George Will’s Marxist Theory of Baseball

Sports fans tend to be Republicans. One could be forgiven for thinking that Pulitzer Prize winning conservative columnist George Will has given them their manifesto.

Will’s best-selling Men at Work was re-released as a 20^th anniversary edition in April. In it, Will sets forth his theory of the “craft” of baseball that looks like a paean to the industriousness and personal responsibility that bowtie conservatives (profess to) love. Yet, what Will admires most in baseball is exactly what Karl Marx lamented is missing from capitalism; Will’s doctrine of labor on the baseball diamond is the Marxist ideal through and through. As Mel Allen said to his comrades, “How about that?”

Will certainly believes he’s writing a conservative tract. He describes his book as “antiromantic,” and in the forward to the new edition, he writes “baseball has had quite enough books of romance, nostalgia and gush.” Will associates such traits with bleeding heart liberalism, of course. (He writes of former Yankee Tony Kubek that he “is a liberal and therefore as warmhearted as all get out”. By contrast, Will argues that “umpires should be natural Republicans- dead to human feelings.”)

The book’s full title- Men at Work: The Craft of Baseball- captures Will’s thesis. Baseball is work, and to work is to ply a craft. “What spectators pay to see”, Will writes, “is a realm of excellence,” where excellence is achieved through good “character, work habits and intelligence.” Men at Work, first published in 1990, focuses on just four figures -Tony La Russa, Orel Hershiser, Tony Gwynn, and Cal Ripken, Jr.. (According to Will, each represents excellence at one of the four facets of the game: managing, pitching, hitting and fielding.) Men at Work does not awe at their innate physical abilities, but instead is a study of their character, studiousness and dedication to self-improvement.

Whence conservatism? Will writes that one of his “most deeply held convictions” is that “character is destiny”. (Etymology backs him up; ‘character‘ derives from a word meaning ‘to scratch or engrave’, i.e. to set in stone). Conservatives have long lamented that government involvement in daily life, particularly via welfare programs, causes (or rewards) laziness. Their derision of the “nanny state” suggests government is infantilizing, and hinders the formation of a strong, self-sufficient character. Pontificating near the end of the book, Will suggests that “America’s real problem is individual understretch, a tendency of Americans to demand too little of themselves, at their lathes, their desks, their computer terminals.” Rewards, then, should not be forthcoming. Will complains that Andre Dawson and George Bell both won MVP awards in 1987 despite their “indiscipline”; after all, they homered more often then they walked.

Men at Work, then, is a story of just rewards. It depicts the upright character of those who are dedicated to the craft of baseball. Will downplays natural advantages- such as the sink on Hershiser’s 90+ mile per hour fastball- and the advantages conferred by high birth- such as Cal Ripken Jr. being the son of baseball lifer Cal Ripken Sr. Will even ridicules those who think the law exists to protect rights: “the pitcher’s principle problem today is to get away with pitching inside as often as he needs to. There is too much litigiousness by batters who, like all other Americans, are very sensitive about their rights, real and imagined.” In short, conservatives should love it.

Yet Will is a closet Marxist.

Karl Marx believed that having consciousness and free will are distinctively human. Whereas nonhuman animals instinctively and unknowingly toil to satisfy physical needs, humans can freely undertake more creative projects. Humans, unlike other animals, can conceive of what they wish to accomplish, and can follow their internal mental blueprint in order to make objective- real- the objects of their conceptions. To freely undertake such projects is, according to Marx, to live a fully human life.

But in capitalism, Marx laments, physical labor is divorced – alienated- from the idea that motivates the work. The man on the assembly line is only familiar with one small part of the finished product, and he need not even know what he is making. As the division of labor increases, labor becomes more fragmented, and the worker has no conception of the whole. Man’s consciousness is wasted, Marx argues, and the worker can only operate on something akin to instinct, as an animal. Such labor is thus experienced as a degrading subhuman activity.

As a result, “alienated labor” can only be a means to an end, an objectionable way to receive a wage so as to satisfy needs outside of work, such as food and shelter and speculation about Lebron James’ free agency. Consequently, Marx writes, “as soon as no physical or other compulsion exists, labor is shunned like the plague.”

When labor is alienated, it is not its own reward. So instead of the happiness and joy that comes of freely completing a project of one’s own design, there is only the “torment” and “misery” of monotonous meaningless work. Instead of the pride that comes from making real what had been only a concept in the mind, there is no concern for the finished product. Instead of the internal desire for good work, there is only the external compulsion of the boss’ directives and the landlord’s demands. In short, there is no craft.

Yet Will gleefully describes his book as being about “four men who are happy in their work.” What is happiness, according to Will? “For a fortunate few people, happiness is the pursuit of excellence in a vocation. The vocation can be a profession or a craft, elite or common, poetry or carpentry. What matters most is an idea of excellence against which to measure achievement.”

Where is that idea of excellence to be found? Will contends that “A great athlete has an image graven on his or her imagination, a picture of an approach to perfection.” Exactly what Marx claims capitalism is missing. But because it is present on Will’s baseball diamond, Will knows that the craft of baseball is not merely a means to an end, an objectionable way to feed the family, but an end in itself, something done for it’s own sake. Consequently, it is not merely the result that matters, but the process. “Winning is not everything”, Will writes. “Baseball- its beauty, its craftsmanship, its exactingness- is an activity to be loved, as much as ballet or fishing or politics.” It is the activity, not the goal, that is worthy of love. So rather than shunning work when no compulsion exists, even ballplayers with long term guaranteed contracts show up early to take extra batting practice.

Will starts Chapter 3 like this:

“Early in the 1989 season Tony Gwynn hit home runs in consecutive games and was even more displeased with his hitting than he generally is. The second home run came after an afternoon spent toiling to remove the flaws in the way he had swung the bat in the game in which he hit the first one… The previous night he had hit two balls hard. One pleased him, the other distressed him. The pleasing one was an out, the distressing one was a home run.”

Gwynn’s goal is not to get hits, but to hit well. “Even though the results are there,” Gwynn tells Will, “I’m not swinging the bat the way I want to swing it. I’ve hit one ball hard to left field out of the 27 at bats I’ve had.” Yet when labor is alienated, only results matter: the order is made or it isn’t, the products are sold or they aren’t. Eschewing the external demands of the marketplace or the box score, Gwynn is free to hone his skills by his own lights, and to his own satisfaction. When labor is alienated, Marx wrote, man only “feels at home when he is not working, and when he is working he does not feel at home”. Gwynn, a California native, a career-long San Diego Padre, and now head coach at his alma mater San Diego State, is clearly at home when he’s at work.

Of course, Marx’ solution to the problem of alienated labor was to eliminate private property. Fittingly, there is no private property on a ball field, dugout, or even in the team showers. Marxists don’t use stalls.

Will does mention Marx once. “About one thing Karl Marx, a lefty, was right”, Will concedes. “Change the modes of production and you will change the nature of work, and consciousness.” Will brings this up only to argue against adopting the aluminum bat.

Conservatives dismiss Marxism as utopian, and hence unrealistic. They think that leftists foster an unrealistic hope in the power of government to transform people into cooperative team-players, even without the profit motive of the free market. Will asserts that “acknowledging limits is, surely, the essence of conservatism (and of realism, which conservatives consider much the same thing.)” But though there are physical limits- fastballs can’t go 200 miles per hour- Will’s is a demonstration of the limitless dedication to perform. Instead of profit, Will’s ballplayers- financially set for life- are motivated only by excellence. His is a case study of the irrelevance of profit to craft. As Shoeless Joe Jackson – a man not enjoying an early retirement from work- says in Field of Dreams, “I’d have played for meal money. I’d have played for nothing.”

Will, in addressing the perennial baseball question- perennial since 1973, at least- as to the legitimacy of the designated hitter, has this to say:

“The best case for the DH is this: it represents the rarest of things, the triumph of evidence over ideology. The anti-DH ideology is that there should be no specialization in baseball, no division of labor: Everyone should play ‘the whole game’. That theory is obliterated by this fact: specialization is a fact with or without the DH. Most pitchers only go through the motions at bat.”

In Men at Work, Will has provided a Marxist counterexample to his own conservative ideology. If only he were to step up to the plate.