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  • Watching Baseball, Seeing Philosophy: The Great Thinkers at Play on the Diamond
  • Roberta Newman (bio)
Raymond Angelo Belliotti . Watching Baseball, Seeing Philosophy: The Great Thinkers at Play on the Diamond. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2008. 187 pp. Paper, $35.00.

The preface of Watching Baseball, Seeing Philosophy asks, "Why am I here? What is my destiny? How should I live my life?" (1). In this book, Raymond Angelo Belliotti, Distinguished Teaching Professor of Philosophy at the State University of New York at Fredonia and author of a number of other works including What is the Meaning of Human Life and Happiness is Overrated, does not provide definitive answers to these questions, which he notes are "contestable and revisable." He does, however, attempt to demonstrate that "the careers of nine baseball players and the words of nine philosophers can help teach us how to lead robustly meaningful, valuable lives" (2). This is a tall order.

Part baseball book, part philosophically oriented self-help book, Watching Baseball, Seeing Philosophy is divided up into nine chapters or innings, no doubt influenced by the structure of Ken Burns's documentary series. In each section, the author pairs teachings of a specific philosopher with the practical example of a baseball great. For example, Mickey Mantle is paired with thirteenth-century theologian St. Thomas Aquinas, while Jackie Robinson is paired with Antonio Gramsci, a twentieth-century thinker with Marxist leanings. At first glance, some of these pairings seem unusual, while others, like Billy Martin and Niccolò Machiavelli, appear to make a great deal of sense.

Belliotti is particularly successful at demystifying some of the concepts posited by the philosophers, at the same time correcting misconceptions about their ideas. The section on Martin and Machiavelli does this particularly [End Page 141] well, focusing not on the commonly held notion that the Italian political philosopher's "teachings" may be summed up by the maxim, "The end justifies the means," but, rather, on the Renaissance notion of virtù which informs Machiavelli's Discourses as well as his conduct book for aspiring rulers, The Prince. Belliotti distinguishes virtù as described by the sixteenth-century writer from the contemporary notion of virtue, defining the quality as "shorthand for a host of admirable character traits: deserved pride, courage, vigor, intelligence, ambition, spirit, even genius" (21). In Machiavelli's terms, a leader possessing virtù is strong and decisive, and communicates those qualities to his soldiers. Virtù, moreover, is available in limited quantities. There is only so much to go around. A leader exhibiting more than his fair share of virtù will do so at the expense of his opponents, essentially sapping them of the same quality.

Understanding the concept of virtù is crucial to comprehending Machiavelli's stated intent in his writings. Such distillation, reducing the ideas of a given philosopher to a single idea or set of ideas, however, does disservice to the work of some of the other thinkers. In contrast to Belliotti's treatment of Machiavelli's virtù, his approach to the work of William James, the late nineteenth-century American philosopher and psychologist (as opposed to the baseball statistician), is not quite as successful. Describing what he defines as James's "agenda," Belliotti writes, "He aspires to demonstrate that belief in God is not blind irrationalism, but a voluntary, rationally permissible, genuine choice" (138). While the essay Belliotti cites, "The Will to Believe," deals directly with this notion, it is hardly the single, central idea in James's writing. Certainly, James focuses on the psychology of religion in this essay, but reducing James's work to a single idea without reflecting on the complexity of his other writing does the philosopher a disservice. This is true of the chapters dealing with the work of Nietzsche and Kant as well.

This inconsistency also extends to Belliotti's treatment of the baseball figures meant to serve as practical examples of the philosophers' ideas from which, presumably, the reader is meant to learn valuable life lessons. Where his explanation of Machiavellian virtù is successful, his examination of Billy Martin as an embodiment of the quality is less so. At first glance, there would be few better examples of what might be...

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