The virtues of the ancient Greeks are still relevant to America’s national game.
The Ancient Wisdom of Baseball, by Christian Sheppard (Greenleaf Book Group Press, 184 pp., $27.95)
C an baseball teach us virtue? As Ichiro Suzuki emphasized in his speech at Sunday’s Hall of Fame induction, it certainly can illustrate its rewards. (Its record in punishing vice is rather more checkered.) A new book goes further. In The Ancient Wisdom of Baseball, Christian Sheppard argues for baseball as a lens to re-examine the virtues of the ancients. “Every baseball game, if viewed from the right angle,” he writes, “reenacts an ancient myth.” And so, Sheppard traces the parallels between those ancient myths — especially mining the Iliad and the Odyssey, those foundational Western yarns — and the stories of the national pastime. For Carlton Fisk in Game 6 of the 1975 World Series, as for Odysseus wielding his mighty bow, “both stories show virtuosity rewarded with victory and joy.”
A slim, beach-readable volume, The Ancient Wisdom of Baseball is part baseball-fan memoir, part baseball anecdotes, and part classical storytelling. For the younger reader, or the older one who hasn’t cracked the classics in a few decades, Sheppard never assumes that Greek mythology or the philosophy of Plato or Aristotle are so familiar to the reader that they don’t require a concise summary.
The personal memoir aspect of the book traces Sheppard’s biases: a devout but ultimately disillusioned Red Sox fan who abandoned the team when it didn’t re-sign his hero (Fisk); his search for meaning in the classics and baseball after drifting from his faith; his return to Cubs-fan adulthood in Chicago; and his return as a father to the great question of whether to raise his daughter in the suffering church of Cubs fandom.
The book is organized in chapters denominated as innings (he’s not the first writer on baseball to do this), covering particular virtues — courage, prudence, temperance, justice — as well as reflections on beauty, tragedy, and myth. He moves from the construction of the ball and bat and the breaking in of mitts to the steroid controversies to Wrigley Field’s lights to the catharsis of the Cubs breaking their 108-year World Series drought and the justice of Jackie Robinson. He recalls along the way Andre Dawson’s throwing arm and Gabby Hartnett’s legendary 1938 “Homer in the Gloamin’” — a moment of drama in the late-afternoon shadows that would have been anticlimactic had Wrigley had lights then. The Greek philosophy and mythology are intertwined with this without unnecessary erudite flourishes. The history of the Cubs and Red Sox offers plenty of material.
I spotted only two factual errors. One is that Sheppard states that Pete Rose never bet on games he was involved in, a position that was defensible (and which I defended on the available evidence) for many years, but that was undermined by subsequent revelations. (Rose insisted that he never bet on his own games as a player, but that is hyper-technical to the extent that he bet on games he managed while he was a player-manager.) The other is describing George H. W. Bush as a pitcher at Yale, rather than a first baseman. But these are minor quibbles.
Sheppard identifies many of the same virtues that Ichiro observed. As he notes on the labor of breaking in a mitt, “You need to do something over and over to temper your reactions because reason alone does not suffice. Good reasons are never good enough to do good. Otherwise, the brightest of us would be the best. (And this just ain’t so.)” He looks at baseball’s many unwritten rules as evidence of the importance of custom.
But why baseball? Sport, as he notes, serves the role of William James’s “moral equivalent of war” in the sense that term was originally intended: an effort that would summon the virtues that war inspires in driving men to their limits, but without the carnage of the battlefield or the laying waste of society. But that’s true of other sports, too. Baseball requires a somewhat more controlled fury than football, basketball, or hockey, but all of those sports demand that even the most aggressive athletes remain in control. Baseball inspires more mythmaking because of the game’s age and because it is played outdoors, in the summertime, at a less frenetic pace that allows the spectator some leisure to absorb the action. But that’s still not quite it.
The secret, instead, is the length of the season. The unyielding fact of a baseball season is that there’s another game tomorrow. A major-league team plays twice as many games as does a basketball or hockey team (four times as many as women’s basketball) and ten times as many as a football team. Long stretches without a day off are common enough that the union had to negotiate to get a maximum of 21 game days without a day off. It was harder when doubleheaders were more common.
The length of the season is a grind. Football may take as much physically out of a man in 17 games as baseball does in 162, but not emotionally. Repetition is the spine of baseball: a typical everyday player bats over 600 times, and even in these days of reduced workloads, a starting pitcher may face more batters than that. Playing every day means that nobody gets out of a season close to undefeated; a great team loses around 40 percent of its games, a great hitter gets out around 60 percent of the time, and a great pitcher allows a walk or a hit at least one time out of four. Baseball’s heaping servings of failure, combined with the unceasing schedule that allows little time to stew on those failures, demand and build reserves of resilience and persistence. It’s the everyday grind that makes baseball players closer in their experience to people with real jobs — but most of those jobs aren’t performed in front of 40,000 screaming people.
That’s what makes a baseball season an odyssey.