Efficient Cause

There are no sports to watch right now, which has placed baseball somewhat more prominently in my mind. By way of explanation: it's the best sport to follow, and to think about. But to watch? Probably not.

There are various reasons for this, depending on who you ask. Schools of various vintage can be blamed, and not without reason. Blame, though, is perhaps the wrong word.

A team is supposed to win; to win you need to score runs; we basically know now that the best way to score runs is to avoid outs (to walk) and hit home runs, where BABIP is eternally 1.000. Which is not to say a high batting average on balls in play is without value, or fails to indicate a useful player: Ty Cobb has the highest ever, and he was pretty good. It's just that Brooks Robinson never threw out a batter who had just watched ball four, and with very few exceptions, balls hit over the fence are never caught.

The problem here, rather evidently, is that the efficient manner of play dispenses with defense and (mostly) baserunning, dynamic components of the game that people like to watch. We are left with the "three true outcomes"--a walk, strikeout, or home run--but little in the way of on-field dynamism.

There are exceptions, though they are mostly not well known players. The last true star in that vintage was probably Ichiro, one of the most prolific singles hitters of all time. Even that sentence is either praise or criticism, depending on your perspective. It has to be said, he didn't walk much, or hit for extra bases often. But if that must be said, then it must also be felt that he was remarkable to watch, and one might ask whether this is because--not in spite of--his relative inefficiency.

It is often said of baseball that the drama comes from the focused battle between the hitter and pitcher. And this is... well, it's not untrue. But it also wasn't the original intent. Way back when, the notion was simply that the pitcher threw something for the batter to put in play; the baserunning speed and acumen of the batter versus the fielders, then, took center stage. A walk or a strikeout was essentially a punitive measure put in place to keep things moving; they were never intended as desirable outcomes--certainly not 2/3 of the "true" outcomes.

As an aside, I think it's tremendously lucky for football--both kinds--that analytically optimal strategy just so happens to align with what people mostly like to watch. (No one really wants to watch Mahomes hand the ball off 45 times a game.) Baseball and basketball, then, were not only unlucky, but certainly that in some respects.

There isn't a coherent thesis here, more like an iffy observation: Sometimes less efficient things are more beautiful, and we like them better.

A more learned person than me could relate that back to Aquinas and others, and note that beauty is an absolute good--that is, good in and of itself, not good for something. And so to be truly beautiful, a thing cannot be instrumentalized. And perhaps, one might say, to make something good for something is to make it less beautiful, and less good.

This, maybe, is part of why jogging exceedingly long distances appeals. It's silly, good for nothing. And so, good. Beautiful, even.

(See? I brought it around.)