Triumph and Tragedy in Mudville Read Free

strike from Hugh Casey. Interestingly enough, Dershowitz believes that Gould’s view of baseball informed his larger view of history, rather than the other way around, because baseball is so accessible and it is so easy to see what might have happened in the outcome of a game with just the smallest of changes, say a different relief pitcher throwing to Bobby Thomson in 1951, or perhaps Casey Stengel in 1960 bringing in Whitey Ford for the final outs against the Pirates.
    Baseball really begins for Steve Gould in the 1949 season, DiMaggio’s last great year, when he missed the first two and a half months of the season with aching feet and then came back in late June to lead the Yankees to a three-game sweep in Boston, a series in which he hit four home runs and knocked in nine runs. If I have any regret, reading these pieces, it was that Gould did not seem to have made a comparable connection to Ted Williams, whom I think he would have adored. For someone who was fascinated by the complexity of human behavior and its effect on performance (“the human heart in conflict with itself,” to use another phrase of Faulkner’s), it has always struck me that Williams is a much more interesting, much richer subject than DiMaggio. I can just imagine Gould and Williams together—Gould with his wondrous, shrewd, and relentless curiosity, and Williams with his exuberant spirit, his ferocious and on occasion belligerent intelligence, delighted because he had finally found someone smart enough to understand him: “No goddamn it, Professor Gould, when I said pitchers are dumb by breed, I meant exactly that, pitchers are dumb by breed…. Yes, of course pitchers are a breed—what else would they be? Why you ought to know that—I thought they told me you were a smart Harvard scientist! ”
    I’d have loved to have been a fly on the wall for that one. After all, Williams’s own philosophy (though he was technically a political conservative and Gould a liberal) paralleled Gould’s with some surprising similarities, and Gould would have loved one of Williams’s elemental truths of both baseball and life: “God gets you to the plate, but from then on, you’re on your own.” That is, natural talent has a lot of to do with the earlier rounds of selection in any enterprise, but what you put into it on your own, how hard you work and how much passion you bring to it, how much you study to improve yourself matters equally—it is our mark as individuals, our passions, our visions, our commitment on occasion to something larger than ourselves, which sets us apart. Fittingly, no baseball player ever studied the game more closely, worked harder to build himself up physically (especially in an age when players accepted their bodies and did not try to improve them) than Williams. He was, as much as any player I can think of, someone who reflected the qualities in a society that Steve Gould wrote about so well, the achievement of a seemingly ordinary man fighting not inconsiderable disadvantages, who raises himself to a position of excellence out of his own fierce will. For certainly there was a central theme which distinguished Gould’s most important work: he was wary of classification of people by race and by ethnicity. Here he was well ahead of the curve; he understood that continuing breakthroughs in science—the coming of DNA with its awesome implications—would likely create an ever greater instinct to categorize people and to do it too quickly, based on what are presumed to be genetic characteristics, as if to rephrase Tolstoy, your genes are your fate. He was, in effect, the anti–bell curve man; other forces, he believed, determine our character and fate more than sheer DNA. He did not like people being pigeonholed based on presumptions about them, presumptions that had nothing to do with their character and their individuality. (As such, I believe he would have been fascinated by the revelations which came out about Williams,