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Part B in an Occasional Series
Aug. 3rd, 2013 02:43 pm
Currently at Toronto Pearson: 25, which'll probably be the high for today. The highs have been running below normal more or less every day since July 23. It's gotten down to single digits almost every night in Bancroft since then.
(Part A, obviously, has become somewhat out of date. Depending on where you're reading this, Part A now ought to be either Al Purdy or Annie Dillard. But I think we've covered those anyway, and will continue to do so, no doubt. So, onward! And tune in eight years (!) from now for Part C in an Occasional Series, which I have a feeling will still be "Canadian Shield".)
I think this must be the first year since 1984 that one of the starting pitchers in the All-Star Game was a guy I've never heard of before. (And, wow, 1984, Charlie Lea, really? I'd bet that no one has ever won as few games as his nine in his career following an All-Star Game start. Funny, I would've guessed that Atlee Hammaker started the 1984 All-Star Game for the NL, but he was actually the guy who gave up Fred Lynn's second-inning grand slam the year before--which was the first year I remember watching the All-Star Game--thus ensuring Dave Stieb the win. (He started again in 1984, and lost.) Seven earned in two-thirds of an inning for Atlee Hammaker in '83--surely the worst outing in all-star history? But he may have had the best name in all of baseball history.)
Sometimes I think maybe I should write a book called something like All I Really Needed to Know I Learned from Baseball. I’m often reminded of something Gary Matthews used to say on the radio: you can’t just hit one ball hard in any given game and expect to get a hit; you have to hit two or three balls hard to have a good chance of getting a hit. Lots of guys take an 0-for and say, yeah but I hit that one ball hard; that should've been a hit. Fact is, any ball you hit hard could easily be an out. Even if there’s only a 25% chance of getting out on any hard-hit ball, if you hit one ball hard per game in four at-bats, over the long haul you're going to hit .187, which is terrible. So if you have a game where you hit one ball hard, you had a terrible game. Even if you got lucky and it went over the fence, what you did in that game was terrible. This is something I think about, for instance, when I give myself just one shot to get something done, maybe by wasting time until I’ve only got time for one shot. When you do that, you might feel like, well, I’ll give it all I’ve got on that one shot. And then you do that, and something unexpected happens, something you have no control over, and your one good shot fails. And so you think, I gave it a good shot; I was just unlucky. But even if you were unlucky on that one shot, you weren’t unlucky on the whole; you were foolish to let success or failure rest on one shot.
What I’ve been thinking about lately has to do with the fact that my right shoulder—my throwing shoulder—has never really recovered from something I did to it lifting bags of groceries into a car in Apsley a couple of years ago. It popped out of joint and then right back in again, which is something that happens to my shoulders fairly often. When I was a kid, it was just my left shoulder that did it, and only ever on check-swings. The first time it happened was frightening, and I think it was the only time I ever came out of a baseball game because of an injury. Eventually both my shoulders were doing it, and sometimes it would happen just doing something like rolling over in bed. But it never did any lasting damage—didn't even hurt after a couple of minutes at most—until that one time in Apsley. That time, pretty clearly I tore something. It hurt for a couple of weeks and it has never really recovered. But I can get along almost entirely fine without whatever I tore; I guess other muscles or tendons or whatever compensate for it. I can even throw almost as hard as I could before--but only about once every couple of weeks. After that, it hurts, and with each successive throw it hurts more and more, so that if I keep throwing I can barely throw at all without setting my shoulder on fire (and it hurts more and more of my arm as I start short-arming it and straining my elbow … which is another story: on my way in to my very first tee-ball practice, when I was five, I picked up a ball in the outfield and threw it all the way in and my elbow went POP and that pretty much ended my pitching prospects right there). So I've got maybe one good throw in me per softball game. But: I’ve got about as many mediocre throws in me as I want. As long as I don’t push it past, I don’t know, 60%, 75%, it’s OK. The trouble is, I can’t not push it up to 100% if the situation in the game calls for it. Oh, you know, I can, in the same way that you can walk over to your window right now and pitch yourself out, and in the same way that Brett Lawrie can stop himself from taking blind leaps over walls after foul balls, but the fact is, if I cut off a ball in the outfield and the hitter is trying for second, I am going to fire it in as hard as I possibly can. (Which reminds me again of the thing in George F. Will’s Men at Work where a reporter asks Andre Dawson’s manager what he thought of Dawson making a reckless attempt at a foul ball in a meaningless situation and the manager looking at the reporter like he’s from another planet and saying: “He was playing hard.”) Probably my favourite play I’ve ever made in any game, by the way, was in one of our playoff games a few years ago—-one of about two playoff games we’ve ever won—-where I cut a ball off down the left field line and threw a strike to second, and the hitter was so surprised to see the ball get there ahead of him that he fell over backwards. That was awesome. (Even though people pay much more attention to offense than defense in baseball, there’s no question that the most aesthetically pleasing plays are defensive ones, because great defensive plays involve deliberate precision in a way that offensive plays can’t.)
Anyway, it’s gotten to the point this year where I’ve stopped playing the outfield and started playing mostly second base instead. (You’d think, until you start thinking about it (which I had never really done until the last couple of weeks), that second base would be much less arm-taxing than third, because it’s a much shorter throw to first, but you’d have it backwards. At second you have to make relay throws from the right side of the outfield to the plate, and those are a lot longer, and are usually made under more duress, than throws from third to first. (Then again, teams in our league almost always stick a weak-armed player at second, and maybe have the shortstop make all the relays (I’ve somehow never noticed, and our anarchist team never talks about how anyone should do anything) —it’s just second nature to me, from so many years of playing baseball, to go out to take the throw when the ball is hit to the right side of the outfield.) So that’s better for me, and it seems like it would be better for the team, except I don’t think it is, and that bugs me: there’s always a good chance that whoever replaces me in the outfield will throw worse at 100% than I would throw at 60-75%. (Whether or not I’m deluded about that, all that matters for present purposes is that I think it’s probably true.) If that’s true, then I’m hurting the team by playing second, with maximum effort, instead of playing the outfield, with less than maximum effort.
Thinking about that, teaching quickly comes to mind: teaching at maximum effort (by which I don’t mean “working hard” at it; I mean being fully engaged in it) hurts me. (Of course it doesn’t just hurt me, or I wouldn’t do it! Anyway, there’s nowhere on the diamond you can play where a situation calling on you to throw the ball as hard as you can isn’t going to come up sooner or later. A few weeks ago I was playing first base—the safest position apart from catcher, which is where you play if you almost literally can’t throw at all—and a throw from short went off my glove to the outfield side. As I was picking it up at the fence I heard shouts of “home!” so I spun and fired it to the catcher. We got the out; my shoulder hurt, and it was worth it.) It might be better on the whole if I could pull it back, pull myself back, 25-40% … whatever that might mean. (Be 40% less of a lunatic and more professional?) But I can’t. I won’t. I’d rather just keep throwing as hard as I can until my arm falls off and I can’t throw at all.
Another thing I’ve been thinking about lately is the idea of being stuck in a narrative. I had to think about whether this is something more familiar from baseball or politics, and then I realized that in politics people talk about “changing the narrative”—e.g., if the narrative you’ve been selling is that you had to invade Iraq because Saddam wouldn’t cough up his WMDs, and then it turns out that Saddam didn’t have any WMDs, then you need to change the narrative to something else, like you had to invade Iraq because Saddam was oppressing the Kurds or whatever. Of course, examples abound of being stuck in a narrative in politics, too—after all, if being stuck in a narrative is a something you really needed to know about that you learned from baseball, then you’d have to find important examples of it in any direction you look. But then, the trouble is that being stuck in a narrative is a lot like being in the grip of an ideology—I guess being stuck in a narrative is a way of being in the grip of an ideology—in that people are going to disagree over what counts as being stuck in a narrative. You’re stuck in a narrative if you’re so committed to a certain story about how things are that you ignore or unjustifiably discount evidence that ought to make you doubt the story. So, climate-change skeptics think that most of us are stuck in a narrative about climate change. On the other hand, there are cases where the narrative includes falsifiable predictions (which the anthropogenic climate change narrative does not), and when those predictions actually turn out to be false, you have to give up the narrative (if you’re a reasonable person!)--by now you’ve had to give up whatever story you might’ve had about why the NDP can never win in Quebec, or about why the Liberals will remain the natural governing party of Canada. Then again, on the other hand of that other hand, people can still cling to their narratives even in the face of overwhelming contrary evidence. Plenty of people persist in believing that Jack Morris “pitched to the score” (and so deserves to be the in Hall of Fame despite having a career ERA a run higher than Dave Stieb’s. I don’t think I ever got around to posting a comparison I did up a while ago of Dave Stieb’s 1985, when he led the league in ERA and went 14-13, and Jack Morris’s 1992, when he won 21 games with an ERA of four and a half—I was comparing their game results when they gave up, e.g., two runs or less and five runs or more, so, you know, it goes something like Stieb loses every time he gives up five runs or more while Morris, well, doesn’t, and Morris wins every time he gives up two runs or less while Stieb gets a bunch of losses and no-decisions. The incredible thing about Stieb’s 1985 is that he did that on a team that won 99 games—more than Morris’s 1992 Jays. It’s one thing for Felix Hernandez to go one game over .500 while leading the league in ERA with a last-place team that can’t hit; it’s another to do that with a first-place team that scores a boatload of runs for everyone except you.) But the stats show no significant correlation between game situations and how Morris performed. How is it that people remain stuck in the Morris narrative? Well, for one thing, Morris himself believes it and keeps preaching it. (So I guess he at least believes that he tried to throw more fastball strikes when he had a comfortable lead. Maybe he even did do that--but if he did, all it goes to show, when you put it together with the results, is that he might as well have tried to throw more fastball strikes all the time.) But mostly, people are going to say something like it’s an intangible thing that stats can’t measure, which doesn’t really make any sense. The stats simply show that Morris didn’t pitch better in close games than he did otherwise. But you can’t hold those stats in your head—any more than you (if you’re an ordinary person) can hold stats about atmospheric carbon and temperature in your head—like you can hold 20-win seasons and 10-inning playoff shutouts in your head. While I’m sitting here writing this (at the cottage, with no internet), I have no idea what the stats actually look like; I just remember hearing that they show that Morris didn’t pitch better in close games … so I guess you can draw your own conclusions about whether it’s more reasonable to believe me or some geezer who knows that hustle wins games. (OK, back home, I see that according to Baseball Reference Morris's career opponents' OPS in "high leverage" situations was .695, and in "low leverage" situations it was .694. So, when it mattered most, he pitched insignificantly worse than when it mattered least (with, ha, exactly the same career difference as his 1987 staffmate Walt Terrell). Tell ya what, though, looking around at some other pitchers, a lot of them were significantly worse in high-leverage situations. One exception I've found is Roger Clemens--14 points better. Even Greg Maddux's opponents' OPS was 36 points worse in high-leverage situations. Dave Stieb's was--uh oh--55 points worse. Oh look, though, Roy Halladay: 14 points better. Attaboy, Roy! But geez, Cliff Lee: 34 points better. So, uh, what does this show? Uh ... not much. Although it appears that Cliff Lee is a much more "clutch" pitcher than Jack Morris was, which is a surprising result. (Juan Guzman: also a more clutch pitcher than Jack Morris. Awesome!) So, who's stuck in a narrative, the people who think Jack Morris didn't really effectively "pitch to the score", or the people who think he did? Damned if I know, really.)
You could say that what Nietzsche means by “imposing style on your character” can be put in terms of giving your life a coherent narrative. Nietzsche says it’s something only a few of the strong type can do (because only they can cut away the parts of themselves that don’t fit; everyone else had better learn to live with incoherence, with being lousy works of art, with having parts that stick out and parts that clash, with being great big messes. (The “one thing needful”, he says in that aphorism, is to be able to live with yourself, one way or the other, because if you can’t live with yourself, you’re not fit to live with anyone else, either.) Imposing style on your character means choosing a narrative, the narrative that tells the story of the person you want to be, and willing yourself to be stuck in it—but not willing yourself to be stuck in it contrary to the evidence, but willing it so much to be true that there no longer is any contrary evidence. (Hence, one story goes, you “become what you are”.)
There’s another Nietzsche, a later Nietzsche, who says “I mistrust systematizers and avoid them” because “the will to a system is a lack of integrity”. That’s kind of a joke; the point is that reality itself lacks integrity, and so no system can be true to it. The very last Nietzsche (who hardly anyone cares about except Deleuze and Guattari … and Kundera) says: “I am Prado; I am also father Prado. I am all the names of history.” I am large; I contain multitudes. The second-last Nietzsche, of Ecce Homo, tells his own story, the story of a sick and weak man who writes such great books because he has always been falling apart. The will to truth is a symptom of weakness—or of strength turned against itself, asceticism. The strange thing is that those weak ones who seek to win by reason set coherence as the standard—that’s the point of the Socratic elenchos; if your beliefs are incoherent, you lose. (But note that Socrates always wins this game by not playing, or at least he always avoids losing by conceding from the outset that he can’t win.) Plato supposedly takes the Socratic method and makes a metaphysics of it: the good is one; the sign of a dialectical person is the ability to take a unified view of things. That’s the sign of a dialectical person, but it doesn’t mean either that the end of dialectic itself is a unified view of things or that the dialectical person essentially takes a unified view of things—it doesn’t mean that things in themselves are unified. The truth is a mess. The good is one, but every one is many. The end of dialectic is seeing that, which means seeing that there is no end to dialectic. That’s the mathematical secret given away at the beginning of the discussion of the philosopher’s education after the cave allegory: philosophers first of all have to know how to count, but in the end what that means is that they have to see that there are endless ways to count things. To be a philosopher is to count things according to their forms, but in the end it turns out that there are endless ways to count the forms, because a form is generated any time two or more particulars are collected together—for every many, there is a one. You find out what the one is by collecting together the salient particulars, but you can only pick out the salient particulars to be collected together on the basis of some view of what the one is. This doesn’t mean you’re necessarily stuck in whatever narrative you start with—the action of dialectic is (in part) the transcendence of narratives, coming to see that there are other ways of collecting the particulars, other ways of seeing the one that is the standard of salience. You do it most simply by talking to other people--dialektikos originally means nothing other than dialogue; you see that someone else sees things differently than you do. If the other person really is seeing things differently than you do (and not just making shit up), then, if you’re a dialectical person, you don’t try to decide who’s right and who’s wrong (you neither remain stuck in a narrative nor change the narrative in the sense of abandoning one for another), but you put the two views together into a unified view—and then you go on and try to do it again, and again.
(What, you were expecting a point?)
(Part A, obviously, has become somewhat out of date. Depending on where you're reading this, Part A now ought to be either Al Purdy or Annie Dillard. But I think we've covered those anyway, and will continue to do so, no doubt. So, onward! And tune in eight years (!) from now for Part C in an Occasional Series, which I have a feeling will still be "Canadian Shield".)
I think this must be the first year since 1984 that one of the starting pitchers in the All-Star Game was a guy I've never heard of before. (And, wow, 1984, Charlie Lea, really? I'd bet that no one has ever won as few games as his nine in his career following an All-Star Game start. Funny, I would've guessed that Atlee Hammaker started the 1984 All-Star Game for the NL, but he was actually the guy who gave up Fred Lynn's second-inning grand slam the year before--which was the first year I remember watching the All-Star Game--thus ensuring Dave Stieb the win. (He started again in 1984, and lost.) Seven earned in two-thirds of an inning for Atlee Hammaker in '83--surely the worst outing in all-star history? But he may have had the best name in all of baseball history.)
Sometimes I think maybe I should write a book called something like All I Really Needed to Know I Learned from Baseball. I’m often reminded of something Gary Matthews used to say on the radio: you can’t just hit one ball hard in any given game and expect to get a hit; you have to hit two or three balls hard to have a good chance of getting a hit. Lots of guys take an 0-for and say, yeah but I hit that one ball hard; that should've been a hit. Fact is, any ball you hit hard could easily be an out. Even if there’s only a 25% chance of getting out on any hard-hit ball, if you hit one ball hard per game in four at-bats, over the long haul you're going to hit .187, which is terrible. So if you have a game where you hit one ball hard, you had a terrible game. Even if you got lucky and it went over the fence, what you did in that game was terrible. This is something I think about, for instance, when I give myself just one shot to get something done, maybe by wasting time until I’ve only got time for one shot. When you do that, you might feel like, well, I’ll give it all I’ve got on that one shot. And then you do that, and something unexpected happens, something you have no control over, and your one good shot fails. And so you think, I gave it a good shot; I was just unlucky. But even if you were unlucky on that one shot, you weren’t unlucky on the whole; you were foolish to let success or failure rest on one shot.
What I’ve been thinking about lately has to do with the fact that my right shoulder—my throwing shoulder—has never really recovered from something I did to it lifting bags of groceries into a car in Apsley a couple of years ago. It popped out of joint and then right back in again, which is something that happens to my shoulders fairly often. When I was a kid, it was just my left shoulder that did it, and only ever on check-swings. The first time it happened was frightening, and I think it was the only time I ever came out of a baseball game because of an injury. Eventually both my shoulders were doing it, and sometimes it would happen just doing something like rolling over in bed. But it never did any lasting damage—didn't even hurt after a couple of minutes at most—until that one time in Apsley. That time, pretty clearly I tore something. It hurt for a couple of weeks and it has never really recovered. But I can get along almost entirely fine without whatever I tore; I guess other muscles or tendons or whatever compensate for it. I can even throw almost as hard as I could before--but only about once every couple of weeks. After that, it hurts, and with each successive throw it hurts more and more, so that if I keep throwing I can barely throw at all without setting my shoulder on fire (and it hurts more and more of my arm as I start short-arming it and straining my elbow … which is another story: on my way in to my very first tee-ball practice, when I was five, I picked up a ball in the outfield and threw it all the way in and my elbow went POP and that pretty much ended my pitching prospects right there). So I've got maybe one good throw in me per softball game. But: I’ve got about as many mediocre throws in me as I want. As long as I don’t push it past, I don’t know, 60%, 75%, it’s OK. The trouble is, I can’t not push it up to 100% if the situation in the game calls for it. Oh, you know, I can, in the same way that you can walk over to your window right now and pitch yourself out, and in the same way that Brett Lawrie can stop himself from taking blind leaps over walls after foul balls, but the fact is, if I cut off a ball in the outfield and the hitter is trying for second, I am going to fire it in as hard as I possibly can. (Which reminds me again of the thing in George F. Will’s Men at Work where a reporter asks Andre Dawson’s manager what he thought of Dawson making a reckless attempt at a foul ball in a meaningless situation and the manager looking at the reporter like he’s from another planet and saying: “He was playing hard.”) Probably my favourite play I’ve ever made in any game, by the way, was in one of our playoff games a few years ago—-one of about two playoff games we’ve ever won—-where I cut a ball off down the left field line and threw a strike to second, and the hitter was so surprised to see the ball get there ahead of him that he fell over backwards. That was awesome. (Even though people pay much more attention to offense than defense in baseball, there’s no question that the most aesthetically pleasing plays are defensive ones, because great defensive plays involve deliberate precision in a way that offensive plays can’t.)
Anyway, it’s gotten to the point this year where I’ve stopped playing the outfield and started playing mostly second base instead. (You’d think, until you start thinking about it (which I had never really done until the last couple of weeks), that second base would be much less arm-taxing than third, because it’s a much shorter throw to first, but you’d have it backwards. At second you have to make relay throws from the right side of the outfield to the plate, and those are a lot longer, and are usually made under more duress, than throws from third to first. (Then again, teams in our league almost always stick a weak-armed player at second, and maybe have the shortstop make all the relays (I’ve somehow never noticed, and our anarchist team never talks about how anyone should do anything) —it’s just second nature to me, from so many years of playing baseball, to go out to take the throw when the ball is hit to the right side of the outfield.) So that’s better for me, and it seems like it would be better for the team, except I don’t think it is, and that bugs me: there’s always a good chance that whoever replaces me in the outfield will throw worse at 100% than I would throw at 60-75%. (Whether or not I’m deluded about that, all that matters for present purposes is that I think it’s probably true.) If that’s true, then I’m hurting the team by playing second, with maximum effort, instead of playing the outfield, with less than maximum effort.
Thinking about that, teaching quickly comes to mind: teaching at maximum effort (by which I don’t mean “working hard” at it; I mean being fully engaged in it) hurts me. (Of course it doesn’t just hurt me, or I wouldn’t do it! Anyway, there’s nowhere on the diamond you can play where a situation calling on you to throw the ball as hard as you can isn’t going to come up sooner or later. A few weeks ago I was playing first base—the safest position apart from catcher, which is where you play if you almost literally can’t throw at all—and a throw from short went off my glove to the outfield side. As I was picking it up at the fence I heard shouts of “home!” so I spun and fired it to the catcher. We got the out; my shoulder hurt, and it was worth it.) It might be better on the whole if I could pull it back, pull myself back, 25-40% … whatever that might mean. (Be 40% less of a lunatic and more professional?) But I can’t. I won’t. I’d rather just keep throwing as hard as I can until my arm falls off and I can’t throw at all.
Another thing I’ve been thinking about lately is the idea of being stuck in a narrative. I had to think about whether this is something more familiar from baseball or politics, and then I realized that in politics people talk about “changing the narrative”—e.g., if the narrative you’ve been selling is that you had to invade Iraq because Saddam wouldn’t cough up his WMDs, and then it turns out that Saddam didn’t have any WMDs, then you need to change the narrative to something else, like you had to invade Iraq because Saddam was oppressing the Kurds or whatever. Of course, examples abound of being stuck in a narrative in politics, too—after all, if being stuck in a narrative is a something you really needed to know about that you learned from baseball, then you’d have to find important examples of it in any direction you look. But then, the trouble is that being stuck in a narrative is a lot like being in the grip of an ideology—I guess being stuck in a narrative is a way of being in the grip of an ideology—in that people are going to disagree over what counts as being stuck in a narrative. You’re stuck in a narrative if you’re so committed to a certain story about how things are that you ignore or unjustifiably discount evidence that ought to make you doubt the story. So, climate-change skeptics think that most of us are stuck in a narrative about climate change. On the other hand, there are cases where the narrative includes falsifiable predictions (which the anthropogenic climate change narrative does not), and when those predictions actually turn out to be false, you have to give up the narrative (if you’re a reasonable person!)--by now you’ve had to give up whatever story you might’ve had about why the NDP can never win in Quebec, or about why the Liberals will remain the natural governing party of Canada. Then again, on the other hand of that other hand, people can still cling to their narratives even in the face of overwhelming contrary evidence. Plenty of people persist in believing that Jack Morris “pitched to the score” (and so deserves to be the in Hall of Fame despite having a career ERA a run higher than Dave Stieb’s. I don’t think I ever got around to posting a comparison I did up a while ago of Dave Stieb’s 1985, when he led the league in ERA and went 14-13, and Jack Morris’s 1992, when he won 21 games with an ERA of four and a half—I was comparing their game results when they gave up, e.g., two runs or less and five runs or more, so, you know, it goes something like Stieb loses every time he gives up five runs or more while Morris, well, doesn’t, and Morris wins every time he gives up two runs or less while Stieb gets a bunch of losses and no-decisions. The incredible thing about Stieb’s 1985 is that he did that on a team that won 99 games—more than Morris’s 1992 Jays. It’s one thing for Felix Hernandez to go one game over .500 while leading the league in ERA with a last-place team that can’t hit; it’s another to do that with a first-place team that scores a boatload of runs for everyone except you.) But the stats show no significant correlation between game situations and how Morris performed. How is it that people remain stuck in the Morris narrative? Well, for one thing, Morris himself believes it and keeps preaching it. (So I guess he at least believes that he tried to throw more fastball strikes when he had a comfortable lead. Maybe he even did do that--but if he did, all it goes to show, when you put it together with the results, is that he might as well have tried to throw more fastball strikes all the time.) But mostly, people are going to say something like it’s an intangible thing that stats can’t measure, which doesn’t really make any sense. The stats simply show that Morris didn’t pitch better in close games than he did otherwise. But you can’t hold those stats in your head—any more than you (if you’re an ordinary person) can hold stats about atmospheric carbon and temperature in your head—like you can hold 20-win seasons and 10-inning playoff shutouts in your head. While I’m sitting here writing this (at the cottage, with no internet), I have no idea what the stats actually look like; I just remember hearing that they show that Morris didn’t pitch better in close games … so I guess you can draw your own conclusions about whether it’s more reasonable to believe me or some geezer who knows that hustle wins games. (OK, back home, I see that according to Baseball Reference Morris's career opponents' OPS in "high leverage" situations was .695, and in "low leverage" situations it was .694. So, when it mattered most, he pitched insignificantly worse than when it mattered least (with, ha, exactly the same career difference as his 1987 staffmate Walt Terrell). Tell ya what, though, looking around at some other pitchers, a lot of them were significantly worse in high-leverage situations. One exception I've found is Roger Clemens--14 points better. Even Greg Maddux's opponents' OPS was 36 points worse in high-leverage situations. Dave Stieb's was--uh oh--55 points worse. Oh look, though, Roy Halladay: 14 points better. Attaboy, Roy! But geez, Cliff Lee: 34 points better. So, uh, what does this show? Uh ... not much. Although it appears that Cliff Lee is a much more "clutch" pitcher than Jack Morris was, which is a surprising result. (Juan Guzman: also a more clutch pitcher than Jack Morris. Awesome!) So, who's stuck in a narrative, the people who think Jack Morris didn't really effectively "pitch to the score", or the people who think he did? Damned if I know, really.)
You could say that what Nietzsche means by “imposing style on your character” can be put in terms of giving your life a coherent narrative. Nietzsche says it’s something only a few of the strong type can do (because only they can cut away the parts of themselves that don’t fit; everyone else had better learn to live with incoherence, with being lousy works of art, with having parts that stick out and parts that clash, with being great big messes. (The “one thing needful”, he says in that aphorism, is to be able to live with yourself, one way or the other, because if you can’t live with yourself, you’re not fit to live with anyone else, either.) Imposing style on your character means choosing a narrative, the narrative that tells the story of the person you want to be, and willing yourself to be stuck in it—but not willing yourself to be stuck in it contrary to the evidence, but willing it so much to be true that there no longer is any contrary evidence. (Hence, one story goes, you “become what you are”.)
There’s another Nietzsche, a later Nietzsche, who says “I mistrust systematizers and avoid them” because “the will to a system is a lack of integrity”. That’s kind of a joke; the point is that reality itself lacks integrity, and so no system can be true to it. The very last Nietzsche (who hardly anyone cares about except Deleuze and Guattari … and Kundera) says: “I am Prado; I am also father Prado. I am all the names of history.” I am large; I contain multitudes. The second-last Nietzsche, of Ecce Homo, tells his own story, the story of a sick and weak man who writes such great books because he has always been falling apart. The will to truth is a symptom of weakness—or of strength turned against itself, asceticism. The strange thing is that those weak ones who seek to win by reason set coherence as the standard—that’s the point of the Socratic elenchos; if your beliefs are incoherent, you lose. (But note that Socrates always wins this game by not playing, or at least he always avoids losing by conceding from the outset that he can’t win.) Plato supposedly takes the Socratic method and makes a metaphysics of it: the good is one; the sign of a dialectical person is the ability to take a unified view of things. That’s the sign of a dialectical person, but it doesn’t mean either that the end of dialectic itself is a unified view of things or that the dialectical person essentially takes a unified view of things—it doesn’t mean that things in themselves are unified. The truth is a mess. The good is one, but every one is many. The end of dialectic is seeing that, which means seeing that there is no end to dialectic. That’s the mathematical secret given away at the beginning of the discussion of the philosopher’s education after the cave allegory: philosophers first of all have to know how to count, but in the end what that means is that they have to see that there are endless ways to count things. To be a philosopher is to count things according to their forms, but in the end it turns out that there are endless ways to count the forms, because a form is generated any time two or more particulars are collected together—for every many, there is a one. You find out what the one is by collecting together the salient particulars, but you can only pick out the salient particulars to be collected together on the basis of some view of what the one is. This doesn’t mean you’re necessarily stuck in whatever narrative you start with—the action of dialectic is (in part) the transcendence of narratives, coming to see that there are other ways of collecting the particulars, other ways of seeing the one that is the standard of salience. You do it most simply by talking to other people--dialektikos originally means nothing other than dialogue; you see that someone else sees things differently than you do. If the other person really is seeing things differently than you do (and not just making shit up), then, if you’re a dialectical person, you don’t try to decide who’s right and who’s wrong (you neither remain stuck in a narrative nor change the narrative in the sense of abandoning one for another), but you put the two views together into a unified view—and then you go on and try to do it again, and again.
(What, you were expecting a point?)
