Wonder and Baseball
“You can observe a lot just by looking.” -Yogi Berra
Einstein famously quipped: “The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science. He to whom the emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand wrapped in awe, is as good as dead —his eyes are closed.” If we agree with the Physicist, then two questions present themselves. The first: Why is the emotion of wonder the most beautiful and important thing we can experience? The second: how may we cultivate a sense of wonder, particularly among the young, where it is most needed? If Einstein is correct that wonder is the true source of all art and science, then it qualifies as the primary intellectual engine that drives the mind forward, making it imperative to cultivate in the young. I will consider the first question philosophically, and then explore a subjective experience, from my own childhood, of a seemingly mundane discovery which offered a promise of the mysterious, and cultivated wonder.
The mysterious is a promise. It is an offer of a secret which, if obtained, will expand one’s being - will grant power. Consider the structure of fairy tales. How often does the protagonist encounter a mysterious being (the Trickster or Wise Old Man in Jungian terms) or a magical object that promises great power? The nature of the being or object is unclear, perhaps even dangerous,but the protagonist can see that there is a reward available if they can complete the required quest, purify their hearts and motives, and learn to use the object wisely. The sword in the stone, sleeping beauty, Ali Baba’s cave and “Open Sesame!”, each of these manifests a magical and alluring nature to the beholder and promises vast rewards. It does not furnish detailed instructions, but rather a set of clues that must be worked out through the intelligence and pure intentions of the seeker. Often, the impure-of-heart perish. They fail because they sought not out of a sense of wonder, or to bring about a good end, but to gratify themselves and exert power over others.
Who perceives the most promise but the infant? To him, every object in his field of awareness twinkles with promise. Neither is there a need for rational mediation. The sunbeams playing on the carpet as they shine through the window are tantalizing enough. The shadow the infant casts on the wall might be a companion, a friend. What a reward a friend would be! What else draws the infant out of immobility and silence into a human being but the recognition of magical promises everywhere, with conditions that must be met to obtain it.
We don’t have to command an infant to begin this process. He does it on his own, impelled by this force of wonder at the mysterious. We can only conclude that such a process is inborn, and might very well be what we refer to as “life” - the force that supplies indeterminacy to matter. Difficult to define or nail down, but obviously present and essential.
Even in the subhuman realm, we see indeterminacy at work. We see matter moving itself, changing form, impelled by an inborn pre-rational confidence. Rationality itself is a much later form of indeterminacy, and thus is clearly not the prime component of motion. This primal desire is the engine of growth, and I see no reason that it would die with the end of infancy, or upon the arrival of rationality, but rather that the advent of more complex indeterminacy merely provides further tools for this realization. The original wonder is forgotten, but continues to impel life forward unless consciously suppressed. It seems axiomatic that the furthering of life is good, and wonder the fundamental requirement for the furtherance of life.
When rationality arrives on the scene, it brings with it the concept of “domains”. Domains are logical categories that determine how we can use or understand the object within that category. When an object is presented as a member of a domain, we assume that it can only serve the function that the domain assigns to it. We see a brick and assume that we are to see it as a building material. However, it could also be a paper weight, a weapon, a stage for action figures, a coaster, an armrest, a stair, etc. Obviously, a facility with domains serves our practical reason, but one can easily see the traps this entails. One becomes so dependent on the shortcuts that domain-dependent thinking provides, one loses the ability to reckon outside them - to see the fundamental essence of things that exist before practical reason digests them.
Domains are a result of extraverted thinking, and are imposed by our rational minds. As useful as they are, however, they serve to suffocate wonder because they remove the sense of promise from reality. It presents reality as understood, filed, and devoid of magic. Why devoid of magic? Because we no longer have confidence that any object can hide more aspects of Being than those presented to our mind by its domain. The true enchantment that excites wonder is the realization that there are connections behind domains, that there is more than meets the eye, and that the complexity of the world is deeper yet simpler than domain-dependent thinking would have us believe. It is in these cross-domain connections that earth shaking discoveries are found.
An example: the English logician George Boole invented a system in which true statements were assigned a variable of ‘1’ and false statements were assigned a variable of ‘2’, allowing logical problems to be solved in the same manner as mathematical problems. In 1948, Claude Shannon, dubbed “The Father of the Information Age” recalled encountering Boolean logic in an undergraduate philosophy class at the University of Michigan while serving a summer internship at Bell Labs. It occurred to him that combining call routing technology and Boolean logic could allow him to send any type of information solely using Boolean true and false values. This obviously had momentous consequences for the future of information systems.
Clearly, the search for fundamental relation produces profound discoveries, and thus the search for these fundamentals is a paramount concern of human life and development. While the connection made by Shannon mentioned above is clearly of an extremely complex nature, it is the fruit of seeing beyond domains. Perceiving the essential reality beneath imposed hierarchies begins with wonder and curiosity.
While mature explorations of this nature take place in the realm of physics and metaphysics, the process begins much earlier. We have already mentioned infancy, and due to its pre-rational nature it is difficult to analyze. Childhood, however, provides a richer well of examples, as it is here that we begin to be conscious of the existence of domains, as we gather more information about the adult world and adult mental processes, but before we have become entirely domain-dependent. I offer below an example of a simple childhood discovery in which a sense of wonder at the mysterious led to a cross-domain realization.
I took an interest in baseball from a young age. I was initially attracted to it for the reasons many young boys are: athletic prowess, the noise and lights of the stadium, the combative drama and semi-gladiatorial nature of the “mano a mano” between pitcher and batter. All of these serve to inspire wonder as well, but I wish to focus on my discovery of the box score.
I began, as mentioned, with a qualitative and emotional understanding of the game. When I was about 7 or 8, however, while attending a game my father introduced me to the scorecard. It is a means of expressing, through numbers and symbols, the progress and results of the game, the precise measurable contributions of each player, the percentage of success within the timeframe of the game, etc.
Fascinated by the notion of the scorecard, I quickly surmised that the box scores listed in the daily paper each morning were the official accounts of the same thing. It was here that it first occurred to me that physical things and human interaction could be expressed in numbers. (Indeed, any adult fan will agree that when one asserts the merits of a particular player, the first instinct of any analyst is to look at the players’ numbers to determine objective value.)
At the age of 7 I understood that numbers could be used to count, and to determine the quantity of a collection of objects. But here were numbers expressing relationships between humans, presenting probabilities of success, and professing to offer an understanding of quality expressed through Number. Additionally, the box score was arranged with the most obvious and easily understood statistics toward the left side of the chart, and proceeding to the more obscure measurements and probabilities to the right. This arrangement alone inspired wonder. There was a promise that if I pushed to understand the mysterious symbols and numbers further from the familiar, they would yield ever greater comprehension of the game I loved.
As I continued to pore over the scores and statistics, gaining greater facility in understanding them, deeper notions began to emerge. I recall noticing that one player was batting .1000 for the year, indicating that he had succeeded in every trip to the plate, and had thus performed perfectly. I declared that surely this was the greatest player on the team, because look at how much lower every other players’ average was! The distant-second was almost .700 points lower. I was recognizing the expression of quality in number form. My dad, however, asked me to check how many “at-bats” my new hero had taken. He pointed me to the correct column, and we noticed that there was a ‘2’ entered. Though this player had succeeded in every chance he had taken, he had only taken two chances! My father pointed me to the second and third place hitters, and we noticed that each of them had taken over 300 at-bats. Succeeding a third of the time, when taking so many chances, was clearly better than succeeding twice in total. The opposition had three hundred opportunities to exploit a hitters weakness, to analyze previous failures and understand how better to exploit these weaknesses. The hitter had punished his body hundreds of times, in addition to playing the field, and had continued to succeed over the long run. I began to grasp the importance of “sample size” and the power of time, i.e. the “long run”, in determining value. Armed with these understandings in the domain of baseball, I gradually noticed them present in a myriad of ways, and it dawned on me as I matured that these were fundamental concepts for measuring the value of anything, both subjective and objective.
Also of note was the recognition of the conflict between Number and quality. As elegantly as Number might express relationships and value, I had a gut-level aversion to the idea that everything could be expressed through Number. How disheartening it was to imagine that the players I idolized were purely defined by quantities, that “heart” and “grit” played no role. After all, contributions could only be quantified after they were brought into existence, but these contributions originated from a source that was “pre-number”, and how could quantity reach into a human’s soul, into the indeterminate realm, and claim to know what would emerge? Did Number stretch beyond its bounds?
It illustrated how a human could be the bridge between the indeterminate and determinate. It was quite unsatisfying to think that everything is predetermined and expressible through Number. There was clearly something subjective within a player that could not be captured. Every long-time fan can think of a player who posts exemplary numbers year after year, and yet in situations that are considered “clutch”, they seem to fail more often than not. A long-time fan can easily recall a different player who fails to post notable numbers, and yet possesses the “clutch” gene.
A sabermetrician (one who conducts empirical analyses of baseball) will insist that there is no such thing as a “big moment”. Baseball is a game of averages, of sustained success over the very-long-term. This is true, and yet not true. Some situations are simply more meaningful than others, and delivery within these situations is more meaningful than delivery in a lesser scenario.
While I saw the ability of number to link quantity and quality, baseball also illustrated the limits of such an arrangement. Some things exist outside the realm of quantification, no matter what the mathematical purists may insist. How’s that for mysterious? I’m sure Mr. Einstein would agree.