Today is the most beautiful day of the year

For today is the day that pitchers and catchers report to spring training… My soul is happy.

Eff robins. Today is the harbinger of Spring. Today is what reminds us that cold, evil misery does not have an eternal grip on the world, but that goodness, warmth and beauty will return.

Propositions, Truth and Steroids

I’ve been considering how I might wax poetic today, but I didn’t make a decision until this morning. I wished a friend a happy P&C and he asked if I was upset about Roger Clemens. So I decided to get something off my chest about steroids:

The steroids scandal doesn’t bother me much at all.

Just like the strike didn’t bother me (other than depriving me of baseball). Just like it doesn’t bother me 89 years ago a group of eight men played with the faith of fifty million by taking money to throw the World Series.

Don’t get me wrong; all of these things make me sad. But they don’t bother me. The reason is this: I love baseball! It is the greatest, most beautiful, most correct sport ever created, and that does not change with Roger Clemens having allegedly used performance enhancing drugs.

In a philosophy class yesterday we discussed the difference between a sentence and a proposition. Loosely, a sentence is a collection of words in a particular language. The thought expressed by a sentence is a proposition. Otherwise put, a sentence is a local instantiation of a proposition.

Roger Clemens (assuming he is guilty, which he appears to be) is a bad sentence. 1994 was a bad paragraph. Bary Bonds is a mumble of barely decipherable words.

But baseball is a proposition. It is a proposition to which we can assign a truth value. And baseball is true. Period.

This is why I never understood people who refused to watch baseball after the strike. I don’t watch baseball for baseball players… I watch it for me! I watch it to participate in truth and beauty. I wrote a few days ago about transcendent music. There is nothing, no song, no painting, no picture, no poem, no film or play… nothing that I find as aesthetically pleasing as baseball. The field, the rules, the motions, the structure, the sounds, the smells… Baseball is correct, and no poor instantiation of it can change that.

Baseball is correct. Happy Pitchers & Catchers.