The Library of Congress catalog lists over 4,400 entries under the subject heading of “baseball.” It's hard to imagine that any of them begin with an epigraph from Kierkegaard, but Alva Noë's “Infinite Baseball” certainly does: “The goal is to arrive at immediacy after reflection.” The epigraph may be unprecedented, but nowadays it's not at all surprising that a Berkeley philosophy professor would turn his attention to baseball.
The sports beat was once something writers aspired to move beyond—James Reston and Westbrook Pegler started out as sports reporters—but lately there has been a lot of traffic in the other direction. Even as its hold on the general population weakens—football has long since become America's favorite sport—baseball has proved to be a magnet to pundits, academics and public intellectuals with established reputations in more ostensibly grown-up realms, including Stephen Jay Gould, David Halberstam and George Will. Bart Giamatti traded the presidency of Yale for that of the National League. Mr. Noë's book provides further evidence that, to some, baseball has become too important to trust to the professionals in the dugout or press box.
“Infinite Baseball” consists, for the most part, of short pieces published over the past few years on one of National Public Radio's blog sites, to which the author has added an introduction that stakes out his particular vantage point. Mr. Noë writes that “we don't play baseball and watch it and write about it and think about it because it is so darn special” but “it's special . . . because we care so much about it, because we play baseball and sing its praises and write about it.” This interaction between activity and thought is what makes baseball an “infinite” game, in Mr. Noë's view. He explains that baseball “isn't the men on the diamond doing what they do.” It is “a domain of play; it is a field of thought. . . . Take away the reflection on and you are left with mere activity—with something robots could do. And that's not baseball.”
Read Full Article »
