Whether by hitting three strikes or making a baserunning blunder, all those cast “out” from play exit the field with sullen expressions. The rules of baseball are unparalleled in their bleakness, for unlike most other ball games that progress by units of successful offensive plays or goals, the most basic unit of the game requires the deaths of three players.
Baseball is an exercise in death, delicately designed and systematically reenacted. Baseball manufactures death and factualizes it. All baseball statistics are a memory of how batters died, vast troves of data on batters having perished.
The concept of the home is also present in baseball: home runs, home plate. Baseball begins at home and ends upon a return home. But what is referred to as a home in baseball is not any building or material thing, but the standoff between the batter, the catcher, and the pitcher. It is the relationality that arises when the ball thrown by the pitcher is chosen by either the hitter’s bat or the catcher’s mitt.
Batters combat fear as though predestined to do so. A ball flung at a velocity nearing 140 kilometers per hour elicits instinctual fear. Batters, squeezing their bats in their sweating palms, transform into a ball of sympathetic nerves wired to react.
Baseball’s logic is grounded not in progress, but in eternal return.
Unlike soccer or rugby, baseball does not permit the regimental vision of players filing into an orderly line and advancing into an enemy camp. In baseball, the ground does not signify territory. The only path permitted to the player on offense is a straight one. Compared to the spatial freedom enjoyed by soccer players, baseball players are afforded nearly nothing that could be considered space. What space is afforded to the player on offense is two-dimensional, not three-dimensional. All that exists are the lines connecting the three bases. The space between bases becomes a desperate escape route, down which players must race for their lives. This is not a material line, but something closer to a logical procedure. Because one is “out” when tagged by a defender with the ball in his glove, players who successfully advance to a base remain as close as they can to their base, as though stuck. In the expanse of the baseball field, all that is permitted to those on offense are the four stick-straight faces of the diamond.
The Italian anthropologist Corrado Gini tells us of a game supposed to have been brought to Northern Africa by a Germanic migrant around the fourth century. His research was on ta kurt om el mahag (“the ball of the pilgrim’s mother”), a game with a home, bases, and a pitcher, that exhibits a remarkable likeness to the game of baseball we know today. According to Gini, the game was a collective ceremony carried out by the tribe to beckon the spring rain. That is, it was a spring ritual (Frühlingsritual).
I only came to enjoy baseball relatively recently. Likely after I became fixed in my ways. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say, after a clear division between what I can and cannot do was drawn.
The fact that what is actually afforded to me at the current moment and what could have been afforded to me if circumstances had been different necessarily form a mutually exclusive relationship. That in order to be able to do one thing, I must not have done another.
The basis of life is not progress, nor expansion or empowerment. It is renunciation. It is not conatus or the will to power, but an emptying of the self.
Had you not amputated part of the ego, had you insisted it was still yours and clung to it, your life as you know it now would not exist. The constraint of power, the voluntary destruction of power, is a condition of life.
Grief permeates this understanding. To be able to enjoy “meaning” in the life I am currently afforded—one that is not lavish, but decent and dependable—I must submit in the deepest recesses of my heart to the partition of the possible from the impossible. Acceptance of the impossibility of distinction, choice, and exclusion, requires time aplenty. In the process of struggling with the seemingly trifling and meaningless problems of life, we come to realize and accept that diminishing the ego through letting go is an artifice of existence.
No matter how fierce or high-minded the mental combat, a battle of ideas is but a mirage. But the confrontation with the problems of this material life of eating and earning, of meeting and fighting, of buying and selling, of building homes and tearing them down is the true fight, the fight that must be fought at least once, the fight that when won becomes a badge of honor. To age is to learn to bow one’s head and submit to this messy reality. It is to be grateful for the weight and gravity of routine, its repetitive monotony, as each day passes to the next. It is to see continuing to live as both precious and frightening.
Most of the events that stand out when we look back at our lives are not “cumulative” stories but “emptying” ones. Stories of loss. Stories of failure. Stories of breaking up, of missing out, of abandoning, of being abandoned. Like baseball, the routine life is a story of things being picked off one by one. Just as the drama of a baseball game comes from the procession of batters dying one after another, so too does the drama of our lives revolve around how we have endured our own “outs.”
The universe of those who enjoy baseball is not romantic. It is unfeeling, prosaic, lonely. It is a site of seclusion.
There is no god there, merely reverence for the pedestrian dutifulness that would have you believe that, someday, all the mundane matters of daily life will coalesce into some monumental change. There is no such thing as a miracle there. For those who believe that behind all apparent miracles are cold, certain, brassbound rules, baseball’s true allure is its metaphysical comfort.
“Baseball is the most intensely quantified of all ball games and the most closely associated with recordkeeping. From the outset, the clear specialization of roles within the team and the distinction between defensive and offensive players enabled the accumulation of statistics that have come to define the game. . . . Whether the player on offense will succeed is influenced by his ability and can easily be quantified. His rate of success (batting average) is calculated to the third decimal point and serves as one of the most important figures in the game. Likewise, whether the highly specialized defensive players will succeed or fail, too, is measurable in clear terms. For instance, the indicator of a pitcher’s success or failure (earned run average) is important enough to be quantified to the third decimal place. Numbers determine every moment of the game.”
Baseball fundamentally differs from soccer in this sense. Soccer has only barely been made modern but remains a sport brimming with passion incapable of being ensconced in rationality. This isn’t to call soccer barbaric, or violent, or masculine. It is more to say that soccer knows not the allure of abstraction, nor the factuality attained through such abstraction. A true experience of soccer can be felt when you run across the field and kick the ball, or at least watch athletes do so on television. We cannot read a book after tuning into a soccer match.
My favorite soccer player was Ruud Gullit, the standout of the Netherlands in the 1980s. The appeal of Gullit’s soccer cannot be captured in stuffy factoids about how many goals he scored in a season, what his pass success rate was, or how many seconds he took to run one hundred meters. “New record” holds no significance in a soccer game. The factual as presented in records is immaterial. The fanaticism Gullit stoked in me cannot be divorced from the grace of his physicality, the visual experience of the structural organization and division of his body. (Some players have a particular aptitude for instilling in us what a heart-throbbingly aesthetic experience it is to see a human body organically become one with and move through the space that surrounds it.) The pleasure of watching him receive the ball, staggering, huge, his dreadlocks whipping about, activating the instantaneous power of his racehorse-like muscles, weaving through defenders and gallantly storming the gates, arises purely from the domain of visual motility. I have no interest in how many seconds it would take for a ball to travel from his left foot to the goal, nor in the ball’s velocity. The scene produced when Gullit’s foot and the ball and the surrounding space coalesce—whether the game is won or lost—is a perfect monad. Though it can be emulated, it can never be reenacted.
What soccer gives us is a beautiful image of a decisive moment framed in gold. Soccer is aesthetic. It is an evolutionary beauty that one seldom finds in baseball. The body of the soccer player is reminiscent of the resilient, scarred bodies of our prehistoric ancestors who traversed the African savanna while hunting and gathering food. A storied body, embodying joy and suffering as it stands exposed to the trials of nature, in a struggle for survival itself. The physicality of soccer, the beauty boasted by the expressivity of its movements, has a certain primitive nature to it.
In comparison, the bodies of baseball players are more cartoonish than aesthetic. While the body of the soccer player approaches the animal, the baseball body is characterized by artificial mechanical properties, functionalities for specified purposes. The pudginess of the cleanup hitter, the slightness of the first batter up, the aloof, antisocial countenance of the pitcher. Such archetypes dominate the physical form of the baseball player. Rather than some sort of aesthetic fulfillment from their hair or leg muscles, or even their facial expressions, what enthralls us in baseball are the objective facts of how fast the pitcher lobs the ball, how far the batter launches it into the air.
Soccer is a sport defined by images, dominated by qualitative values that scoff at quantification. More accurately, it is the sport of “gesture on display.” Gesticulation is the true star of soccer. The greatest displays that soccer provides us with are not those in which a goal is scored to break a two-to-two tie. That is, its greatest moments are not found in victory. The visual moments created by brilliant body language that has no part in victory are the secret force that makes soccer what it is. For instance, soccer moments that stick in my mind are the eyes of (usually Italian) strikers as they run, momentarily insane, after scoring a goal—those mysterious eyes, unfocused and unrestrained, sucking all the time around them inward, the dynamic depth of those pupils as they collapse the authority of ordinary language and expression, becoming a ball of affective speed that spreads like fire, how they harken to the cosmic emptiness suddenly unlocked by the face in orgasm.
The fact is the first form of perception to have been created, and will be the last to disappear. The French word for fact, fait, is the past participle of the verb faire, “to make.” That is, in French (though the same goes for Latin as well) the fact is “that made true.” For instance, in examining the process by which such facts are “produced,” Foucault’s genealogy adopts a strategy of relativizing the factuality of facts. Bruno Latour takes a more radical lean in his investigation of the production of facts. To Latour, a fact is something always in production. A fact does not arise from an occurrence and the propositional response to it, but becomes a fact only within a particular network that makes it fact. There is no fact and fiction, but factual facts and less factual facts. We sometimes forget this. A fact is not an immutable entity. Facts are bound to the historical, social, and psychological processes that establish facts as facts. Facts are plastic.
But what I think to be more important than this is the finality of fact. That is, that fact is the final foothold of human perception, sensation, cognition.
Suppose, what about the smoker’s cigarette makes it so addictive? It may be the smoke, the taste, perhaps even the smell. But there is something that lies beyond such pleasurable sensations. The most final, longest enduring, and precisely for this reason always the most hidden, allure of the cigarette is the very fact that “I am smoking a cigarette.” As we smoke a cigarette, we enjoy the fact of our smoking of a cigarette.
Such a fact is a function of a certain place and a certain time—a certain mise-en-scène. When we slip out alone from a rowdy bar feeling somewhat melancholy, when we wake from a nap and watch from the veranda as the sun sinks in the sky, when we are jolted by a hit song from our past—the encompassing desire to smoke that enraptures us produces the fact that “I am here, now, smoking a cigarette,” and is thus a desire to complete the mise-en-scène as it stands before our eyes, no different from a “desire for fact.” This intense desire orients not toward sensation, but fact.
When we make love, we not only relish our lover’s physical body, but we relish our relishing of that body. Sensual pleasure is quantitatively amplified when ensconced in the fact of our current enjoyment of that pleasure. In a critique of a piece of writing by Eduard Fuchs about the arousal prompted by erotic nude photos, Walter Benjamin writes: “If there is anything sexually arousing here it is more the exhibition of the naked body in front of the camera, than the view of nakedness itself. This is probably the notion which is intended by most of these photographs.”
When the heart stops, the brain dies, the body decomposes and loses its form, what dies last, what endures in the face of death, are the facts. The date of birth, the date of death of the deceased. The anecdotes and memories he leaves behind. The jokes he told too often. These are the transient facts that fight off death and decomposition. Until the fact that “he died” itself dies, he is not yet dead.
Is this, the ability to abstract reality into facts and thus obtain distance from reality, both the crowning achievement and affliction of Homo sapiens, who began to manufacture reality?
The human animal: producing facts, dominated by facts, disappearing into facts.
The desire, joy, and struggle of a baseballer desperately attempting to raise the immovable iron wall of his batting average are all condensed into a handful of numbers. Numbers materialize all the drama in a baseball player’s life. Paradoxically, it is through the violence of this materialization that he is saved from oblivion. Kafka’s messiah, said to come only on the day after the end of the world, refers not to a savior who will usher in the millennial kingdom, but to the fact itself that the messiah will come at the end of all things, wrapped in the shabby cloak of finality. If the single fact of “The messiah will come” survives to the end of this naked earth, it will be just fine if no messiah ever arrives at all.
