by John Sexton
In 2001, just after I was named NYU’s president, I received a package from The New York Times. The short note with it read: We know that you’re a huge fan of baseball and of Jackie Robinson in particular, so as a special memento we are presenting you from our archives this original 1955 Jackie Robinson glove. I read the words four times: This original 1955 Jackie Robinson glove.
It had been forty-six years since Robinson helped Brooklyn to its only World Series win, but despite the passage of time, he has endured as my hero. I am beyond proud that his magnificent wife, Rachel, has an advanced degree from NYU (in nursing) and that I can count her as a friend (I carry with me, as a testament to marital love, a wonderful picture of an older Jackie, his head lovingly resting on Rachel’s shoulder). I had Jackie’s number 42 sewn in the cuff on my academic gown (possibly in penance for getting my chipped tooth repaired), paying tribute to him in much the same way that Major League Baseball did when it ruled that no new player would ever again wear 42—except for each April 15, the anniversary of his first game in the majors, when every player wears it.
But then it struck me. Maybe this wasn’t Jackie’s glove. Maybe it was just a Jackie Robinson model glove, similar to gloves carrying baseball players’ names that stores have been offering for years. Was this glove actually used by my hero or did it once sit on a sales rack at Sears? I read the letter again; it was delphic, capable of either interpretation.
Over the years, I’ve discovered in conversations with friends that some people, faced with such a situation, would call the newspaper to clarify the language; others wouldn’t. Interestingly, a dinner with some curators at the British Museum revealed that none of them, all folks whose lives are devoted to authenticating works of art, would make such a call. In my mind, the choice was clear. I was glad to embrace the possibility, however remote, that this glove actually was worn by Jackie, at least once, on the green fields of my youth.
I recognize that by making this decision, I reveal a certain unbecoming willingness to forswear available knowledge, since whether it was actually a glove Jackie used was unknown to me but knowable (as opposed to being unknowable like the deepest matters of faith and doubt). I stand convicted in this case, though I hope, on this rare occasion, I will be forgiven for choosing a certain connection (however unproven or ambiguous) to the great Robinson over possible disappointment. My forbearance in the search for truth also displays some of the unhealthy mental characteristics of those who refuse to accept the revelations of carbon dating in order to live in comfortable belief that the world was created in seven, twenty-four-hour days. On such matters, I abandon my tolerance for ambiguity. It usually is the case that, where doubt can be resolved, it should be. Rare—and cherished—are those instances in which the only answer for doubt is faith.
Whatever one’s tolerance for ambiguity, however, religion is replete with the interplay of faith and doubt, whether the subject is icons or relics or parables or the most fundamental elements of faith. And often the truth affirmed by faith does not depend upon the factual accuracy of the verbal account that carries the message. For many believers, for example, it is beside the point whether the Bible’s account of the Good Samaritan is literally true; what counts is the lesson it conveys. So also the story of Lazarus’s rising from the dead or even the resurrection or the provenance of the Shroud of Turin.
For those whose faith derives from the literal truth of these accounts, the stories and objects obviously have immense power; but the point is that the stories can resonate even for those who do not see them as literal accounts but see them as myths capturing a truth beyond. For those in the latter group, they are hierophanies, pathways to a deep truth. For both groups, however, doubt plays a role: For those who take the stories literally, doubt is a deep threat, potentially causing the story to unravel if contrary facts are shown. And for those for whom the story is a pathway to an ineffable truth beyond, doubt is the reminder to be humble as one confronts the unknowable through faith, never assuming one has a complete and final understanding or the ability to capture its essence in articulated propositions.
Baseball tolerates doubt, even that which easily could be resolved. It embraces the poetry of human judgment rather than the science of instant replay. Except in a narrow area, home run calls where a boundary is in dispute, baseball forswears the clarity technology could provide; and this exception has only produced one memorable incident, when an Alex Rodriguez blast in the 2009 World Series hit a television camera in the field of play and was ruled a home run, though baseball officials are considering some expansion of the technology’s use. This new approach, however, is not without at least some dissent in baseball’s front office. In his post-managerial job working for the commissioner, Joe Torre put it this way: “The game isn’t perfect. For all of us that want everything to be right all the time, that’s not going to be the case, no matter how much replay you’re going to see. I don’t know why we want everything to be perfect. Life isn’t perfect. I think this is a game of life, myself.”
When umpire Jim Joyce blew a call at first base that cost Detroit Tiger pitcher Armando Galarraga what would have been the final out of a perfect game in 2010, thousands of fans and dozens of commentators and columnists petitioned baseball commissioner Bud Selig to invoke his “best interests of the game” power and overrule the call. Selig refused—even though by then Joyce had conceded his mistake.
During the 2012 baseball season, in a much less compelling case, the Mets actually offered their third baseman, David Wright, as sacrifice in an appeal to the league office of a ruling affecting what had gone in the books as a one-hitter by R. A. Dickey. Their appeal urged that the lone hit be turned into an error by Wright. Not surprisingly, especially given baseball’s commitment to living in the gray zone of a human official scorer’s judgment, the league office denied the request. Interestingly, Dickey threw another one-hitter in his very next start, becoming only the seventh person in modern baseball history to pitch back-to-back one-hitters. Ironically, earlier that same month, the first no-hitter in the Mets’ fifty-year history had been thrown by Johan Santana, saved only because the third base umpire ruled that a ball hit by St. Louis Cardinal Carlos Beltran landed foul—a ruling that would not have survived instant replay.
Don Denkinger called balls and strikes for thirty years but is best remembered for another incorrect call at first base that Cardinals fans will tell you cost their team the 1985 World Series against the Kansas City Royals. But umpires have always had the final word.
Baseball’s seven-year experiment with QuesTec computer equipment to evaluate umpires’ calls of balls and strikes is yet another example. According to the rule book, the strike zone stretches from the midpoint between the top of the batter’s shoulders and the top of the uniform pants (usually around the letters of the uniform) to just below the knees. Horizontally, it’s the width of home plate. But umpires have always added a dose of discretion. For years, the term National League strike referred to the more generous calls afforded to pitchers in the NL than the AL. Players knew how certain umps would call games, and they adjusted. It was “part of the game.”
Once umpires’ calls were placed under the microscope beginning in 2003, the strike zone started to change. And for finesse pitchers like Greg Maddux and Tom Glavine—both of whom built their Hall of Fame–bound careers by getting borderline strike calls, where their pitches may not have grazed the corner of the plate but came close enough—it shrunk. But the outcry that followed served as a reminder that the lords of baseball have always ruled that a strike isn’t a strike because it fits neatly into a box; it’s a strike simply because it is called one by an umpire. The very reason an umpire uses such bravado in making the call of “Strike!” on an obviously close pitch is to put a coating of certainty on what could be doubt. The game’s rituals demand it; one of the quickest routes to an ejection from a game by an umpire is to argue a ball or strike call.
But baseball still has followers who would redu
ce the game to numbers and equations. And the intricate arithmetic of the game provides grist for the mills of such persons—the statisticians and trivia buffs who sometimes are celebrated and often regard themselves as the true aficionados.
The recent rise of sabermetrics—the analysis of baseball through complex statistical measures—has brought a new lexicon to the game, catapulted a new breed of general managers to prominence, and brought joy to those who delight in stats and trivia. Players are now scored on their OPS (an amalgam of on-base and slugging percentages) and BABIP (which measures how many balls in play against a pitcher go for hits), and there is much, much more. Stadium scoreboards and television broadcasts, supported by powerful search engines, announce how the batter at the plate has done in a certain inning, against a certain kind of pitcher, on a certain day of the week, in certain wind conditions; and this is supposed to help us enjoy the game. To some, such data is the key to understanding baseball; to others, myself included, it is reminiscent of medieval theologians debating the number of angels that could dance on the head of a pin.
Let me be clear. I love the intricate numbers of baseball. To this day, my son remembers how the two of us would work with a folded newspaper as I would teach him to decipher box scores. Yes, I taught him mathematics; but more important, I taught him baseball and I taught him love as we worked on those numbers together. It was a way for us to bond. There is wonder in the vast variety of numbers that baseball produces. And it is undeniable that sabermetrics provide valuable tools to the front office and fan alike; evidence of all kinds is critical to making good decisions—the more, the better.
But the most important elements of baseball cannot be measured. Some of them simply are immeasurable. And the numbers can miss the essence of the matter; the facts can become false idols, obscuring truth in horrible reductionism. Simply scribbling F7 on a scorecard after a spectacular catch in left field doesn’t capture the magic of the moment or the actual talent involved—just as musical notes on a sheet of paper cannot capture the beautiful sounds of a violin.
Sabermetrics will explain that most hitting and winning streaks stem not from determination or even luck but from a phenomenon known as a Poisson distribution, a mathematical expression in a gorgeously complicated equation of the probability of events occurring within a fixed period of time. The poet watching from the center field bleachers sees the game through a different lens entirely. The difference between sabermetrics and mystery is the difference between the veracity of Poisson distributions and the wonder of Joe DiMaggio’s magical hitting streak.
Scientist and mystic “live at the portal between knowledge and mystery,” wrote Chet Raymo. The scientist sees a piece of cloth that can be carbon dated or a glove whose provenance can be demonstrated. The mystic sees through the relic (The shroud in which Christ was wrapped? A glove Robinson wore?) to the mystery. But to subjugate one magisterium (in Stephen Jay Gould’s words) to another, to see either science or religion as the only source of knowledge, is to narrow the search for truth, not to elevate it. Balance is the key; and doubt is a call to balance.
In Robert Coover’s novel The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop., the eponymous Henry loses all sense of balance as he immerses himself in baseball’s mountain of data. A melancholy accountant, he finds joy only from a game that he invented, a baseball league of pure fantasy played out on his kitchen table through dice and charts, where each roll helps determine the results of individual pitches, plays, games, and even entire seasons. Henry keeps records meticulously, calculating stats, which in turn provide the trends that shape subsequent “plays.” Ultimately, Henry (and the reader) is unsure which of his worlds is real. His simulated league is a destructive obsession.
Henry’s descent is gradual. Early on, he observes his league and its players from afar: “You roll, Player A gets a hit or he doesn’t, gets his man out or he doesn’t. Sounds simple. But call Player A ‘Sycamore Flynn’ or ‘Melbourne Trench’ and something starts to happen. He shrinks or grows, stretches out or puts on muscle.” To Henry they become human, and he has feelings for them.
But later, after his favorite player is fatally struck by a line drive, a seemingly certain Henry intervenes in the world he has created, seeking not only retribution but also what he considers to be a restoration of balance (would God do this?). At the moment of Henry’s intervention in his world, his relationship with the game and reality is transformed: “He picked up the dice, shook them. ‘I’m sorry, boy,’ he whispered, and then, holding the dice in his left palm, he set them down carefully with his right. One by one. Six. Six. Six. A sudden spasm convulsed him with the impact of a smashing line drive and he sprayed a red-and-golden rainbow arc of half-curded pizza over his Association, but he managed to get to the sink with most of it. And when he’d done his vomiting, when he’d finished, he went to bed and there slept a deep, deep sleep.”
The Universal Baseball Association is a great story, deeply metaphysical and existential, and at its core a study in duality: free will and predestination, creationism and evolution, omnipotence and helplessness, certitude and doubt. It is commentary on Albert Einstein’s famous dictum that God does not play dice with the universe. And it is no coincidence that J. Henry Waugh abbreviates to JHWH, a reference to the Old Testament Hebrew’s spelling of Yahweh, the name of God. In becoming the Creator, Henry sacrifices his humanity, living in a world fixated on nothing but numbers.
Like Henry, many baseball fans are fascinated by the facts and figures of the game. I am myself. But even for those who do not become as obsessed as Henry Waugh, trivia can easily become a Philistine’s gambit, and here doubt serves us well. Take the following tale as warning—or as a homily on the importance of doubt even where faith abounds.
My friend Anthony Mannino (I call him Tippy) is a living encyclopedia of baseball. When I became dean of NYU’s School of Law in 1988, I started using a car service, and Tippy, one of the drivers, became a fixture in my life and those of my family and friends.
Tippy is a Damon Runyon character. A New Yorker to his core, he is full of opinion, full of lore, and completely without pretense. He can connect with anybody, often by sharing his passion for baseball. And he is a veritable repository of baseball “knowledge,” although the following will remind us that sometimes (maybe often) what we believe to be true is not and that many a sportswriter who followed the Hall of Fame Yankee manager Casey Stengel’s challenge to “look it up” found a different story from the one he told.
On rides to the ballpark, Tippy regales my guests with fascinating accounts of the minutiae of the game. And over the years, in an act of inexcusable intellectual theft, I have often adopted Tippy’s best questions and passed them off as my own, usually to spark conversation during a dull game. The two best, in my view, deal with New York players who had accomplished rare feats—indeed, feats that (according to Tippy) had been accomplished only once in the entire history of the game.
Question one: Who is the only player in baseball history to have hit an inside-the-park grand slam home run?
As my interlocutor invariably struggled for the answer, I would give a set of tantalizing clues. I would point out that the batter was a pitcher (the outfielders were apt to be playing shallow, making a ball hit over their heads more likely); then I would remind my companion that in the old Yankee Stadium, the monuments in deep center field were in play, often causing outfielders to get confused when a ball caromed off them. To add a sense of relevance, if I were asking the question at a Yankees game, as was usually the case, I’d point out (until a few years ago) that “he’s in the ballpark tonight,” because the answer was the man who was for many years manager Joe Torre’s pitching coach.
Mel Stottlemyre.
Question two: Who is the only player in baseball history to hit a home run in his first major league at-bat and a triple in his second?
My first hint would be that the player is in the Hall of Fame. Second—and this always raised so
me eyebrows—in a twenty-one-year career, the player never hit another home run or another triple. Third, among other feats he had pitched a no-hitter. And fourth, he was best known as a knuckleball-throwing relief pitcher. The last clue usually gave it away.
Hoyt Wilhelm.
I must have asked guests and friends these questions hundreds of times. At the first NYU commencement ceremony held in the new stadium, in May 2009, I challenged the graduates with the Stottlemyre question in my closing address. My offer to buy dinner for whoever contacted me with the correct answer went unclaimed.
Two months later, my friend Fred Wilpon called to invite me to a Mets game. Fred has made it a personal mission to try to convert me to the Mets (he’s the majority owner), arguing that they’re the natural descendants of the Dodgers.
Fred told me that he had invited another rabid Yankees fan who, as he put it, “should be a Mets fan as well,” and said that I’d be surprised by how much the other guest knew about baseball. That person, it turned out, was Henry Kissinger. I brought with me my colleague Katy Fleming, who runs NYU’s campuses in Europe, and whom Fred had invited when I told him she was in town.
What Fred and I had forgotten was that Katy, like Kissinger, is an expert in European history. As the game progressed, the two delved into a heated discussion on the Congress of Vienna, Klemens von Metternich, and how the world might be if events had unfolded differently in the nineteenth century (the words infield fly rule were never uttered). Fred and I rolled our eyes: The two had lost their sense of place and time. Worse yet, the game was too listless to draw them back to us.
To fill the void, I launched into my standard ball game discourse. “Dr. Kissinger, if I can interrupt. I know you are having a great conversation with Katy about history, but I’m going to restore your faith in the research university by dazzling you with some baseball history that—even as omniscient as you are—you do not know.”
