Dennis Martinez and the Uses of Theory
1987; The Yale Law Journal Company; Volume: 96; Issue: 8 Linguagem: Inglês
10.2307/796396
ISSN1939-8611
Autores Resumofor the Baltimore Orioles, was caught by journalist Ira Berkow in the act of talking to his manager, Earl Weaver, shortly before the beginning of a game with the Yankees.Berkow, sensing a story, approached Martinez and asked him "what words of wisdom had been imparted by the astute Weaver." 1 Now Martinez is a pitcher who is unlikely ever to make it into the Baseball Hall of Fame, if only because he seems to experience every pitch as a discrete event, unrelated to either its predecessor or its successor; but if his baseball skills are suspect, his philosophical skills would seem to be beyond dispute.In response to Berkow's question, Martinez offered a twostage narrative.In the first stage he reports the event."He [Weaver] said, 'Throw strikes and keep 'em off the bases,' . . .and I said, 'O.K.' " This is already brilliant enough, both as an account of what transpires between fully situated members of a community and as a wonderfully dead-pan rebuke to the outsider who assumes the posture of an analyst.But Martinez is not content to leave the rebuke implicit, and in the second stage he drives the lesson home with a precision Wittgenstein might envy: "What else could I say?What else could he say?"Or, in other words, "What did you expect?"Clearly, what Berkow expected was some set of directions or an articulated method or formula or rule or piece of instruction, which Martinez could first grasp (in almost the physical sense of holding it in his hand or in some appropriate corner of his mind) and then consult whenever a situation seemed to call for its application.What Berkow gets is the report of something quite different, not a formula or a method or a principle-in fact, no guidance at all-simply a reminder of something that Martinez must surely already know, that it is his job to throw a baseball in such a way as to prevent opposing players from hitting it with a stick.Of course, there is more to it than that, but Weaver made no effort to "impart" that more, and indeed it would have been totally inappropriate for him to have done so.Were he either to explain the principles of pitching or to enumerate the possible situations that might arise during the
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