Standing on the Shoulders of Giants

There's an inner circle that hangs over all our lives, an inner sanctum to which we will never gain admittance. Of course the oedipal chamber, where the primal scene is enacted is the inner circle which all children are excluded from. But in reality we all are like commuters who live in the suburbs of some imagined world of larger than life beings whose mythologies throw a shadow over our existence. No matter how far up the ladder, no matter how high up on the great chain of being, there's always someone there before us whose exploits out shadow anything we can accomplish. “For fools rush in where angels fear to tread,” is Alexander Pope’s famous line, but the fool in question is likely to be coming late to the party. Writers wistfully recall the antics of the Algonquin Round table. No matter how many steroids they take few baseball players can't compete with legends like Ty Cobb and Babe Ruth. No matter what their pedigree politicians never seem to have the charisma of Roosevelt or de Gaulle, nor the glamour of Kennedy whose White House was referred to as Camelot. American directors don’t make films like John Ford, Preston Sturges and Howard Hawks and despite being the highest paid athlete in sports today, can we really put Floyd Mayweather. Jr. in the class Joe Louis, George Foreman or Mohammed Ali? Are JZ and Beyonce, perhaps the hottest team in popular music, any competition for the Beatles or The Stones (who are still going strong)? And how do the De Niros, Pacinos, the Streeps and Jolies of today really crock up to the Clark Gables , Jimmy Stewarts, Cary Grants, Barbara Stanwycks, Katherine Hepburns and Betty Davises of the past? No matter how hard we try, we’re all bridge and tunnel. We’re all by definition standing on the shoulders of giants.

Declaring War (Wins Above Replacement)

photo of Yankee’s sportscaster Mel Allen

The question is, is the current obsession with statistics in baseball, equivalent to the secondary market in derivatives which Warren Buffet famously called “financial weapons of mass destruction?” A front page Times piece entitled, “Modern Stats Bring WAR to Broadcast Booth (B.A.B.I.P., Too)” (NYT, 4/1/13) describes the burgeoning importance of esoteric baseball statistics which are curiously reminiscent of the infamous CDF’s and CDO’s we heard about in the doomed era of the subprime mortgage crisis. “WAR, VORP and B.A.B.I.P. (Those stand for wins above replacement, value over replacement player and batting average on balls in play, for those of you dusting off your radios as the season begins),” Steve Feder, the Times reporter explains. SABR (The Society for American Baseball Research) already has a large following who will attend their annual convention at the Philadelphia Marriot from July 31 to August 4). But what about the days when the homey voice of Mel Allen gave the play by plays in Yankee games? What about expressions like “it’s a swing and miss,” “it’s going, going, it’s gone,” “looks like he’s bunting,” or merely “it’s three and two with a man on second.” Back in the old times, baseball was a relatively slow moving sport compared to football, basketball and certainly boxing. There would be long periods of silence and there was a solace to the unenlightened commentary. Listening to baseball was like sitting on the porch during a hot summer’s day and that’s exactly where you’d often be listening, with the far off crack of the bat in the old Polo Grounds or Ebbets Field being the only sound to break the silence. But even as a leisurely pastime, it had its legendary moments and personalities. Remember Stan Musial and Ted Williams, Koufax and Robinson? Not to speak of Yank all stars like Berra, Ruth, Gehrig, Jeter and AROD. However, all these statistics play mind games with the brain. Baseball is becoming a little like Zeno’s paradox. Achilles should be beating the tortoise, but he’s become so weighted down with math that he ends up going nowhere.