Wednesday Wisdom

“Is this heaven? no its Iowa" is a famous line from the movie Field of Dreams, which romanticizes the game of baseball and its relevance to American culture. The movie mythologizes baseball’s history and some of its forgotten players when an Iowa farmer build a baseball field in a cornfield.

History

The first baseball game is widely celebrated and officially recognized as the first organized baseball game played under modern rules occurred on June 19, 1846, in Hoboken, New Jersey. The New York Knickerbockers Base Ball Club faced off against the "New York Nine" (also called the New York Base Ball Club). The New York Nine defeated the Knickerbockers with a score of 23–1 in four innings. The idea that the "first baseball game" was played in Cooperstown, New York, is based on a famous, but now historically discredited, creation myth centered around a Civil War general named Abner Doubleday. However, the Abner Doubleday myth is why Cooperstown became, and remains, the spiritual and official home of baseball with the Hall of Fame.

This Hoboken game is significant because it was played using the "Knickerbocker Rules," which were formalized by Alexander Cartwright and other members of the Knickerbockers club in 1845. These rules established several foundational elements of the modern game such as established boundaries for fair and foul balls. They also instituted the rule of "Three hands out, all out" better known now as three outs. They also prohibited “putting out” a runner by throwing the ball at them instituting the tag rule. Pitching required the ball to be "pitched, not thrown" meaning overhand rather than underhand. While earlier forms of bat-and-ball games existed like Rounders and Town Ball, this match in Hoboken is the first officially recorded inter-club contest to utilize the rules that would become the blueprint for the sport we know today. The most important rule perhaps implemented by the “Knickerbocker Rules” was the diamond shape of the infield, which was later standardized as 90 feet between the bases and 60 feet 6 inches for the pitching mound to home plate. The pitching mound started as no more than 15 inches in 1904 and was standardized to 15 inches in 1950. The 1968 Major League Baseball season is famously known as the "Year of the Pitcher," due to the unprecedented dominance of pitching throughout the league led to the mound being lowered to the current 10 inches high. An influx of international athletes, better training in the off season along with a generous strike zone and the elevated mound height led to lowest league batting average of .237. Bob Gibson recorded a 1.12 earned run average and Denny McClain won 31 games. In addition to higher velocity, pitchers were using spin called the “Magnus Effect” * that created late breakings sliders. The advantage was so great the Major League Baseball lowered the mound the following year to 10 inches to level the playing field.

While the infield became standardized, the outfields differed widely as baseball was commercialized, and fences and grandstands were put around the fields. The green grass, infield dirt and the structures built around them added to the aesthetics of the architecture. The structures built were so different that they conjured sperate descriptions. Ebbets Field (1913), The Polo Grounds (1911) and Yankee stadium (1923) all in New York city are examples, while Sportsman’s Park in St Louis (1909), Baker Bowl in Philadelphia, The Astrodome, The Ballpark in Arlington and Camden Yards show the diversity of the ballparks in name. The Green monster, a towering wall in left field at Fenway Park, The Ivy walls of Wrigley Field or the homer runs that fall into McCovey Cove at Oracle Park in San Francisco all lend to the imagery of these unique structures.

“The house that Ruth built” known as Yankee stadium opened in 1923 and was built in the style of classical Greek and Roman style. The stadium became known as the “Cathedral of Baseball”. Singer, songwriter and beach combing philosopher had a notable quote about ballparks before playing at Wrigley field sums up the importance of baseball and its ballparks to the American story when he said “These old ballparks are like cathedrals in America. We don't have big old Gothic cathedrals like they do in Europe. But we got baseball parks,"

Elysian Fields

Baseball runs through the fabric of American history and folklore, and the teams and their players are identifiable as the cities they represent. From on field excellence to the off-field heroics of Ted Williams or Roberto Clemente, these names are remembered throughout American culture.

The Elysian Fields, often simply called Elysium, is the closest concept the ancient Greeks had to Paradise or Heaven. It was a place in the afterlife reserved for the souls of those who were heroic, virtuous, or specially favored by the gods. The name "Elysian Fields" is a beautiful, evocative term that has persisted in language to describe any place of serene bliss or ideal happiness.

That first organized baseball game in Hoboken, NJ, back in 1846, yeah you get the punchline- it was played on Elysian Field.

*The Magnus effect is a physical phenomenon where a spinning object moving through a fluid (like air or water) experiences a sideways force, perpendicular to both the direction of motion and the axis of spin. Magnus effect arises from pressure differences due to spin. It's essential in aerodynamics, sports physics, and some engineering designs. Spin does not just make something turn, it can deflect its whole path

And now you know...

Thanks, Dad, for the gift of curiosity!

Philosophy is the art of thinking, the building block of progress that shapes critical thinking across economics, ethics, religion, and science.

METAPHYSICS: Literally, the term metaphysics means ‘beyond the physical.’ Typically, this is the branch that most people think of when they picture philosophy. In metaphysics, the goal is to answer the what and how questions in life. Who are we, and what are time and space?

LOGIC: The study of reasoning. Much like metaphysics, understanding logic helps to understand and appreciate how we perceive the rest of our world. More than that, it provides a foundation for which to build and interpret arguments and analyses.

ETHICS: The study of morality, right and wrong, good and evil. Ethics tackles difficult conversations by adding weight to actions and decisions. Politics takes ethics to a larger scale, applying it to a group (or groups) of people. Political philosophers study political governments, laws, justice, authority, rights, liberty, ethics, and much more.

AESTHETICS: What is beautiful? Philosophers try to understand, qualify, and quantify what makes art what it is. Aesthetics also takes a deeper look at the artwork itself, trying to understand the meaning behind it, both art as a whole and art on an individual level. A question an aesthetics philosopher would seek to address is whether or not beauty truly is in the eye of the beholder.

EPISTEMOLOGY: This is the study and understanding of knowledge. The main question is how do we know? We can question the limitations of logic, how comprehension works, and the ability (or perception) to be certain.