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Going Deep: Baseball and Philosophy

#1
C C Offline
http://www.publicbooks.org/going-deep-ba...hilosophy/

EXCERPT: [...] It is not just imaginary philosophers who love baseball, and it is not just me. The great John Rawls, who revolutionized political philosophy, believed that “baseball is the best of all games” and once recounted reasons why. In 1982, Chicago philosopher Ted Cohen expressed his love for the game by claiming to have found a contradiction in the rules. He petitioned the league to resolve the matter, without immediate success. But the rules were silently changed, removing the apparent inconsistency, in 2010. Mark Halfon, who teaches philosophy at Nassau Community College, has written two books about baseball, *Can A Dead Man Strike Out?* and *Tales from the Deadball Era*. And now Mark Kingwell, a philosopher at the University of Toronto, has published *Fail Better*, which concludes, “Baseball is […] the most philosophical of games.” Finding improbable depths in the game of baseball has become an intellectual performance art. This review is my contribution. Baseball is the most philosophical of games because, like philosophy at its best, it harmonizes meaning with meticulous analysis....

MORE: http://www.publicbooks.org/going-deep-ba...hilosophy/
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#2
Yazata Offline
I'm not sure whether I'd call baseball 'philosophical' or not.

But I am appreciating it more and more as I get older. It's an old-man's game in a way, with its slow pace. (So much time is spent just watching a pitcher standing there getting ready to throw a pitch.)

I find that I can turn on a baseball game on the TV and listen to it out of the corner of my ear, so to speak. I vaguely know what the score is, what inning it is, which team is up and how many outs there are. But much of my attention is devoted to something else, like looking at the internet. If something more interesting happens like a hit or a run, the excitement of the announcers' voice clues me to look up.

Baseball doesn't demand much from the casual TV viewer. But there's more to ponder if I'm motivated, since each pitch is its own situation, with particular hitter/pitcher strengths and weaknesses, with players on base, with defenders shifting and with how many strikes and balls there are.

So it might be like philosophy in that you can dive deeper and deeper into it. Of course most sports are like that.
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