Quote of the Day (George F. Will, on Baseball, Stats and Social Sciences)

“Baseball may be in some ways a product of nineteenth-century sensibilities, but baseball's fascination with quantification makes it very much attuned to the twentieth century. The development of certain familiar technologies (adding machines, calculators, computers), and the related development of research skills and data-gathering agencies and bureaucracies, have produced in this century a surge in the quantity of social information available. This has led, in turn, to the growth of the social sciences, and to the growth of hubris, even intellectual triumphalism.”—George F. Will, Men at Work: The Craft of Baseball (1990)

George F. Will once wrote a book called Statecraft as Soulcraft. The mere title was enough to give me the shivers, maybe because it sounded like “Statecraft as Witchcraft” (which, come to think of it, sometimes seems apropos). It sure didn’t seem like much fun.

Even if you don’t agree with the political leanings of the Pulitzer Prize-winning conservative columnist (who turned 70 today), you’ll still find much of interest—fun, actually—in Men at Work, in which he speaks to four different ace practitioners of the summer game.

Years ago, Garry Trudeau’s "Doonesbury" comic strip ran a weeklong series that made wicked fun of Will’s penchant for quotations. (The columnist summons his “Quote Boy,” an intern named T. Hamilton Tripler, to dig up appropriate material from the past—nothing later than Archbishop Laud, in the time of King Charles I of England, he instructs.)

But Men at Work has some truly great examples of the art, including Baltimore Orioles manager Earl Weaver’s instruction to pitcher Ross Grimsley, then in crisis mode, that, when you get right down to it, sounds like it could double as a ward heeler’s advice on Election Night: “If you know how to cheat, start now.”

True diehard baseball fans (very much including deejay Jonathan Schwartz, who, in protest against Super Bowl Sunday, gives over much of his show on that day to baseball-oriented material), no matter what their political stripes, are likely to agree with another Will quote, from elsewhere in his vast work over the years: “Football is a mistake. It combines the two worst elements of American life: Violence and committee meetings.”