Monday, November 3, 2014

Interlude XI. Foucault - part 5 - Bachelard + baseball


Intro & Preface & Contents


Previous: Interlude X. Foucault - part 4




Continued from The Passion of Michel Foucault by James Miller...

Gaston Bachelard.

p 60
Of all the French historians of science, however, it was surely Gaston Bachelard (1884-1962) who was the most eccentric and, for Foucault in his formative years, the most important...


The more Bachelard studied the perverse power of the imagination, the more fascinated by it he became. In 1938, he began what turned into a sequence of studies on the role played in the imagination by the four primal elements -- earth, air, fire, and water. In each book, he classified the chimeras [not sure if this is the right link for chimeras] of poets with the rigor of a chemist. Some of Foucault’s most beautiful pages in Madness and Civilization, on the aquatic world plied by the medieval “Ship of Fools,” owe a very large debt to the way Bachelard analyzed the reverie of water. “No one,” Foucault would declare in 1954, “has better understood the dynamic work of the imagination.”


p 61
But Bachelard’s impact on Foucault did not stop there. For out of his unusual and sustained encounter with both poetry and modern physics, Bachelard wrested a world view that stressed ruptures, breaks, cleavages; instead of a dialectical harmony, he saw a human condition broken in two, with reason on one side and reverie on the other: “between concept and image there is no possible synthesis.” And though the rigorous application of reasoning in science might disclose the truth of what really is, only fluid images of poetry and the dreamworld could make reality sing. The imagination that could produce obstacles to scientific progress became for Bachelard a harbinger of a person’s “secret being” and “inner destiny,” pointing a way “beyond thought,” perhaps transgressing “the most certain of laws and human values” -- yet also provoking “a leap toward a new life.” By thus stressing the revelatory power of poetry and art, Bachelard’s later work curiously converged with that of Heidegger.


This also sounds like it contains aspects of Nietzsche’s Apollinian and Dionysian.


All the French philosophers of science, from Cavailles to Bachelard, rejected the idea that scientific discovery involved an accumulation of immutable truths that merely needed to be fitted together like some cosmic jigsaw puzzle. Instead, they stressed the creative role played by the scientist: far from being a gradual evolution, the history of science had been rocked by a series of conceptual revolutions, producing demonstrable “breaks,” marking fault lines in the way that scientists thought about the world. Our modern conception of the “true” was, in part, a historical product of these changing scientific theories that were liable to change again in the future...

At the risk of disappearing into a Shandean world of infinite digressions, I have to dip into Nietzsche here. At first I thought I could just give some basic concepts from The Birth of Tragedy and leave it at that, but I’ve read ahead a ways and there is really a great deal of Nietzsche and The Birth of Tragedy in what follows, so I am going to go full Shandy (or full Sterne) and switch to a more detailed examination of that book -- which I, fortunately, already have notes for.



Baseball.

I’m not a big sports fan, but I do follow sports. It’s my tradition to catch the end of the crucial game in major sports -- the last quarter of the Superbowl, the end of the World Cup, the final three innings of the deciding World Series game. Last night they played the seventh and final game of the 2014 World Series which my home team won. I was starving so I went to a neighborhood pizzeria early, in the fifth inning, to watch the game on TV as I ate.


Normally most of the action happens in the final innings, but this time I saw nothing but pitching, which turned out to be the best part. I have to assume that my reader is not familiar with American baseball (the best way to learn about the game is to read Roger Angell on the subject. He is a lovely writer in love with the game) so I’m going to say a little about pitching.


What I want to stress is how difficult it is to throw a ball past a batter. The starting pitcher begins the game and, these days, is expected to continue into the 6th or 7th inning when he turns the ball over to a series of specialist relief pitchers. The team that is leading when the 9th inning starts, will bring in their "Closer" to get the final three outs (known as a “save”). Getting those final outs is perhaps the hardest thing to do in baseball and the pressure and difficulty increases as the games get more important. Getting the final three outs to win the World Series is a truly daunting task that many otherwise excellent pitchers have failed at... spectacularly. You have to be exceptional just to be put in the position of doing this, yet often pitchers simply fail in the most visible way imaginable.


A team will usually have a #1 starter -- their “ace” -- and, because the games are played almost every day, #2, #3, and #4 starters as well. At some times teams will even have a #5 starter to give their pitchers a little more time to recover between starts. While much is expected of the #1 and #2 starters, the others might only be expected to get through four or so innings before turning the ball over to relievers.


When the Giants won the Series in 2010 they had three pitchers who could have been considered either #1 or #2 starters. In the third game of that Series the Texas Rangers could not score a single run against the rookie, Madison Bumgarner, who out pitched his more experienced fellow starters.


Two years later, the Giants only had two pitchers good enough for the #1 or #2 status, but they had three over-performing #3 starters. In 2012, as in 2010, the starting pitchers were usually good enough to get to the excellent set-up and Closers who could handle the 8th and 9th inning (and when one of the starters faltered one of the “aces” from 2010 was able to pick them up in his new long relief role). Madison Bumgarner pitched another shutout game in 2012.  


This year, 2014, the Giants only had Bumgarner as #1 and no obvious #2. The other three starters were really #4 or #5s and did not improve their game for the Series. There were still good relievers for the final innings, but often the games had been lost before they got to those pitchers. So the series largely came down to one person, Madison Bumgarner. In game one he won but gave up his first run in three World Series games (in three different World Series). In game five he pitched a complete game shutout. Which means that he was pitching so well that the manager didn’t do the obvious -- usually automatic -- thing of giving the ball to the specialists to close out the game. Then, in the deciding seventh game, after only two days rest, Bumgarner was called in again in the 5th inning, just as I started watching at my pizzeria, to relieve another regular relief pitcher. With only a one run lead, he pitched yet another five shutout innings to win (technically Save) the game and win the World Series for the Giants. Again, the manager didn’t even ask his Closer to warm up because Bumgarner was so dominating.


From what I’ve written here you might think it’s the pitcher, Madison Bumgarner who impresses me and provokes me to write, and he certainly is impressive. But it’s really the manager, Bruce Bochy, who interests me. Football is most often compared to war, and for good reason, but baseball, especially at the championship level, is, I think, even more like war with the manager as commander. The players are like regiments on the field of battle and Bumgarner is an excellent unit -- something like one of Caesar’s crack legions at the Battle of Pharsalus. But it’s the way Bochy uses his forces that wins championships. If you could have polled all the other managers in baseball at crucial moments in the 5th and 7th games, I doubt many would have made the same calls Bochy made. Many would have done the “safe” thing and gone to the set-up man, or at least the Closer in the ninth inning. I might have gone with the Closer myself because, as I said earlier, there is nothing harder than getting those final outs, and that was something even Bumgarner had never done in a World Series game prior to this week. And the Giant’s Closer is very good, so it might not have changed the outcome of either game... but you never know.


There’s a complicated game managers often play in the later innings, switching pitchers -- often replacing a right-hander with a left-hander, or vice-versa -- to get an advantage over a particular hitter. Bochy is good at this game, too. But there is always a risk taking the ball from one pitcher who’s going strong in favor of another pitcher who, statistically, should have an advantage over a particular batter... if he is on his game that day. This strategy can also fail. In games five and seven, Bochy wasn’t even tempted to play that game, he knew he had a good thing going and, as he said himself, “We just got on his horse and rode it.”

I really thought I could get through this without talking about Tim Lincecum, but it seems I can’t. While going through videos of these World Series, I found a video dedicated to Linsecum in 2012. Timmy, as he is known locally, was the ace in 2010 and a fan favorite -- known as "The Freak", for his strange delivery, though the long hair and a reputation for smoking weed probably kept the nickname going. He had previously won back to back Cy Young awards (the award for the best pitcher in each league), but in 2012 he had lost his starting role and was delegated to the bullpen for the World Series. Instead of throwing a tantrum, he became the Giant’s secret weapon in long relief: video here


Roger Angell “is the son of Katharine Sergeant Angell White, The New Yorker’s first fiction editor, and the stepson of renowned essayist E. B. White, but was raised for the most part by his father, Ernest Angell, an attorney who became head of the American Civil Liberties Union.” (Wiki) Angell has made a career out of writing the stories baseball provides -- being an excellent writer (even now, in his 90’s) hasn’t hurt. The story of the Giant’s success in 2010, 2012, and 2014 is also the story of other interesting players -- many from Latin America. Angell, in writing about baseball, has been shooting fish in a barrel, and more power to him. 



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