Roth on Baseball

Editor’s Note: Well, we’re going to try something new on here which we call “Bloggy Friday,” where numerous times throughout the day we will post some smallish blog item – I see this as something similar to what old sports columnists used to call “emptying the notebook.” Like everything else on this blog, there’s no strategy involved and not much prior thought either. We’ll just see how it goes.

We start with a baseball quote by author Phillip Roth (as told to David Remnick of The New Yorker). Roth was talking here about the bizarre need for people to read his work in some alternative way (as in: “What do these characters' names REALLY mean? Seymour – does that mean See More?”). But I think this quote can be about a lot of things:

“It’s like baseball. Suppose you and I went up to the ballpark together and there’s a guy next to us with his kid. And (the father) was saying, ‘Now, what I want you to do is watch the scoreboard. Stop watching the field. Just watch what happens when the numbers change on the scoreboard. Isn’t that great? Now do you see what just happened there? Did you see what happened? Why did that happen?’

“And you say, ‘That guy is crazy.’ But the kid imbibes it and he goes home and he’s asked: ‘How was the game?’ And he says, ‘Great! The scoreboard changed thirty-two times and Daddy said last game it changed only fourteen times and the home team last time changed more times than the other team. It was really great! We had hot dogs and we stood up at one point to stretch and we went home.’

“Is that politicizing the game? Is that theorizing the baseball game? No. It’s not having the foggiest idea what baseball is.”