Good afternoon. Time for a break. Given the wall-to-wall coverage by Yves and others here, nothing explicit on this Good Friday about the Ramadan War in West Asia. Instead, herewith a few reflections during holy season of the three great Abrahamic traditions.
Part the First: Ethical Capitalism? Some argue about whether business can be ethical. The answer to that, of course, is a very strong “Yes!” I am often accused of being anti-business by those who suspect my leanings, conservative as they are at a fundamental level. Nothing could be further from the truth. Business civilization makes life as we know it possible, and it has for a very long time in one form or another except in societies that live completely off the grid. The Hazda of Tanzania we discussed here in 2023 come to mind. They need very little from business civilization and remain very healthy, if threatened by the modern world. It is sometimes forgotten, by those on notional left and notional right and the squishy center, that markets and business are not coextensive with capitalism. Markets and businesses are essential. Capitalism is not and is often inimical to both. Just look around, this is not hard to see that destruction is seldom actually creative.
Brad Swanson takes up the subject in a recent essay in the MIT Press Reader with The Grand Old Illusion of Ethical Capitalism. The subtitle of the essay is “Donald Trump’s Big Oil bonanza is an environmental disaster — but the industry’s reaction exposes a larger truth about capitalism itself.” Indeed:
Donald Trump has long called global warming a hoax, but his sweeping anti-climate agenda has stunned even many of his supporters. Since returning to the White House, he’s withdrawn the U.S. from the Paris Treaty, rolled back critical greenhouse gas regulations, and opened up millions of acres of previously protected public land for oil and gas drilling.
In response, big oil and gas companies have abandoned, without the slightest resistance, the showy public commitments they had previously made to climate transition. For example, BP has slashed green energy expenditures by 70 percent, Equinor has cut back its renewable capacity targets by almost 40 percent, and Chevron has reduced its carbon-reduction capital expenditures to about 5 percent of its total capital expenditures. None of the world’s 12 largest oil and gas companies plan to decrease fossil fuel production, and all of them project that fossil fuels will continue to overwhelm other sources of energy for the foreseeable future, according to a recent evaluation.
Far from a change of heart, this is simply Big Oil returning to form. The petroleum industry has never been serious about curbing emissions, 90 percent of which globally come from fossil fuels. Indeed, after decades of investment, renewables still account for a minuscule amount — about 0.13 percent — of total energy produced by the world’s largest 250 oil and gas companies, according to a recent research paper. “I think the article resolves the debate on whether the fossil fuel industry is honestly engaging with the climate crisis or not,” said the paper’s lead researcher. “Their interest ends with their profits.”
It always struck me as passing strange that anyone ever believed Big Oil would slow down its development of every usable oil and gas field they could find, that is until the price of fossil fuels collapsed due to their declining utility (one can hope). That is the nature of capitalism, which Milton Friedman described in a throw-away piece in The New York Times Magazine where he explained that the only purpose of a capitalist operation is to enrich its “shareholders.”
This tendentious piece is now often cited as one of the “laws of economics,” although such laws do not exist in the actually existing world. This halfwit notion was nonsense in 1970 and it is still, although Brad Swanson does note that the urge had been implicit with real consequences for a long time before then. Nevertheless, transnational corporations are often chartered entities that exist in society and not apart from it. I have read that corporate charters usually do not mention shareholders. But the damage done to the ecosphere and its living things by Milton’s Trope has been extensive. Very little penetrates the corporate hive mind, or for that matter the hive mind of any kind – scientific, political, economic, theological:
The permanent establishment of a taxpayer-funded social safety net in the postwar period only reaffirmed corporations’ unwavering fealty to shareholder value. The president of the mighty Dow Chemical Company, Leland Doan, wrote in 1957, “Any activity labeled ‘social responsibility’ must be judged in terms of whether it is somehow beneficial to the immediate or long-range welfare of the business. . . . I hope we never kid ourselves that we are operating for the public interest per se.”
The corporate community resisted even when the tide of public opinion turned against the malign Jim Crow segregation system in the 1950s and ’60s. When U.S. Steel was accused of workplace discrimination in 1963, prominent academic Andrew Hacker struck back forcefully: “If corporations ought to be doing things they are not now doing — such as hiring Negroes on an equal basis with whites — then it is up to government to tell them so. The only responsibility of corporations is to make profits, thus contributing to a prosperous economic system.
Duly noted. Negative externalities such as social disintegration and air and water pollution are not part of the calculus but they have rendered our world a perilous place with an uncertain future. Which brings us to the main topic of Swanson’s essay, ESG:
The answer to this quandary finally came in the early 2000s, in the form of a new stock-picking tool called Environmental, Social and Governance, or “ESG” for short. The seductive promise of ESG is “doing well by doing good” — or getting rich by investing in companies that make the world better. On the back of this dream, capital invested in accordance with ESG principles has grown monumentally, to as much as $30 trillion, about one-quarter of the global total of assets under management.
ESG claims that adroitly managing environmental and social risks will improve profitability and, therefore, stock prices. But ESG only counts risks that are financially material, ignoring all social or environmental harm for which a company faces no financial penalty. As you might expect, this often bears perverse results. For example, cigarette companies kill their customers — you can’t get more anti-social than that! — but smoking is legal, and Big Tobacco rarely faces liability for cancer from smoking. That is why tobacco companies are sometimes awarded good ESG scores and even appear (pdf) in some ESG stock funds. Likewise, fossil fuel companies, which have historically made high returns and avoided significant regulatory penalties, appear in 80 percent of ESG funds.
Whether it be alcoholism, gambling addiction, gun deaths, climate change, or other iniquities, the damage that companies inflict on society without literally paying for it — or the negative externalities, as they’re called in economics — entirely escapes ESG’s radar.
Yes. And until we escape the late Neoliberal Dispensation that has brought us a democracy of “one dollar – one vote” in the aftermath of Anthony Kennedy’s masterpiece, Citizens United vs. the Federal Election Commission, this will continue. And to my friends who own their own businesses and provide benefits to their communities while doing very well for their families, keep it up. We depend on you. But the thing is, when you stop caring about your community and become a negative externality, we can see that, too. And it won’t be good for your business. But you already knew that, didn’t you? In the meantime, I will keep reminding you that the vote of the locker room attendant is just as valid and valuable as yours. Or should be. Now, how can we get the Boards of Directors and the C-Suites of ExxonMobil and JPMorganChase to understand this? They are not your friends, by the way.
Part the Second: Baseball Agonistes. The second greatest game has begun its 2026 season, but all is not right in that world despite record receipts and the availability of every game on television, somewhere. Among other things, Robots are ruining baseball. So says Bill Kauffman in The Spectator, which bills itself as the oldest surviving magazine in the world (1828). I read it to keep up with what those people are up to and it seldom disappoints and like its good doppelgangers on the other side, it is not always predictable:
FanDuel and DraftKings ads (convincing evidence of a very sick society) spice the early spring airwaves, robots deliver their unimpeachable verdicts on human actions and a family of four shells out 500 bucks for parking and tickets to attend a game. Major League Baseball has returned!
At least this year MLB scheduled its Opening Day game – a March 25 interleague (yech!) contest between the New York Yankees and San Francisco Giants – to be played stateside. Mixing America Last-ism with corporate-culture imperialism, six previous Opening Day games have been played on foreign soil. That other countries might have sports of their own annoys the panjandrums of professional baseball and football, who seek to impose spectatorial homogeneity on a diverse planet. At least the soft-drink imperialists of the recent past feigned altruism; I can still hum the jingle from the “I’d Like to Buy the World a Coke” campaign of 1971.
According to a recent article about the Los Angeles Dodgers, that family of four can get in and out of Chavez Ravine for less than $425, but who’s counting? The parents who pay for the tickets (probably in the bleachers), two beers, four hot dogs, two soft drinks and parking, that’s who. And that is a problem for the sport of baseball that does not register with the commissioner of baseball (lowercase intentional). But eventually it will, and bots like Rob Manfred, if he is still around when the crash comes, will wonder what happened, from Palm Beach in the winter and Pebble Beach in the summer:
Major League Baseball has been de-charmed – dehumanized – by grotesque rule changes (a runner mysteriously materializes on second base during extra innings); and potential rule changes (a “Golden at-Bat” permitting a hitter to bat out of order); and the increasing subordination of humans to machines (robo-umps and instant replays). For Yogi’s sake, even catchers now signal the type of pitch they wish the hurler to throw not by wiggling fingers but rather via keypads and wireless receivers.
To grouse about this is to be dismissed as an old man yelling at clouds, but goddammit, some clouds deserve to be yelled at. After all, cumulonimbi carry the rain that washes out games. One might hope that the rot at the top, whose avatar is the execrable commissioner of MLB, Rob Manfred, brainstormer of the Golden at-Bat and pitiless executioner in 2021 of 40 of Minor League Baseball’s 160 teams, does not seep into the grassroots, but the evidence is as blunt as a fastball to the face.
Kauffman left off a few things in this rant. One of them is the pitch clock, which became necessary as World Series games that lasted about two hours when I first started watching them as a Little Leaguer in the mid-1960s (in broad daylight) became four-hour snoozefests, due to commercials, in the 1990s. The other is an increase in the size of the bases, which rendered stolen base records irrelevant, but I digress. And then there is this:
Since 2019, the number of kids who play baseball or softball has fallen by about 20 percent for those six to 12 years of age and about 15 percent for those aged 13 to 17. The purest form of youth baseball – self-organized sandlot play, no adults present – has virtually disappeared. Every day I walk past the ballfields on which I played from dawn to dusk, with a break for lunch, for all the summers of my boyhood, and they are as vacant as Kristi Noem’s comely noggin.
What is lost? Friendships, time outdoors, neighborhood camaraderie… and social maturation. In sandlot play, you had to resolve disputes – strike or ball? safe or out? – on your own; there was no umpire, human or robotic, to lay down the law. Seldom did these disagreements result in fistfights or headlocks. It was only a game, after all, and none of us possessed missiles we could casually lob at the opposing team.
Ah, sandlot baseball. As a kid growing up in a neighborhood full of budding athletes of various abilities where all were welcome, we played games that lasted all afternoon, ending only when the one household rule had to be followed: Be home in time for supper. In my humble opinion, the most important thing lost when these games disappeared was “social maturation.” When kids became prisoners of their devices, more than physical skills were lost. When we oldsters finally got to wear that little league uniform and adults coached us, we learned to be ballplayers second and good sports first and always (I wonder, did the current president ever play baseball or any other team sport? I am too lazy to look that up, but it seems doubtful). My final little league team went 21-0 and then beat the all-stars in the exhibition game before the hotdog party that ended the season during which we got to pick out a broken wooden bat to take home (in fairness to the all-stars, we did have five members of that team in our dugout). Memory of a lifetime.
More recently, an abomination called “travel baseball” (the sibling rival of travel soccer) has severely diminished local play and local leagues. But more than that, it has led to children having Tommy John surgery on their throwing arm before they reach the age of 15 years old, because they play one sport all year ‘round instead of alternating between baseball, soccer, basketball, and others (football is also declining for good reason, CTE). Physical damage and burnout, all in one go. Nuts. This is common in these parts, where one community has been consumed by travel baseball and the $400 baseball gloves that come with it.
Anyway, despite Rob Manfred and his cluelessness, when baseball season starts, all is right with the world. In places. While I no longer pay much attention to the regular season, the World Series is still alluring despite the designated hitter rule. Except when it includes the Dodgers, once again, with their superstar who should have been cast into the outer darkness with Shoeless Joe Jackson and Pete Rose (now reinstated posthumously). Shoeless Joe did take the money, because he needed it, but then he went out and batted .375 against the Cincinnati Reds and did not make an error in the field. He is still as dead as Pete Rose, too, so maybe there is hope for him. Manfred opened the door to the Hall of Fame and the shade of Shoeless Joe should be allowed to walk through it before Pete Rose gets close to Cooperstown.
Part the Third: Education and the Good Life. Deep Springs College is the definition of sui generis, and most of us could imagine spending two years there. This is explained by Ruby LaRocca in her article in The Times (London), “I study at an exclusive American college, we can’t drink, use wi-fi, or leave during term.” Sounds a lot like a certain other American college in the Deep South, but it is not. Deep Springs is an American original, and Ms. LaRocca explains why:
Two years ago I arrived at Deep Springs College in California and took a deep sigh of relief.
After years of being homeschooled in Ithaca, New York, and never owning a phone or using social media, I was finally surrounded by other young people like me who weren’t tethered to their devices. Young people who read and spoke like they weren’t chronically online.
Here at Deep Springs, the internet is effectively banned. And while life in this isolated, arid basin between two mountain ranges about a two-hour drive from Death Valley isn’t for everyone, it’s possibly the best place to get a college education in the age of AI.
…
Founded in 1917 by the business magnate LL Nunn, Deep Springs might be the country’s most selective college and it is certainly the smallest, admitting just 12 to 15 students a year. The entire student body fits into three Chevy Suburbans.
At this private two-year college, where most students transfer to top schools upon graduation, we are also expected to look after a fully operational ranch and about 300 head of cattle. Students live on site and do much of the necessary manual labour, from shoeing horses to delivering calves. We also clean, garden, butcher, mend fences, milk the dairy cows, feed the animals, maintain the farm vehicles, cook for the entire college (twice a day, every day) and wash all the dishes.
With some oversight, we also manage the day-to-day operations of the college: hiring faculty, running admissions and choosing the semester’s slate of courses. Classes in our wide-ranging liberal-arts curriculum are small and intensive seminars focused on literature, science and social sciences. Participation is not optional; it is demanded.
Students at Deep Springs never need the “digital detox” that all of us could use once in a while (mine is, generally, no TV, after countless hours wasted in front of what my thoroughly working-class father called the “idiot box;” he was correct, sixty years ago):
But the students of Deep Springs are always in that “still point”. Against the backdrop of the desert valley and the responsibilities of a working ranch, the enticements of a digital life seem paltry by comparison. In the valley, we are the internet. We are each other’s entertainment, social connection and intellectual resource.
Where does all that time go, the time not spent pacing and prowling about the apps? What do students reach for if not a phone?
Mostly into strange, wonderful experiences. Every Tuesday night, for example, six or seven students take their turn at a podium to give an intensely personal, moving, funny speech as part of a mandatory class in public speaking. Students look forward to the annual spring holiday called Shakespeare Week when we read, discuss and perform the Bard’s plays for 72 hours straight. Last year I directed a production of Antony and Cleopatra, and this year I’m doing Hamlet.
Reading, writing, talking to one another on a ranch in the desert. Sounds like what all of us could use, at times. It is certainly a good education:
Life at Deep Springs might sound like it’s full of constraints. But the restrictions, the impediments, that’s the gift. Because we don’t own a lot of things out here, we learn to value the things we have. If something breaks, we don’t throw it out. We learn to fix it.
The good news is you don’t have to live in an isolated desert valley mucking out cow stalls and reading Augustine to rediscover life before social media, the internet and cell service. Yes, some aspects of Deep Springs are hard to replicate, such as the springtime practice of branding and castrating calves. But a book and a candle? Easy. Once you spend some time expanding the limits of your attention, you won’t want to go back. Your days, once spread thin by distraction, will be filled to the brim.
And one thing the students, faculty, and staff at Deep Springs will not be required to do, while they remain there, is complete cybersecurity training every two months in a futile institutional effort to stay a half-step ahead of the hackers, phishers, and malware cretins. Sounds like a pretty good life.
Part the Fourth: From the Sublime Deep Springs to the Ridiculous Everywhere Else. Or, what our world is coming to as Sylvie Delacroix explains The hidden costs of ‘helpful’ AI. This can be summarized thusly:
Even when artificial-intelligence tools aid individuals’ decision-making, they can quietly de-skill whole professions by narrowing how uncertainties and values are debated.
Uncertainty and values to deal with the uncertainties, these are the stuff of life. But in our world few seem to remember this:
A computer-science experiment captures, with unusual clarity, the difference between designing artificial-intelligence systems that are ever-more powerful according to a fixed benchmark and developing tools that genuinely support human judgement1. Researchers have created a collaborative chess game in which each team comprises pairs, partnering a strong AI with a weaker, human-like one. A coin toss decides, before each move, which partner will play. Neither knows in advance which will go next.
The result was striking. Despite being weaker at conventional chess, AI tools designed to make moves that the human-like partner could build on consistently beat teams led by Leela, a superhuman chess AI. Being powerful was not enough: compatibility with a partner was more important.
And this is relevant to more than a game of chess, which has one and only one objective, checkmate. For example:
Consider a diagnostic AI tool trained to frame clinical uncertainty in terms of probability scores. In some cases, that works well: a 70% likelihood of bacterial infection based on the test results, for example. But this approach collapses when the judgement has no concrete statistical basis. For instance, when a physician suspects domestic abuse, the decision of whether to record their concern cannot be reduced to a probability. It rests on their judgement about whether documentation would help to protect the person or risk worsening the family situation. Such decisions are interpretive and ethical, rooted in contested values. When every uncertainty is forced into a probabilistic frame, value-laden professional judgement does not just get distorted, it becomes invisible.
…
There are, then, two forms of AI-induced de-skilling to worry about. One is individual and measurable: a physician’s perceptual acuity can decline through disuse. A 2025 study, for example, found that endoscopists’ unaided detection rates for precancerous growths fell from 28% to 22% after working with AI assistance. The other form is collective and harder to detect: an entire profession might gradually lose its capacity to question and redefine its goals, because AI systems embed assumptions about what those goals are.
This reminds me of a former colleague, long before ChatGPT and its bastard offspring were a thing. He believed the way to be productive in the laboratory was to automate everything, including the routine but essential research chores that could be done by hand in a small fraction of the time automation required. He persisted and got exactly nowhere (the instrumentation sales reps loved him, though). Instead of paying attention to what his data were trying to tell him, he became fixated on making the data reproducible through automation (the so-called reproducibility crisis is not, but that has been and will be for another time). All this instrumentation jones did was separate him from his data. But more importantly it prevented him from ever getting a result. As I tell my students: Once is an anecdote, twice is data, three times is a result, but if and only if you can do another experiment based on the first result and get a new, logical predicted result. Thorstein Veblen was correct: The purpose of research is to make two questions grow where there was only one before. My colleague deskilled himself into oblivion (without AI) and nothing good came of this.
I want my physician to know what she is doing and why, without AI influencing her diagnosis. But as medical education goes all-in on AI…well, if wishes were horses, beggars would ride.
Part the Fifth: May some good sense return to this world, soon. Happy Easter, Best Wishes on this Passover, and Belated Best Wishes for Ramadan and Eid al-Fitr. Shalom, Salam, Peace to all.
Thank you for reading. See you next week!
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I loathed baseball as a child — and I enjoyed ALL the other sports from the very first time I tried them, and played many of them well into adulthood: hockey, soccer, football, basketball and rugby.
Standing around in the blazing sun waiting around for someone to actually hit a fair ball was about the most tedious experience of my young life, so I quit after a couple of years of total boredom and futility.
Baseball is on the whole fairly boring, but not as boring as golf-which really isn’t a sport, and you don’t see MLB stars calling up the President to get themselves out of a DUI jam-as Tiger Woods did the other day fruitlessly.
My one hope out of the Trump administration is that he personally is responsible for the death of golf, hell, i’d go to the funeral.
I was not as hot and bothered as I should have been when the pitch clock came along, but computers as arbiters on pitches is beyond the pale.
If I play to form, i’ll watch snippets of a few MLB games this season, and then get interested as the playoffs come along. I’ve got the fairweather fan thing down pat.
That is why God gave us wiffle ball.
When a baseball dreams, it dreams it’s a frisbee.
Doc KLG, I have a remedy for your baseball blues, it’s in the form of the scrappy, crazy Milwaukee Brewers. So enjoyable to watch. None of the big money players, a crowd that loves the game, decent prices at the ballpark. And they’re actually a very good team. I’d say the Cubbies are not so bad either but it’s sort of sacrilege now that we’re in the same league and division. Thank god for baseball right now because otherwise I’d be in a funk.
Plus, you had Mr. Baseball in the broadcast booth forever! I remember Bob Uecker from when I was that Little Leaguer. He claims he was the catcher for Phil Niekro when the Braves absconded from Milwaukee. Even at 10 that seemed, well, unseemly.
I researched ESG funds 20 years ago and concluded that it was all mostly greenwashing. Sure, you could find funds that avoided fossil fuels and others that avoided tobacco, but very few of the companies in their choice of portfolios could be called socially or environmentally responsible. IOW ESG funds just allowed investors to pick their poison…a little bit. Furthermore, returns didn’t seem to be any better than other good funds.
My takeaway–environmental and social damage is intrinsic to profit taking.
KLG, I can’t thank you enough for your Friday Coffee Breaks. I learn so much, and yet somehow, while being rigorously honest, you manage to keep me from falling into complete despair. “Shalom, Salam, Peace to all” indeed.
Thank you, Carla! ((blushes))
There is nothing better than playing catch with your dad.
Reading your section on AI reminds me of a tweet I saw recently. I guy was explaining how he had trained a dog to answer questions and if you listen closely, it kinda made human sounds with its barks. The manager said that that’s great. That he was fired all 1200 of his staff and then asked when the dog will be ready to make medical diagnoses.
Wiffle balls make great ball gags, they let air through while muffling the screaming O’s.
I met some interesting people when I worked in SF during the 80’s…
Sounds just like the French Quarter back during the 1970s. You knew you were in the wrong place when you went upstairs from the disco floor, that lighted up in patterns following the beat of the music playing, and found a pool room with big cushions on the pool table tops.
I remember being told once that the first rule of “Friendly S&M” was: “No blood.”
Stay safe and sane.
It was a pleasure reading your post today. The “squishy” center drew a smile immediately followed by the instructive distinction between markets/ business and capitalism.
In the summer there was usually an AM radio station in the midwest that carried the St. Louis Cardinals games. In 1950 we went to a Cardinals–Brooklyn Dodgers game complete with Jackie Robinson, Roy Campanella, Stan Musial, Red Schoendenst, et al.
It’s curious to read about Deep Springs the same day reading about Syracuse University axing 95 majors including “classic studies”, “art”, German and other languages. One hundred years ago German was the scientific language and a usual requirement for medical school.
For the most part being retired one can avoid AI now. That seems unlikely to last very long.
My internist is getting a copy of your essay.
The notional Left and Right are pretty squishy, too. I had missed that about Syracuse. Absurd and frightening at the same time. There goes their claim to be a serious seat of the higher learning, but virtually no one will care.
Cricket (esp. test cricket). Who can fail to be entranced by a game lasting five eight-hour days with a very high proportion of matches ending in a draw (also called no result).
Seriously – when I was growing up in the ’60s to ’80s, there was always a sharp increase in people calling in sick at work when there were test matches being played in UK time.
For a while the West Indies were the cricket team to beat, and its interesting how the Caribbean conjures up both cricket and baseball stars far in excess of anywhere else, population-wise.
I have never really understood cricket, but there is still time. A good friend who is from Jamaica tells me of test matches between the West Indies and England when the entire country stopped for the duration. Sounds civilized, actually. And the West Indies always won in his telling.
I find your lack of faith disturbing. Not only did Our President play baseball, he hit the game-winning home run, and was scouted by the pros.
Thank you for that reference! And the great Robert Lipsyte! Back when I read a newspaper first thing every morning, the first stop was the Sports Section. That was the only place where facts were the standard. The scorebook does not lie. Ball Four came out during my last year of Little League. The older boys passed it down and many of us read it. At the time I wanted to grow up to be Bobby Richardson and play second base for the Orioles instead of the Yankees. The books was scandalous to the grownups, but perfect for the adolescent in all of us. Loved Jim Bouton! The current occupant is as good as Bouton in anything only in his fever dreams.
Like so much of what comes out of Trump’s mouth, that too is one big beautiful lie. No game winning home run and no pro scouts. Whether your post was meant to be sarcastic or not, it is definitely misleading.
Thanks KLG! A hearty amen for peace to all.
I have to confess to being one of those sandlot kids. I played baseball in midget league, little league, babe ruth and high school. But the sandlot play was the best, and we pretty much played sports, or rode bikes, or roller skated, or skated boarded or did whatever until it was dinner time or dark (which ever came first). My wife and I made sure our kids did pretty the same. (And we were lucky that smart phones did not come along until our youngest was out of high school.)
But watching baseball has never had much appeal to me. I haven’t been to an MLB game in over thirty years (I will occasionally watch them on TV, a World Series game, and lately, Bat Bros videos on YT). And the changes make it even less appealing to me. It remains, as my dad once complained while we watched the World Series on TV, the only sport able to pack 15 minutes of action into four hours.
But I still have some gloves, bats, and balls and am up for a catch as soon as the lawn dries up a bit.
Deep Springs College might be the most hidden away higher learning establishment, it’s off the beaten path, purposely.
Not too far from the oldest trees in the world in the Bristlecone Pines in the White Mountains, and about the same distance away from the premier hot springs in California.
I plan to teach my grandson how to throw a baseball, if I live long enough! His father and uncle never played our national pastime. They can deal with the soccer.
Well do I remember going to the Spring Training exhibition games at the old Miami Orange Bowl back in the 1960s. I was a little kid and loved the whole thing. I know not about now, but back then the teams were aware of the positive effects all around from team engagement with the fans, especially the youngsters. I used to have a Baltimore Orioles ball cap given to me by a player at that venue. (Alas, it died along with much of my nostalgia in Hurricane Katrina.)
My take on the “smartphone” phenomenon is that, yes, the phone might be smart, but not the regular user of said device. One of the main determinants of successful problem solving is the ability to ask the proper questions. To do that, one needs a field of experiences both wide and deep. Any electronic device is constrained, by definition. Thus devices do not supply a full enough population of variables to base useful decisions on.
One useful definition I read years ago concerning Artificial Intelligence is that, electronics are set constrained devices. They are glorified tools. Terran humans have brains whose complexity approaches the infinite. They are consciousnesses.
Rant over. Thanks for your forbearance.
KLG. Maybe you should let your grandson see “The Natural” with Robert Redford. A fine baseball film. Maybe “Bull Durham” too when he is older. A clip from “The Natural”-
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V-o_baPnY1w (3:59 mins)
Eight Men Out by John Sayles!
Pride of the Yankees with Gary Cooper and Teresa Wright!
The Stratton Story with James Stewart and June Allyson.
Great essay again, thanks KLG.
Agree 100% on the baseball. Clankers calling balls and strikes are an abomination. One of the early Red Sox games this year had CB Bucknor behind the plate. His calls were challenged multiple times and found lacking, and then in frustration he called a batter out on a check swing rather than appealing to the 1st base ump, which is the normal practice, not wanting to be shown up again. He was embarrassed on national TV. Now Bucknor has had a reputation as a terrible ball and strike caller for a long time, but that’s a problem for the umpires’ union to fix, not a robot.
If baseball wants to use robot umpires, then find some robot players to play those games too. Leave real baseball for the humans.
We didn’t have enough kids around in the rural area where I grew up to play sandlot baseball, but we did get some pick up games going during family reunions. They were held in a field that my family owned that had a baseball diamond where my grandfather and other farmers had once played. My grandfather gets a brief shout out in a wonderful book on baseball written by former news correspondent and family friend David Lamb, who once took a year off, bought an RV, and spent the summer traveling the US watching minor league baseball games (before Manfred whacked so many of the teams) – Stolen Season: A Journey Through America and Baseball’s Minor Leagues.
And you might be surprised, or not, to find that our current resident of the White House did play baseball as a kid, and according to none other than himself, could have, and perhaps should have been a pro. The Boston sports radio show likes to play an intro clip every morning where Trump claims his mother said he could have gone pro. I couldn’t find that exact one, but here’s a similar claim in this CNN clip. He probably could have been a rocket surgeon too had he wanted, but luckily for us he chose to grace the world with his political talents instead.
And he did it with bone spurs!
I played in the Highlander League in SoCal from when I was 8 to 14, and there were 3 diamonds of play with a snack shack in the middle of them that had a lone bare 40w bulb atop a pole on the roof, and when that light went on, all games were stopped on account of darkness.
If you were ahead in a squeaker you might stall a little bit as best you could, but my series of woeful teams seldom had the chance, mired in the cellar or not from it.
In my favor there was little pressure in terms of performing, and nobody kept track of batting averages and the like. Mom came to all of my games, and moms made up the majority of those in the ‘stands’.
I don’t remember there being a ‘draft’ before the season started, i’m sure certain players were coveted more than others, certainly no MLB scouts were watching my games.
We had to go door to door selling Worlds Finest Chocolate bars at 2 bits per bar before the season started, and I think each player had to sell 50 chocolate bars that helped pay the freight on balls & bats.
Everybody played in Little League, but hardly any in Pop Warner-maybe 1/10th as many boys.
I spent a week with the Hadza about a decade ago, genuinely amazing people with whom I was honored to share a love of cannabis. Deep Springs College, on the other hand, sounds like a nightmare. Why spend 72 hours with Shakespeare when there’s perfectly good cowpies to watch dry?
Karl Marx was actually very favorable towards capitalism and wrote how the capitalist deserved his or her profits because of the work done of organizing, management, and vision realization. He also believed that industrial capitalism when reaching its monopolist stage would naturally transform into socialism. What Marx opposed was the exploitation inherent in the class war, and he especially opposed the kind of financialization which characterizes modern capitalism.
Our summer sandlot games were played on actual diamonds in a town park and we had arbitrary rules to accommodate smaller players/younger brothers (infield hits had to come to a stop before they were picked up etc). In the late afternoon or early evening the fields were populated by industrial and semi pro leagues and we learned a lot about baseball and many other things as well while hanging around the benches during these fiercely contested raucous games. This understanding of the game and its refinements were put to use when attending major league games with my big city cousins. This was at a time (so long ago) you could decide of a warm afternoon to go to an ongoing game, get yourselves to the wooden stadium and pay a small fee for the privilege of sitting in the bleachers, sleeves rolled up and eating hot dogs handed to you by vendors to shout encouragement and rain abuse on the “umps”. This is what baseball was about; participation on and off the field.
Not a fan of robo-umping either. It slows the game down unnecessarily without improving it.
But I do like the pitch clock. It was needed to offset the time drag of over coaching and player development of baseball players since they were 8 years old. Not a perfect answer, but something needed to be done.
The best baseball players are no longer developed in the US. As with a lot of wrongs in the US, there is way too much emphasis on short-term results and instant success. It’s not just the injuries and burn out, but there is a lack of flexibility and patience in player development. The ability of a kid to experiment and figure things out for themself is strongly discouraged. They end up deferring to the expertise of some coach or player development guy who supposedly knows better, at their parents’ behest. I can’t think of a switch hitter who is not from Latin America. Where are the American Shohei Ohtani’s? The US hasn’t developed one of those since Babe Ruth. This is what happens when capitalism is adopted as your moral code.