It’s opening day of the Major League Baseball season, but before your break out your calculators and slide rules, take a deep breath. Yes, among team sports, baseball is particularly given over to physics-based approaches, with the drag, gravitation, spin, and velocity of the pitch meeting—or eluding—the mass, plane, and speed of the swing. Yes, many authors in the annals of baseball lore have offered intricate commentaries on the technical aspects of the game, perhaps most famously in Ted Williams’s The Science of Hitting, written with John Underwood, a book popular enough to prompt a second edition. And yes, since then, front offices have turned, with increasing alacrity, to related areas of scientific inquiry from biometrics to data analytics. Yet there are plenty of other factors to consider in baseball, as any of the nearly 20,000 sports psychologists in America can tell you.
One of the first attempts to take baseball’s tangible and intangible dimensions together must be Emil L. Scharf’s 1908 book The Metafysics and Psychology of Base Ball: An Investigation and Analysis of the Causes, Both Fysical and Psychological, That Produce the Various Fenomena of the Game. It’s a curious book, from more than one angle—and no, those aren’t typos in the title. Scharf wrote the book in Simplified Spelling, a revised system of orthography designed to meet the American masses at their typical levels of literacy, in cases where they were actually reading books rather than attending base ball games. This Simplified Spelling initiative, funded and promoted by Andrew Carnegie, also aimed to establish English as a world language, in the service of world peace, and boasted among its board membership luminaries including Melvil Dewey, Henry Holt, and Mark Twain. The effort ultimately made little headway before dissolving in 1920.
Born in Metz, near the present-day common border of France, Germany, and Luxembourg, Scharf (1854–1928) was a fascinating figure who emigrated to the United States as a teenager. Upon arrival, he taught various musical instruments and foreign languages, and was lately affiliated with The Catholic University of America, in Washington, D.C., when he published The Metafysics and Psychology of Base Ball. In writing this book he proved ahead of his time in at least two respects: anticipating Charles Kay Ogden’s efforts toward Basic English in the 1930s, and well in advance of the several professional associations of sports psychology founded in the 1960s.
Scharf’s prescience regarding the metaphysical and psychological aspects of the game might be chalked up to the ineptitude of the Washington Senators franchise, whose fans must have been reduced to head cases in the early years of the twentieth century. The 1904 edition of the Senators ended with a record of 38-113, for one of the worst winning percentages in the modern era, with 437 runs scored versus 743 allowed, winless in April, and finishing 55.5 games behind the pennant-winning Boston Americans. George Washington had been eulogized in 1799 as a man who was “first in war, first in peace, and first in the hearts of his countrymen”; just over a century later, the ongoing futility of the Washington baseball club prompted legendary sportswriter Charles Dryden to explain, that Washington was “first in war, first in peace, and last in the American League.”
In his preface to The Metafysics and Psychology of Base Ball, Scharf confidently asserted that “the game of Base Ball is the national game of America,” and that it “became the favorit national sport when it evolvd itself from its original crude and insipid form into harmony with the character and aspirations of the American peopl, who require action, excitement and quick results” (8). But what seemed, in 1908, like action and excitement didn’t necessarily hold up over time, especially when compared with the faster-moving professional sports of basketball, gridiron football, and ice hockey. If baseball truly remains America’s national pastime, it is thanks in part to certain rule changes designed to jump start the action and keep pace. These include introductions of the designated hitter (1973), the automatic runner in extra innings (2020), the three-batter minimum for pitchers (2020), and the pitch clock (2023).
Some of Scharf’s takes seem positively dated. For example, he explained that “being to a degree a game of chance,” baseball is “one of the few from which betting has been excluded, apparently by common consent, thus preventing one of the most ignobl of human passions from extending its viciousness into this virgin field” (9). Such an account came more than a decade before the Black Sox Scandal that marred the 1919 World Series, generations before all-time hits leader Pete Rose gambled his way out of the Hall of Fame as player-manager for the Cincinnati Reds, and over a century before pitchers Emmanuel Clase and Luis Ortiz of the Cleveland Guardians were implicated in fixing prop bets regarding specific pitches. Many legislators would like to put an end to all such wagers, but for the moment, you can still wager up to $200 a pitch that Tommy Kahnle will throw yet another changeup for a ball—if he manages to get called up from Worcester to Boston, that is, since such bets tend to be prohibited at minor league levels.
Concluding his preface, Scharf argued that “Base Ball is considered clean sport, devoid of all trickery and underhanded manipulation.” Curiously, he wrote these words in the same year that the finest spitballer ever to take the mound was in the midst of his finest season. Pitching for the Chicago White Sox, only two years removed from a World Series Championship, Ed Walsh completely dominated hitters in the summer of 1908, posting a record of 40 wins against 15 losses, with 42 complete games, 464 innings pitched, 6 saves, 269 strikeouts, a 1.42 ERA, and a .860 WHIP. At the time, the spitball was not uniformly regarded as a matter of trickery. All of this came well before the corked bats of Chris Sabo and Sammy Sosa, the performance enhancing drug habits of Jose Canseco and Mark McGwire—among other confirmed and suspected users—and the video-assisted sign stealing gambits engineered in part by Alex Cora and Carlos Beltrán of the Houston Asterisks.
For those baseball players not relying on saliva, or illegal bats, or steroids, or illicit video cameras, how might the best advantage be gained? For this intrepid early baseball writer, “alertness, finesse, nerv, selfpossession and curage are important and necessary factors”: a rare combination indeed! Those general qualities, difficult enough to attain, must be exceeded, in certain circumstances and positions, by other specific requirements like “the geometrical eye” of the outfielder, or even more metaphysical elements, from the “intuitiv, or rather instinctiv, co-operation” of the infielders to the “telepathic influence of the pitcher upon the batter.” To this last, I can aver: in my first season of kid pitch, among nine and ten-year olds in an upstate New York Little League in the mid-1980s, A. J. Irland was famous around town for his intimidating windup, involving a flailing of the arms that consistently knocked his maroon hat from his head, seeming to add at least twenty miles per hour to the velocity of each pitch.
In terms of psychological despair in baseball, the batting slump stands perhaps foremost: for Scharf, its causes included “food, dissipation, insufficient rest, temporary affection, mental disturbances” and various other possible factors. How to break out of such slumps? Latter-day protocols involve notions about how best to arrive at the park, don one’s uniform, step on to the field, step into the batter’s box, make physical contact with the equipment of the game, and so on, and so forth. Scharf authored an early chapter in this book of baseball superstition, worth repeating at length not only for its details, but also for its rationale:
“I devized a narrow slip upon which were printed a succession of cabalistic letters, which were supposed to constitute a charm. The batter was directed to paste it on the part of the bat where the left hand held it, fix his mind upon the slip, keep his eye away from the pitcher and watch for the ball. …. But there was nothing mysterious in this experiment. It might, of course, create the superstitious impression upon the mind that the slip had something to do with it, when it really was a means of extricating his mind from the rut of despondency into which it may have fallen.”
If the superstition was a placebo, it was no less effective. And how literary to boot! Baseball, so often regarded as a numbers game—as in the sabermetrics of Bill James, operationalized in the Moneyball-era Oakland A’s teams of the early 2000s, and by countless other clubs since—gets reframed in this instance as a letters game. But if many slumps are in the head, all of them are finally caused, in one way or another, by the baffling sphere described by Scharf as “the most illusiv object in the world” and as “that pervers, inscrutabl littl orb,” so difficult to comand that it is productive of “a belief in some occult, unknown cause which produces certain dire results entirely beyond the control of the player,” and prompted by said player’s “inability to solv certain fenomena thru the agency of his reasoning powers.”
Who can help him to reason through such “fenomena”? Basketball, gridiron football, and ice hockey teams are guided by head coaches; baseball clubs, like association football clubs, are directed by managers. If coaches are primarily responsible for tactics and training, managers must attend not only to those, but also to the je ne sais quoi of the game, and everything that surrounds it. For Scharf, the success of the baseball manager can be leveraged by certain key personality factors: among them those of the “born commander,” the “leader of men,” the “reader of men,” and either “a certain congeniality or, in its place, a sympathetic nature.” This last division offers a particularly fascinating rubric for assessing managers: in the former category, we might include charmers like Connie Mack, Tommy Lasorda, Bobby Cox, Joe Maddon, and Dusty Baker; in the latter, a host of Everyman figures like John McGraw, Sparky Anderson, Jim Leyland, Buck Showalter, and Terry Francona. In either case, Scharf concluded, the manager needs great reserves of “ready tact” as well as “good judgment and adroitness.”
Like the acts of fielding, hitting, running, and throwing, mamagerial skill sets do not smile on an extended off-season. In 1908, only a handful of clubs trained in the colder months in Hot Springs, Arkansas. Florida’s Grapefruit League was still several years from being founded. Nonetheless, over fifty years before the development of air-supported domes and astroturf, Scharf, ever the visionary, advocated for “a course in the science of base ball, taught in night schools thru the winter.” Largely a bookish solution at the time, it could be no substitute for in-game experience, of whatever kind, indoors or out. For the diamond itself is a school, and baseball, as Scharf framed it, is “the sum total of all knowledge and experience of the game.”
As for the psychology of the umpire, Scharf had plenty to say, particularly in relationship to pitchers, underscoring the significance of differing viewpoints on the action, calling for cooler heads to prevail, noting the impact of the home crowd on close calls, and concluding, with regard to missed calls, that “an umpire may hav a bad day fysically; a disordered liver, perhaps, which causes him to take a pessimistic view of the whole world,—players, spectators and himself included.” One wonders, given this allowance, what Scharf would have made of the video review. Over a century after his book, and decades after such technology became widely available, Major League Baseball finally implemented an instant replay system in 2014.
This season, for the first time, after a long trial course in the minor leagues, an Automated Ball-Strike challenge system will also be introduced, using the same technology that has been solving disordered liver problems in the sport of tennis for the last twenty years. While the translation across sports might seem relatively straightforward at a glance, baseball presents a considerably more complicated use case, for the zone in question is volumetric, rather than two-dimensional, and variable, rather than fixed. A borderline strike might nip the edge of the zone at its top, bottom, front, back, right, or left side. All tennis courts are created to the same pattern, but a strike to a player the stature of Oneil Cruz might well be a ball to a player the stature of Jose Altuve, and vice versa.
Such caveats notwithstanding, this shift might be seen to introduce a further measure of objectivity into the game. Yet baseball will always be, on some level, a contest subject to a certain amount of sheer accident, rather than pure design. Just ask any Blue Jays fan about Addison Barger’s extra-base hit, which managed to lodge itself, on the fly, at the bottom of the outfield wall of the Rogers Centre with no outs in the ninth inning of Game 6 of last year’s World Series, on a fateful Halloween night. “We must, therefor, conclude,” Scharf asserts,
“that the hitting of the ball may be the result of skill, but that fixing its direction is not absolute. If, therefor, a ball is batted beyond the reach of the defense, it cannot be altogether attributed to skill, because the batter could not possibly know the exact direction which the ball would take; hence, the approximate direction is due to skill, the real direction is due to chance.”
How different in degree, then, if not quite in kind, from the twenty-five foot jump shot, the forty-yard touchdown pass, the slapshot from the blue line, or the backhand winner from the baseline. This is what lends baseball a more than average share of metaphysics within the sporting domain.
As for psychology, consider the matter of the “invectiv, ridicule and coarse jokes” directed by the crowd toward the players. Here too baseball stands apart. In gridiron football the helmet largely occludes the heckler; in ice hockey the plexiglass offers a decisive barrier; and in basketball the squeaking of sneakers on hardwood offers acoustic interference, not to mention the sheer pace of all such contests. Golf and tennis, moving from shot to shot and point to point at a more stately clip, strictly disallow such abuse. Baseball alone remains quiet enough and permissive enough for the loudmouth to impact the proceedings. For Scharf, such dynamics stood as “a serious stumbling block to the elevation of the game”—one that “smirches its good name as a national sport.” A physician’s suggestion that pitchers, in particular, resort to literal “cotton in their ears” was insufficient for Scharf, who advocated the enforcement of obscenity laws to prevent such abuses.
“If,” Scharf asked, “the expectoration of infectious matter on the sidewalks has been largely done away with, because, with the promulgation of the law, everyone recognized its wisdom, why cannot the expectoration of putrid language be stopt by enforcing the existing laws at the ball games?” The answer may not be far to seek, for the toleration of such barbs tests the mettle of the ballplayer in ways that indicate his fitness for the sport more generally. Scharf’s aforementioned qualities of “alertness, finesse, nerv, selfpossession and curage” can be demonstrated not only by how players respond to circumstances on the field of play, but also by how they respond to circumstances beyond. Whoever can best handle an unruly fan may also be in a better position to handle a bad hop.
While The Metafysics and Psychology of Base Ball feels like the product of another time in many capacities, it has a certain timeless quality as well, and many of its concerns remain current. Readers interested in a more modern take might consult Marvin Cohen’s Baseball the Beautiful: Decoding the Diamond, since reissued as Baseball as Metaphysics. In Cohen’s case, it’s metaphysics with a “ph,” not an “f,” and for Cohen, a baseball game offers a test case for first principles, providing, in all its drama, “the golden metaphysics of life itself, focused on a field of play,” standing as “an experience encircled by every overtone of existence.” Yes, there are spin rates and launch angles in play, but beyond this, there are also a host of elements that can’t quite be boiled down to an algorithm, a formula, or a spreadsheet.
Scharf’s turn from physics to metafysics proceeded by a certain design, and his treatise on baseball managed to supersede his previous area of inquiry: anti-gravity research, conducted with great fervor earlier in the same decade. Such activities drew headlines in an illustrated multipart newspaper article under the titles “When Buildings and Battleships Fly— Marvelous Possibilities in the Negation of Gravity,” “How I Discovered Negative Gravity,” and “Prof. E. L. Scharf, of Washington, Claims to have Discovered an Electric Force That Counteracts the Law of Gravitation, and Which Will Enable Mankind to Move Heavy Structures From Place to Place on the Wings of the Air,” in an April 1904 issue of The Washington Times. These reports came barely four months removed from the first flight of the Wright Brothers at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, and just ten days prior to the launch of the most abysmal season of the Washington Senators.
Here, again, Scharf was well ahead of his time. It would take over six decades before the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam marched on and attempted to levitate the Pentagon above Virginia, in a fit of Scharfian inspiration. By then the Washington Senators had already left town once (reconstituted as the Minnesota Twins, in 1961), and were on the verge of leaving town once again (reconstituted as the Texas Rangers, in 1971), taking leave for thirty-three years, until a franchise re-emerged in the form of the Washington Nationals (reconstituted from the Montreal Expos, in 2004).
Perhaps yesterday’s Senators could have transcended their losing ways and remained relevant if only Scharf had been able to integrate his two favored areas of inquiry: the fenomena of baseball and the negation of gravity. These days, there is much debate about the validity of the rise of a pitch that moves upward in its delivery from the mound to the plate. Is it more a matter of perception, release point, or trajectory? Scharf might have been the man to address the question decisively, and to give the telepathic influencers of the Washington Senators the necessary leg up. For consider how difficult it would be to make contact with a pitch that could counteract gravitation! Yet the proper approach at the plate would be sure to yield equally astonishing results. Once batted, such a ball, negating gravity, would be likely to carry, and carry, and carry: out of the infield, through the outfield, over the fence, past the bleachers, and beyond—a perfectly wound body of cork, rubber, yarn, leather, and cotton, traveling through the air by an inexact combination of skill and chance, subject to forces that, for all of their intense study, remain, to this day, poorly understood.
