Ever since we got shut out of the Garden of Eden, Jews and Christians have been trying to figure out what the subsequent "Fall of Man" in Genesis actually meant. And means. Now in 2009, could major league baseball have something to say on the matter...?
Here's the deal. Theologically speaking, we are both rationality and animality. Reason and will. Head and heart. While Adam and Eve didn't play baseball, we are lead to understand their rationality was always in perfect control of their animality. Good planning. Until that zero-fun serpent messed them up. By getting them tossed out of Paradise, it left them (and us) without this perfect rational control of our animal selves.
Until, that is, modern science came along a few hundred years ago to put human reason back on the throne. How? Modern science has brilliantly found ways to rationally splice and dice data into irrefutable formulas and cures and inventions. The human reason Adam and Eve screwed up, modern science has brought back. Bigger, bolder and more confidently than ever.
Now baseball is pushing the envelope to an astounding new frontier. The New York Times reports, "A new camera and software system in its final testing phases will record the exact speed and location of the ball and every player on the field, allowing the most digitzed of sports to be overrun anew by hundreds of innovative statistics that will rate players more accurately, perhaps altering forever how the game itself is played."
Talk about our rationality in complete charge of our animality...! Attention fans, when MLB gets through, your game and your players will be so scientifically re-packaged, even Adam, Eve, and the snake would be impressed.
Not exactly what the God of Genesis meant by mind over matter. Or what guys like Ruth and DiMaggio meant by baseball. But there it is fans. Well, except devoted Cub fans whose minds haven't mattered for 100 years!
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Forget technology, I'll take the "greatest generation" of baseball up through the 80's!
ReplyDeleteI think anyone who's lived long enough to compare THEN with NOW will agree. I'm sorry, but for all the fine modern athletes, so much of what makes them fine is the equipment and training and enhancements the "old timers" never had.
ReplyDeleteBut they did have something else -- they seemed to care about the team, not just the contract.
GOOD ARTICLE, BUT ALL THIS STUFF ABOUT BASEBALL USING HIGH TECH DOESN'T INTEREST ME AS MUCH AS A LITTLE SLIVER OF NEWS I HEARD EARLIER TODAY. A SPORTSCASTER MENTIONED THAT MOST OF THE NATION'S MAJOR LEAGUE BALLPARKS OFFER "SKYLINE" SEATS STARTING AT THREE HOURS BEFORE GAME TIME FOR JUST A BUCK APIECE. MAYBE BASEBALL CAN BE SAVED FOR OUR KIDS AFTER ALL, AND NOT JUST FOR THE HIGHROLLERS IN THE SPECIAL GLASSED-IN SUITES WITH CATERING !!
ReplyDeleteMy take is that MLB would do better with more dollar-seats than high-priced technology. Lot of us still have this funny idea the game is about commitment not computers!!!
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