so is Mark McGwire in the different art of power hitting, and Pedro Martinez in pitching finesse. And this—may we never forget, and never cease to practice—is the true significance and essence of enthusiasm, which literally means “the intake of God.”
Times to Try a Fan’s Soul
I n 1949, when Joe DiMaggio became my hero and the Yankees my passion, the Boston Red Sox led the Yanks by one game as the teams met in a final confrontation at the season’s very end. The Yanks won both and then took the World Series against their second-greatest rivals, the Brooklyn Dodgers.
A generation later, in 1978, my son (matching my own age in 1949) and I watched in delight as Bucky Dent’s flyball over the Green Monster (an out almost anywhere else, but a dinger in Fenway Park) beat the Red Sox in the only postseason episode—a one-game playoff to resolve a regular-season tie—of the greatest rivalry in the history of baseball.
First published in the Wall Street Journal , October 15, 1999.
The classicist Emily Vermeule, a colleague of mine at Harvard and an ardent Sox fan, wrote that destiny had deep-sixed the Sox because their drama with the Yanks had to unfold within the rigid norms of Greek tragedy. Roger Angell replied, in the greatest one-liner ever written about sports, that the pathways of history cannot be so foreordained. Mr. Angell offered the alternative view that—just as Yaz, representing the potential winning run, popped to third to end the
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