1.
Yesterday was Opening Day, that is, the first day of the regular season for American baseball. But the first baseball game I watched this year was in the World Baseball Classic. I was in Viejo San Juan, eating mofongo con camarones, while Puerto Rico played Nicaragua. The game was being commentated in English, and I was able to enjoy both the strangeness of the large man standing a foot away from the screen shouting with both fists raised in a seafood restaurant and the familiarity of the commentators’ cadences.
One of the strange practices I use to educate my ear and make myself a better writer is to transcribe certain lines of baseball commentary when I listen to games on the radio or watch them online. I look for phrases that I can immediately hear:
he tags and then throws to first—in time
sent down, had 1 start in triple-A
well-hit, but not productive
strike called to the outer edge
take a four-three lead, into the ninth
and so on. My ability to hear the intonations of these printed words shows me what I want from so-called conceptual writing. Because concepts emerge here just as anywhere else. They are nothing other than the pattern of a habituated voice, responding to something it recognizes.
One of the concepts of baseball commentary is the “bad bounce.” This is when a ground ball hit the dirt in an unpredictable way, and bounces in a trajectory different from what a fielder would normally expect. The bad bounce can happen anywhere on the field, but usually they indicate a kind of imperfection in the soil. Some divot or clod makes a routine play into an extra-base hit. Or, sometimes, it changes the whole course of a game, as happened in the 1960 world series:
Anyone who has played baseball in some organized way has probably done fielding drills where you practice tracking a ground ball and scooping it from a bounce. Athletic habits are rules that are alive in us, both flexible and reliable enough to respond to the contingency of the situation. A great deal goes in to keeping the athletic repertoire reliable by maintaining the consistency of those situations. Fields have to be well-maintained and cared for in order for the drilled-in habits to work. Regulation cleats are designed so that they will preserve the evenness of the field’s soils, and so lessen the likelihood of a “bad bounce.”
And nevertheless, bad bounces happen. The unpredictable bounce of the baseball is not considered unfair (though it is sometimes foul). While some fans and players will cry foul at the slipperiness of a football field, the baseball diamond is seen differently. Its anomalies are part of its nature. As the saying goes, it is a “game of inches.”
In one sense, there is no way to train for bad bounces. They are exactly those events that defy training, even abuse it. Yet at the same time, it’s obvious that experience can help. I remember as kid watching Scott Rolen, Jimmy Rollins, Chase Utley (all Phillies yes) recover a bad bounce and still make a play, or an attempt at one. These moments, even when they failed to get an out or when they turned a potential double into a single, were often more clearly virtuosic than the kind of plays selected for Baseball Tonight highlight reels. Experience was not just statistical probability as muscle memory, but the bodily intuition of the exception. Yes, sometimes you could call the recovery a bobble, but it was more likely for it to end up in the outfield in the first place.
2.
One of the first concepts I encountered in my college education that I recall having a physical response to—I felt a visceral change as I understood the thought—was Kenneth Burke’s idea (he attributes it to Veblen) of “trained incapacity,” that is “that state of affairs whereby one's very abilities can function as blindnesses.” Our training makes us readier to respond to certain experiences, and it is exactly that standing to attention that may be our demise. Burke’s example is, as usual, tragicomic: the Pavlovian conditioned chicken, responding to the farm bell, but this time not to be fed but to become food.
This is why, I think, we should not try to model our education on optimization strategies. Not only because the exception, however rare, may be fatal, but because the very nature of education ought to be open to its own deconditioning. It should be clear to all, and not an embarrassing secret, that all conditioning is conditional. When we experience the “bad bounce” in training, we shouldn’t apologize, but instead recognize this as an encounter with reality. The failure of education is not in its inability to meet these moments, but in its refusal to acknowledge them.
The bad bounce is good for education. When we educate, we should not train. Yes, habits must be developed, and a certain amount of automatism is necessary in any field of performance, regardless of whether it is mathematical or dramatic. The physicist and the actor alike need to think about some problems and resolve others into their repertoire. But education’s objective should not be to get the chickens to come to the bell without a question to its meaning. The great cosmic joke, that the whole World Series, if not all the series of the world, may depend on a bad bounce, is an image we might put at the heart of our philosophies of education.