Supposing Mozart, or One of That Crowd...

...had tried writing a book about baseball?

Triumph and Tragedy in Mudville: A Lifelong Passion for Baseball is a collection of short pieces Stephen Jay Gould wrote for various magazines and newspapers, published shortly after his death. It is the most boringest book about baseball I've read in a long time. That surprised me, because when I'd seen Gould on TV he was generally interesting (except for the awful Simpsons ep that he phoned in), and his books on evolution and biology are generally well regarded (although I haven't read any of them). I'm not sure what I was expecting, but this certainly wasn't it.

Part of the problem is that "various magazines and newspapers" bit. Gould has about five baseball-related personal anecdotes that he relates over and over again. Published in separate venues at different times, it probably wasn't all that noticeable. Collect those articles together in the same volume, and the third time in fifty pages that you read about him getting beat up in Brooklyn for being a Yankee fan it starts getting a little tiresome.

The other thing is that he is unrelenting in his quest to show exactly how erudite he is. Granted, his target audience for most of these pieces was the New York Review of Books crowd, but it begins to approach self-parody in some passages. In a piece on the Abner Doubleday myth, in which he discusses why we know far more about the history of cricket than we do about the "base ball" mentioned by Jane Austen in Northanger Abbey, he states:

The upper and educated classes played cricket, and the history of the sport has been copiously documented because the literati write about their own interests, and because the activities of men in power are well recorded...

Apparently, despite all his fancy book learnin', Gould never learned the meaning of irony. It crops up again in a review of George Will's Men at Work:

By the way, Will's thesis, if ever properly grasped, would forthwith and forever end the silly discussion about the supposed anomaly of why so many intellectuals love baseball, and why baseball, alone among major sports, has a distinguished literature [with Will's book as the latest entry]. We who have loved and lived with the game all our lives feel no need to mount a defense against such ignorance.

That "defense against such ignorance" is, of course, exactly what both he and Will are doing in their respective works. The whole smarter than thou schtick gets annoying fast. There really is no legitimate excuse for using the phrase "fin de siècle" when "end of the century" works just as well and doesn't require checking the dictionary to figure out what the frell he's talking about.

There are some bright spots. His biographical sketches, especially those of Jim Thorpe and Dummy Hoy, are well worth reading (although the piece on Barry Bonds seems naïve now, but we have more information than Gould did), and there are a couple of pieces in which he flexes his scientist muscles that are interesting. Mostly, though, it's listless and boring. I have a theory that this may partly result from the almost inconceivable notion that he considered himself a fan of both the Yankees and the Red Sox. The only explanation I can think of for this sad state of affairs is that in the era in which he moved to Boston from New York there was no rivalry from the Yankee perspective. Sox fans hated the Yankees, but Yankee fans didn't give the Sox a second thought. Anyway, it means that all his fannish passion had to be carefully controlled, like matter and anti-matter, lest it explode. Despite the title, there just doesn't seem to be a lot of passion here.