Focusing on two poems and two sets of statistics, this paper will explore how aristeia, “excellence,” in baseball is represented in statistics and poetry, arguing how the latter remains the most representative way of revealing a batter’s skill, a pitcher’s prowess, and the game’s preeminence as a sport. This argument has particular resonance in the era of sabermetrics championed by James, Alderson, and Beane, in which a player’s and a team’s excellence has been narrowed to some twenty-four measures of efficiency and effectiveness. Sabermetrics is the “attempt…to answer objective questions about baseball [but i]t cannot deal with the subjective judgments which are also important to the game” (Grabiner, 1994). Yet ironically, it is the agonistic and imprecise qualities of the game that make it so resonant within our experience and the ways that we recall it (the same qualities make Lewis’ Moneyball such a compelling read). Over the past twenty-five years, sabermetrics have taken center stage in the discussion of baseball, effectively changed the conversation of the game itself. However, the very ways that people choose to recall baseball—a week, a decade or a century ago—remain distinctly poetic, focusing more on what could have or should have happened rather than focusing on what did happen…unless what happened, as a form of excellence, was removed from the realm of statistical probability (Ruth’s called shot, “the shot heard ‘round the world,” Dent’s playoff home run over the Green Monster, Clemente’s grace and his tragic death). Overall, poetry and baseball remain part of what Huizinga (1944) described as “Poiesis…a play-function” (119), which is the “direct opposite of seriousness” (5) which can accorded to the sabermetric approach to the game. As such, this paper will argue that sabermetrics will continue to remain subordinate to the words crafted to celebrate aristeia in baseball.
About the presenterKenneth Sammond
Ken Sammond holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from Rutgers University and an MPA from Baruch College. Primarily a scholar in postcolonial literature and the conventions of “imagined communities,” he also has interests in exile literature from the Classical world and their influences on postmodern literature, as well as the representation of the Brooklyn Dodgers in fiction. He is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Literature, Language, Writing and Philosophy at Fairleigh Dickinson University where he teaches writing and literature. In addition, he is the Associate Director of the Honors Program there.