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Bill James on Shakespeare and and Verlander

metirish Mar 31 2011 09:48 AM

This is great and sure to generate a lot of discussion on this board. Shakespeare and Verlander Why are we so good at developing athletes and so lousy at developing writers? By Bill James Posted Wednesday, March 30, 2011, at 6:57 AM ET This piece is excerpted from Solid Fool's Gold: Detours on the Way to Conventional Wisdom. (Copyright 2011 by Bill James, used with permission of ACTA Sports, all rights reserved.) The population of Topeka, Kan., today is roughly the same as the population of London in the time of Shakespeare, and the population of Kansas now is not that much lower than the population of England at that time. London at the time of Shakespeare had not only Shakespeare—whoever he was—but also Christopher Mar­lowe, Francis Bacon, Ben Jonson, and various other men of letters who are still read today. I doubt that Topeka today has quite the same collection of distinguished writers. Why is this? There are two theories that present themselves. One is that the talent that assembled in Shakespeare's London was a random cluster, an act of God to locate in this one place and time a very un­usual pile of literary talent. The other theory is that there is talent everywhere; it is merely that some societies are good at developing it and other societies not so good. You may choose which side of this argument you wish to squat upon, but I am on the (b) side; it is my very strong belief that there is talent everywhere and all the time, but that London at that time was very, very good at calling out the literary talent of its citizen­ry, whereas most places and most times are not nearly so effective along this line. I believe that there is a Shakespeare in Topeka today, that there is a Ben Jonson, that there is a Marlowe and a Bacon, most likely, but that we are unlikely ever to know who these people are because our society does not encourage excellence in lit­erature. That's my opinion. This observation is nowhere near as gloomy as it might seem. Our society is very, very good at developing certain types of skills and certain types of genius. We are fantastically good at identifying and developing athletic skills—better than we are, really, at almost anything else. We are quite good at developing and rewarding inventiveness. We are pretty good at developing the skills necessary to run a small business—a fast food restaurant, for example. We're really, really good at teaching people how to drive automobiles and how to find a coffee shop. We are not so good at developing great writers, it is true, but why is this? It is simply because we don't need them. We still have Shakespeare. We still have Thomas Hardy and Charles Dickens and Robert Louis Stevenson; their books are still around. We don't genu­inely need more literary geniuses. One can only read so many books in a lifetime. We need new athletes all the time because we need new games every day—fudging just a little on the definition of the word need. We like to have new games every day, and, if we are to have a constant and endless flow of games, we need a constant flow of athletes. We have gotten to be very, very good at developing the same. There are people who believe that when baseball leagues ex­pand, this leads inevitably to a decline in the quality of talent. In my view, this is preposterous. Talent—like stupidity—lies all around us in great heaps: talent that is undeveloped because of a shortage of opportunity, talent that is undeveloped because of laziness and inertia, talent that is undeveloped because there is no genuine need for it. When baseball leagues expand, that simply creates a need for more talent, which creates more opportunity, which leads—in a soci­ety like ours, which is brilliant at developing athletic ability—in very quick order to the development of more players. Baseball could expand in such a way that it outpaces the available latent talent, true—if it grew too rapidly, or if it expanded to, let us say, 5,000 major league teams. There probably is not enough talent to stock 5,000 major league teams in a place the size of North America without some small slippage in ability, even if the transi­tion from 30 teams to 5,000 was carefully managed. If we went from 30 teams to a mere 300, on the other hand, carefully managing the expansion, it would make no difference whatsoever in the quality of talent. That's my view. American society could and should take lessons from the world of sports as to how to develop talent. How is it that we have become so phenomenally good, in our society, at developing athletes? First, we give them the opportunity to compete at a young age. Second, we recognize and identify ability at a young age. Third, we celebrate athletes' success constantly. We show up at their games and cheer. We give them trophies. When they get to be teenagers, if they're still good, we put their names in the newspaper once in a while. Fourth, we pay them for potential, rather than simply paying them once they get to be among the best in the world. The average city the size of Topeka produces a major league player every 10 or 15 years. If we did the same things for young writers, every city would produce a Shakespeare or a Dickens or at least a Graham Greene every 10 or 15 years. Instead, we tell the young writers that they should work on their craft for 20 or 25 years, get to be really, really good—among the best in the world—and then we'll give them a little bit of recognition. The sporting world, meanwhile, gets criticized constantly for what we do so well. People get squeamish about young people be­ing "too competitive," as if somehow this would damage their tender souls, and complain about the "undue attention" that is focused on young athletes. The grossest example is on the issue of race. People in the sporting world in 1950 were just as racist as people in other parts of society—but people in the sporting world got over it a hell of a lot faster, because we cared more about win­ning than we did about discriminating. Because the sporting world was always ahead of the rest of the world in breaking racial barri­ers, black kids came to perceive sports as being the pathway out of poverty. For this we are now harshly and routinely criticized—as if it was our fault that the rest of society hasn't kept up. Some jackass Ph.D ex-athlete pops up on my TV two or three times a year claiming that a young black kid has a better chance of being hit by lightning than of becoming a millionaire athlete. This is nonsense as well as being a rational hash. Look, it's not our fault that the rest of the world hasn't kept up. It's not our fault that there are still barriers to black kids becoming doctors and lawyers and airline pilots. Black kids regard the athletic world as a pathway out of poverty because it is. The sporting world should be praised and honored for that. Instead, we are more often criticized because the pathway is so narrow. Which, I agree, is a real problem. I would never encourage my children to be athletes—first because my children are not athletes and second because there are so many people pushing to get to the top in sports that 100 people are crushed for each one who breaks through. This is unfortunate. We are very good at producing athletes, and maybe we are too good at producing athletes. Some­times the cost is too high. We should do more to develop the next Shakespeare and less to develop the next Justin Verlander. But this situation is not a failing of the sporting world. Rather, it is that the rest of society has been too proud to follow our lead. http://www.slate.com/id/2289380

Vic Sage Mar 31 2011 03:16 PM Re: Bill James on Shakespeare and and Verlander

i love me some Bill James. there, i said it.

TheOldMole Mar 31 2011 06:16 PM Re: Bill James on Shakespeare and and Verlander

Loved this.

Willets Point Mar 31 2011 06:32 PM Re: Bill James on Shakespeare and and Verlander

Bill James is a good writer from Kansas.

RealityChuck Mar 31 2011 08:33 PM Re: Bill James on Shakespeare and and Verlander Edited 1 time(s), most recently on Apr 01 2011 11:22 AM

Some good points on how writing is undervalued, but James has no clue as to why Shakespeare was Shakespeare and why genius in the arts is rare. Even if you encouraged writers the way he indicates, you aren't going to produce great writers en mass. All the teaching, practice, and encouragement in the world will not necessarily turn out great writers, and the great writers become great even with a lack of encouragement as a kid.

Edgy DC Mar 31 2011 10:30 PM Re: Bill James on Shakespeare and and Verlander

Yeah, I appreciate what he says about race, but I have to say that I have some issues with some of his assumptions. I think great writers are around us, and producing, and we scarcely know it. At least not yet. We know who the best hitters and pitchers are, because they perform in the cauldron of competition, and, at the end of the day, a select few have victorious numbers next to their names. The same can’t be said of writers, because our critical standards are not so black and white. Is the best writer the one who reaches the most people, however deeply or shallowly? Is he or she the one who reaches only a very few people, but reaches them utterly? Does this writer unveil a truth which we hate to think about and bury, or trumpet a gorgeous lie that we celebrate to death. Then there’s the self-consciousness of the whole critical community, and subsequently the readership they inform. Am I supposed to like this writer? Do I only care because the community I want to belong to seems to care? Am I avoiding writers outside my culture and narrow-mindedly closing myself off from the gift of those not like me ethnically? Am I self-consciously seeking a broader ethnic reading selection but have no idea what’s good about many of these writers at all but am nonetheless embracing them out of a misguided insecurity? Christ, we’re so bolluxed up, Shakespeare might walk through town, type up a few episodes of How I Met Your Mother, walk on out, and we might never know that he was ever among us. Should we even care? Maybe he achieved his status for all the wrong reasons, also. The good news there is that the internet is giving writers the sort of cauldron of competition that athletes have long had access to. No longer must a writer fight his or her way through the grim (and hopelessly arbitrary) determinations of college professors, submissions editors, and literary critics before the audience even gets a crack at him or her. Now we have access as writers directly to our potential readership, and if the talent and time and effort produce noble work, the audience will determine its value in the suddenly meritocratic marketplace of ideas. Secondly, I contest the alleged benevolence of this system of finding good athletes. First, we give them the opportunity to compete at a young age. Second, we recognize and identify ability at a young age. Third, we celebrate athletes' success constantly. We show up at their games and cheer. We give them trophies. When they get to be teenagers, if they're still good, we put their names in the newspaper once in a while. As Malcolm Gladwell (who I’m surprised James hasn’t learned from) demonstrated in Outliers, we do a terrible dis-service to youth athletes and the culture they play in by how aggressivley we reinforce the standouts. He told of a Canadian national 16-and-under hockey tournament where a lone woman had the wisdom to notice that he roster included a vast majority of boys born in January, February, and March. Their “talent” had been recognized when they were much younger, getting them placed on elite travelling teams that began their ascension to this national tournament, but in too many cases, their “talent” was too often simply being the biggest and fastest in their class at a young age when a few months could make a huge difference. This false prophecy then became self-fulfilling, because the selection these players got allowed them to get the best coaching and the most challenging competition, while the nascent talent in otherwise equal October-born boys was neglected, leading these boys to quit from lack of reinforcement, or to languish unecouraged in less competitive venues. I think too many young people quit playing sports these days while they’re young because they’re not getting messages that they’re the next Albert Pujols. They quit singing at a young age if they’re not up to the standards of, I dunno, Carrie Underwood. Fuckity fuck, but they’re not really supposed to be. Certainly not when they’re young. Steve J. Rogers frequently points out TV ratings to demonstrate that baseball is no longer the national pastime. But that’s not the failure. Baseball was dubbed the national pastime not because we were all watching it on TV, but because we were playing it. Every small town had teams — teams of adults with day jobs who had been playing since their school days and couldn’t wait to get off work and get a few hours in before the sun went down. There’s a way to produce athletes. Champion athletes, yes, but more importantly, a healthy athletic culture. It seems to me the best thing we can do for athletes and writers and aspirants (particularly young ones, but not only) of almost any field is give them opportunities to keep doing what gives them joy — for hours on end — allowing them the time to either perfect their craft or merely to live a more fulfilling life, whether or not they’ve demonstrated themselves to be precociously awesome at nine years old. Walter Johnson, Albert Einstein, Martin McDonagh: Some geniuses just walked out of the woods. The Beatles too. And Tiger Fuckin’ Woods. No Ministry of Sport — or Ministry of Science or Humanities — recognized their gifts in childhood and tracked them to greatness. They were simply indulged by somebody who cared about them as they refined their strange gifts before finally pulling open the curtain and letting the world in on their masterpieces. I remember a baseball passage I read once. At least, it was supposed to be about baseball. Waite Hoyt would sing while Mark Koneig played the piano... not an odd thing in those days. That kind of thing will come back someday. Electronics have brought the world’s best singers and performers into our living rooms, which unfortunately has intimidated us into thinking we can’t sing to one another anymore, as people did for thousands of years, because we don’t meet the standard. But it will come back, because sooner or later people will rediscover that half the joy of music is in making it. Or more than half… Bill James wrote that.

Willets Point Mar 31 2011 11:03 PM Re: Bill James on Shakespeare and and Verlander

Edgy is a good writer.

batmagadanleadoff Apr 01 2011 12:14 AM Re: Bill James on Shakespeare and and Verlander

Edgy DC wrote: As Malcolm Gladwell (who I’m surprised James hasn’t learned from) demonstrated in Outliers ... That's because this James piece preceded Outliers. I read this piece at least 10 years ago, and if the article turns out to be 20, 25 years old, I wouldn't be overly surprised.

Edgy DC Apr 01 2011 05:42 AM Re: Bill James on Shakespeare and and Verlander

Well, there we go. For the second time in one day, my face gets egg by me not following the link. In my defense, there's a contemporary timestamp at the top of the article in the post.

metirish Apr 01 2011 07:06 AM Re: Bill James on Shakespeare and and Verlander

I'm not seeing where the article is from ten,twenty or twenty five years ago(not saying batmag is incorrect), if I had known that I would have made it clear.....

Edgy DC Apr 01 2011 07:25 AM Re: Bill James on Shakespeare and and Verlander

By the way, Shakespeare and Verlander are perfoming this Sunday at the Washboard Cafe with special guest Arianna Wainscott. It's an early show so make sure you arrive by six to find parking.

Willets Point Apr 01 2011 07:30 AM Re: Bill James on Shakespeare and and Verlander

It does say: This piece is excerpted from Solid Fool's Gold: Detours on the Way to Conventional Wisdom. This new book is a collection of James' older writing.

Edgy DC Apr 01 2011 08:16 AM Re: Bill James on Shakespeare and and Verlander

Willets Point wrote: Edgy is a good writer. Thank you. After midnight is the only chance I have to get momentum these days, and then it's a race to see if I can hit submit before falling asleep.