Durkheim at the Bat: The Elementary Forms of Baseball Life

April 27, 2023
Posted by Jay Livingston

Drew Maggi was a 15th-round draft pick by the Pirates in 2010. He played in the minor leages for thirteen years — Double-A and Triple-A farm teams of a half-dozen different MLB franchises, 1,155 games, 4,494 times at the plate,  Yesterday, three weeks shy of his 34th birthday, he made his first appearance in a MLB game. He was a pinch hitter in the bottom of the eighth inning in a game the Pirates (the division-leading Pirates!) were winning 8-1. He struck out.

The fans cheered. They had cheered even more loudly the moment he was announced. All the Pirates in the dugout had cheered and applauded. And after the game, he was interviewed on the field and on the jumbotron just as if he had hit a walk-off home run.

I imagine Durkheim watching all this, sitting somewhere in the upper deck, thoughtfully sipping a beer. Yes, this is a celebration of Drew Maggi, he thinks, but rituals — and surely this is a ritual — even when they focus on some central individual, are performed not just by the group but for the group. What’s being extolled here is not Drew Maggi, it’s baseball itself. The important point is that we are acting here not as individuals doing what’s in our self-interest, but as members of the group, doing what’s necessary for the group.

Groups come together for these rituals often in response to some threat. External threats are obvious. In the face of threat from another team, we wave our yellow towels. Internal threats are harder to see, but when you see people reacting as if to a threat, and they are not under attack, the threat is probably internal. Quitters are a good example.

A quitter is a threat to the group not because the group is left with one less team member. What’s at stake is the whole premise of the group, because what the quitter is saying is that the very basis for the group  is silly or stupid or harmful. That’s why group reactions can seem way out of proportion. Two years ago, I wrote (here)  about the reaction, especially on the political right, when Simone Biles, for perfectly understandable reasons, chose not to participate in the Olympics. “Quitter,” “selfish psychopath,” “very selfish ... immature ... a shame to the country,” “selfish, childish, national embarrassment.” Jason Whitlock at The Blaze wrote about Biles’s “felonious act of quitting.” Yes, a felony.

Drew Maggi is the other side of this coin. Minor league players have about a 10% chance of making it “to the show,” and even those odds dwindle with age. In sports, thirtysomethings are not exactly hot prospects. The annual salary is less than $30,000 (Triple-A minimum is $700 a week). As for working conditions, the principal attraction is that you get to play baseball. A lot. The sensible thing for a 34-year old man who for thirteen years has never gotten to the major leagues would have been to quit. We the group, we fans and players, raise Drew Maggi up as the focus of this ritual because he symbolizes the reassuring idea that despite all that, baseball is worth it.

Durkheim drains the last of his beer as the fans file for the exits. This spontaneous ritual in PNC Park, he thinks, has the same function as nearly all other rituals: to uphold the fundamental idea of the group and to reaffirm each participant as a part of that group.

Mrs. Maisel Yet Again — 1961 Talking Like It’s 2011.

April 18, 2023
Posted by Jay Livingston

Five years ago, I posted here about the language anachronisms in “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel.” That post (here) remains the most visited page in this blog, the number of views now approaching 20,000. Last night I watched the first two episodes of Season Five, and I have the same question that I had five years ago with Season One: How can they let these obvious anachronisms make it into the final script?

In Season Five, the year is 1961, and Midge has taken a job in the writers’ room for a TV show much like The Tonight Show. She was reluctant to take the job – she’s a performer, not a writer — and on her first day, she calls her manager Susie to ask for advice.

Fake it till you make it may be good advice, but nobody used that phrase in 1961. Nobody. Nor did anyone talk about “going rogue.” But in Episode One, Midge tells Susie, “We had a plan, then I went rogue.”

I ran these phrases by Google nGrams. Here are the results:

(Click on the image for a larger view.)

These phrases did not exist in 1961. Yes,the nGrams data is from books, and trendy phrases turn up in speech — in conversations, on television — before they appear in print, so we should allow for some lag time. A few years perhaps, but not a few decades.

There were others you can find on nGrams: out of the loop, track record, not on the same page. These too arrived much later in the century. Other words just sounded wrong --- at least to my ears, and my ears were around in 1961 —  but I had no quick way to check them: not gonna happen, and suck meaning to be of poor quality.

In that 2018 post, I quoted Amy Sherman-Palladino, co-creator and chief writer of the show saying that she hired a “delightful researcher who has like twelve masters degrees in everything in the world” and who questions things that don’t sound right. Sherman-Palladino herself says, “The last thing I want to do, when everyone is making sure that the piping on the wall and the colors are all correct, is . . . come in and throw in a bunch of dialogue that’s not appropriate.”

But the glaring anachronisms remain, and I’m still puzzled.

Mimi Sheraton and Me

April 10, 2023
Posted by Jay Livingston

Mimi Sheraton, long-time food critic for the New York Times, died last week.

It may be difficult now to appreciate just how big a deal Mimi Sheraton was.  In the late 1970s and early 80s, food and restaurants had become an important part of the cultural landscape. Huge steaks and the like were for men with a lot of money and not much of a palate. On the rise were nouvelle cuisine and authentic ethnic restaurants. More important, information about these places was highly centralized. In 1975 when Mimi Sheraton started at the Times, there was no Zagat’s and of course no Yelp or the  dozens of online restaurant review sites today. There was Mimi, and everybody knew who she was.

Our paths crossed once, briefly many years ago. I was on jury duty one morning in early January back in the early 80s – civil court, downtown Manhattan. A woman was suing the movie theater where she had fallen or tripped, presumably suffering some injury. Civil court judges, to make more efficient use of their time, were not present for voir dire, at least not in this case. The lawyers conducted voir dire themselves. If some dispute arose, they would pause the proceeding and walk down the hall to see the judge.

Even to non-attorney eyes, these lawyers did not seem like the brightest lights in the room. One of my fellow jurors, a philosophy professor (it was Winter Break for him too) said to me, “If my students asked such questions, I would fail them.” It also seemed they weren’t listening closely to the answers.

The plaintiff’s lawyer was questioning a prospective juror, one Mimi Falcone. “And what do you do Miss Falcone – is it Miss or Mrs.?”

“I’m a food critic. I write a column under the name . . .”

But the lawyer wasn’t listening. As soon as she said she said “food critic,” he started speaking over her.  “Where do you write your reviews. I mean if you were someone like Mimi Sheraton. . . .”

She interrupted him firmly. “I am Mimi Sheraton.”
 

From there, things went even further south. “Are you familiar with the Coronet Theater?”

“I’m not sure which it is,” she said, ‘The Coronet or the Baronet” (the two theaters stood side by side on the Upper East Side), “but one of them has this terrible staircase.”

Ms. Falcone was not selected for the jury.

But I was.. Go to lunch, we six jurors were told, and after lunch we’ll begin the trial. But before we left, we approached Mimi Sheraton and asked her to recommend a restaurant in Chinatown. She did, and we went. It was more expensive than most Chinatown lunch places, but most of us could afford it, and for the one who might have chosen a more modest place — an underpaid secretary as I recall – the rest of us shared her part of the bill.  The food was great, and different from much Chinatown fare. Mimi had not steered us wrong.

We returned to the courtroom ready to hear the case only to be told that the parties had reached a settlement. That’s often happens in civil cases. But most civil court juries don’t get a personal recommendation from Mimi Sheraton.

Lyin’ Eyes

March 22, 2023
Posted by Jay Livingston

During the protests over the killing of a Black man in Kenosha, WE, CNN reported that the demonstrations were “mostly peaceful.” Unfortuantely, the background visual behind the reporter showed a lot of fire.

The right-wing had a field day.

Technically, CNN was correct. The demonstrations were mostly peaceful. But that didn’t matter. What mattered were those who posed the greatest threats, the ones who torched those buildings.

And now we have Tucker Carlson (here) saying that the “overwhelming majority” of people who invaded the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021 were “peaceful.” Carlson acknowledges that a “small percentage of them were hooligans. They committed vandalism.” But the overwhelming majority “were orderly and meek. These were not insurrectionist. They were sightseers.”  He has the tape to prove it. In fact, he has all the tape – 41,000 hours. The Republicans on the House committee gave it to him to edit as he sees fit. No doubt, the Carlson cut will show very orderly people, meekly trying to overturn an election that their candidate lost by seven million votes.

Technically, Carlson is correct. The  overwhelming majority —especially if you expand the denominator to include the tens of thousands of Trump supporters who came to the rally that day but did not invade the Capitol — were not hooligans. But again, the numbers don’t matter. What matters are the violent insurrectionists. This small minority are important because they posed the greatest threat to the democratic institutions of the government and to the police who were trying to protect the Capital and the Representatives and staffers who work there. That’s why, as Carlson laments, “you’ve seen their pictures again and again.”  But who are you gonna believe – Tucker Carlson or your lyin’ eyes?

There’s a larger and more complex question topic in these demonstrations — the relation between the overwhelming majority and the extreme minority. It’s far too complex to go into here, especially in the case of Jan. 6.