"I think I was so taken by how the Orioles played because it was different—Earl’s philosophy was effectively countercultural at a time when many teams..."

"... especially in the National League, placed great emphasis on the running game, on bunting men over—on scratching a single run from an infield single, a stolen base, a bunt, and a sacrifice fly. Earl thought that required too many things to go right for a maximum reward of a single run. He preferred to encourage his hitters to work the count, to take walks, and then, with a man or two on base, swing for the fences. If you followed that strategy, he believed, you had a far better chance of putting three runs on the board than the run-scratchers had of putting up a singleton.... In my instinctive contrarianism I grew deeply attached to this way of playing baseball, so you can easily imagine how I felt when, in my twenties, I started reading... Bill James’s Baseball Abstract. For James’s early and profoundly influential exercises in sabermetrics... proved pretty conclusively that Earl was right all along, and those guys scrabbling for one run at a time were just chasing a losing hand. I felt vindicated, and even more so as the years went by and sabermetrics grew more detailed and sophisticated. Earl Weaver was in a way the patron saint of sabermetrics, and I was happy to bask in the reflection of his glory. What makes this a problem is that, as boxing fans have always known, styles make fights. What made Earl’s Way so fascinating all those years ago was its distinctiveness; and that’s what made the arguments among fans fun too. As fascinating as the sabermetrics revolution in baseball has been—and I cheered it on for decades, following James and the other pioneers with passionate intensity—the comprehensiveness of its victory has simply made baseball less enjoyable to watch, for me anyway. Strangely enough, baseball was better when we knew less about the most effective way to play it...."

Writes Alan Jacobs in "Giving Up On Baseball" (Weekly Standard).

And there's the trouble with rationality, in a nutshell. At some point, you may ask yourself, why bother at all? And the rational answer is: Don't bother! The whole wonderful, fascinating thing was irrational, and if it's going to be rational, what's to love?

Now, this makes me think of a scene in the Werner Herzog documentary "Lo and Behold, Reveries of the Connected World," in which we see robots programmed to play soccer:



If you watched that to the end — and maybe you didn't, because robots playing soccer... why bother? — you heard Herzog ask the young man holding one of the robots, "Do you love it?," and the man answered yes. So is the perfectly rational thing lovable? Well, the man loves the robot he's making. But he's experimenting and creating. He's not just a spectator. And I'm watching a Werner Herzog documentary because I love things like the moment when he gets the scientist to experience awareness of his love and to express it.