In this exciting talk, originally given at the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, my colleague Ernest DeFilippis tells how Aesthetic Realism explains the beauty of America’s national pastime.
What is it about the game of baseball that thrills people, has them leap with joy when a ball sails over the left field fence or an outfielder throws a man out at the plate? The answer is in this principle stated by Eli Siegel, the American poet, critic and founder of the education, Aesthetic Realism:
All beauty is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves.
Ever since the first time my father showed me how to swing a bat—when I was three—I’ve loved baseball. But it wasn’t until I began studying Aesthetic Realism that I understood why. Baseball, I learned, is a beautiful oneness of opposites—for example, self and world, near and far, wildness and order—opposites we are trying to put together in ourselves.
Self & World: Hitting a Baseball
New York Yankee great Mickey Mantle once said: “You always know when you’ve hit one. There’s a special feeling when the bat makes contact with the ball.”¹ Why does a person feel so exhilarated as the bat he’s holding in his hands solidly meets that ball? And what meaning does this have for the life of every person?
To hit a ball well is to meet fairly what’s not ourselves: reality in the form of that round sphere. It is a oneness of self and world.
A good hitter has to want to know and meet whatever the pitcher may throw. A pitched ball can curve, rise, drop, screw in, dance up and down; come in very fast, off speed, or slow. Whatever the ball does, the batter must be ready to whip the bat around and hit it squarely.
As he asserts himself, starts his swing, he must follow the ball, yield to and be affected by it, try to understand what it’s doing. Is it on the outside of the plate or the inside? Is it curving away or breaking in? He has less than ¼ of a second to see the pitch and judge its speed and location. And his swing can’t be tentative or tepid. Nor can it be wild with the intent to “kill” the ball.
I’ll tell you a secret: That’s me! This caricature is by my friend and colleague Aesthetic Realism consultant and film maker Ken Kimmelman. He drew the ball in the image of the world, which it represents.
To hit the ball well there must be a oneness of assertion and yielding, power and grace, abandon and precision, mind and body.
For example, in this photo, which captures Mickey Mantle just after he makes contact with the ball, you feel all his thought and energy, his powerful, compact bodily motion, is, at that moment, completely engaged, focused on one thing—going out to merge with that ball. And when that happens it makes that sound millions of people have loved: the CRACK of the bat. In an Aesthetic Realism class, Chair of Education Ellen Reiss, once said of this thrilling moment:
The crack of the bat is a tremendous thing. It is the utmost in the opposites of sameness and difference. Never were ball and bat more different yet they almost become one. It’s fight and friendship….They almost seem to merge, yet at the moment they seem to merge it’s the moment of utter againstness.
And as this happens, doesn’t the world itself look more beautiful?
But Mickey Mantle didn’t know, as ballplayers and fans alike haven’t, that what he did so well as a hitter was a guide to what he wanted to do in the rest of his life. To respect ourselves, feel strong and kind, we need to be energetically engaged with reality, interested in things, ready to see and meet squarely, fairly, the “curves and fastballs,” the complexities of life. Don’t we want to have our whole self—not just 25% or 50% of us—accurately go out to the world and not be, as I once described myself, stuck in a dull “insulated capsule”? Whatever form the world may take—whether it’s a particular situation, an object, or the feelings of another person—don’t we want to meet it fully, courageously? I know, firsthand, the answer is, Yes!
The big debate, I learned, in every person is between our deepest desire—to respect the world, to know and understand it—or to have contempt for it. Aesthetic Realism defines contempt as the “false importance or glory from the lessening of things not oneself.” This debate goes on in every player—both on and off the field. And when a player is at his or her best—respect is the winner.
For example, as a hitter I wanted to meet whatever pitch the pitcher threw, even if he threw a curve and I was expecting a fastball. I was excited by the suspense of not knowing what the pitch would be. It demanded my utter attention and I tried to give it. Anything less would have hindered my ability to follow and hit the ball. —This is when I felt most alive.
However, with people, I had a very different purpose. I thought my glory would come, not through knowing or giving them my respectful attention, but through competing with them, beating them out, having them do my bidding. This was contempt and it hurt my life, and also, I regret, hurt others.
In Baseball & Love, the Desire to Know Is Crucial!
On a date, the thing I was most interested in was not knowing a woman—what she thought or felt—but whether she gave me the utter approval I saw as my due. My notion of a “good time,” was not to think too much, but to go dancing, maybe stop at a café, and then get to the highpoint of the evening—sex. If she surprised me with what I saw as a “curve ball”—that is, she wanted to talk about things she was feeling—I’d get irritated. Rather than meeting with honest interest and excitement what she was hoping for from me, I saw her feelings as interfering with my plans. And even when I did have my way I’d be disgusted with myself, call myself a cold selfish bastard. I felt something had to change in me, but I didn’t know how.
Then, in my mid-twenties, as I attended classes taught by Eli Siegel, I learned what it really meant to meet a woman’s hopes “squarely” and kindly. About Linda Stevens, whom I was seeing, he asked: “Do you see Ms. Stevens the way she sees herself? Do you think you see what concerns her?” The answer was no. He asked, with critical humor: “She’s not subject to your influence sufficiently?” And he said, “Ernest DeFilippis would like to run around the bases without someone jumping at his shins.”
EDeF: Right.
ES: Are you irritated because you feel you have certain rights that are being questioned?
That’s what I felt. And Mr. Siegel explained: “Ms. Stevens has taken for granted that you want her to be delivered to you without your going through all the critical work necessary, all the work of your getting her love or esteem. Will your desire to win be greater than your desire to understand? Will your desire to understand be greater than your impatience?”
I answered, “I hope so.” And Mr. Siegel said: “It is more important that Ms. Stevens believe in you than that you win: it’s more important to have good will for her and be proud of having it.”
Eli Siegel encouraged the best thing in me. He showed there was a bigger, more exciting victory I was after, one I could respect myself for: to have good will, which Aesthetic Realism defines as “the desire to have something else stronger and more beautiful for this desire makes oneself stronger and more beautiful.”
It is to be for the best thing in a person, and against what weakens them. I began to distinguish between these two desires fighting in me—between ill will and good will—including on the ball field.
The Pitcher & Batter: Friendly Combatants
I had seen the contest between pitcher and batter as a battle for superiority. If he strikes me out, he’s better. If I got a hit, I’m better. I went from anger and humiliation to gloating.
I hated myself for seeing people this way but I also thought my competitive drive was my strength, had me play at my best. I was wrong. Ill will—the hope to be strong through the weakness of another—always weakens us, stifles our best possibilities in any field.
I learned I had another hope I had no idea of—a good kind of competition: the hope that the pitcher not be less than he is but as good as he can be, throw me his best stuff, challenge me to be at my best. Deeply, we don’t want someone to flatter our ego with “pitches” we can easily “hit” or praising words we don’t deserve. We want someone to oppose our smug complacency, demand we be better, encourage us to get to new heights. This is what I see as the symbolic good meaning of what happens between pitcher and batter.
They are deeply friendly combatants, who, through mutual respect, bring out the best in each other. 
The pitcher can think, “OK, let’s see what you can do with this one!” And the batter, alert and eager, waits, ready to rise to the moment. All eyes are on them. It is an intense, heart pounding, beautiful drama of for and against. The pitcher here is Sandy Koufax.
The Purpose of Baseball Is to Like the World
Both ballplayers and fans have not known this. Instead, many have felt what Mickey Mantle expressed when he said: “It was all I lived for, to play ball.”² “Baseball…was my life. When I played there was no other world.”³ I too felt this. There was my life on the diamond, which was exciting, where things seemed to make sense, then the unending complexities of life off the field—my family, love, work, the everyday persistent boredom.
And then, in an Aesthetic Realism class that took place in 1974, some years after I had stopped playing baseball, Eli Siegel explained how I and many ball players—including Mickey Mantle—had used baseball when he said: “You wanted the pure life without some of the vexing questions domestic life brings up.” And he further explained: “You concentrated on baseball to the exclusion of other things. You want to give baseball a special, sacred niche. Baseball for you was your one means of justifying existence.”
He was so right! And I’m grateful he took baseball out of that “special, sacred niche” I had put it in, which was really an insult to its true beauty and cultural meaning. I learned that the greatest justification of existence is that it has a structure that’s beautiful—it’s a oneness of opposites. And baseball is a magnificent manifestation of that fact. If baseball itself were to speak, I believe it would say: “Use me to see the whole world better, to care more for people, to be kinder, more interested in things, more ethical!”
Near & Far, Intimacy & Width
I’ll now speak of other opposites that are beautifully one in baseball. Two of these, which Mr. Siegel once said are central in the game, are near and far.
The field is in the shape of a diamond. The beginning point is home plate. From this point, the foul lines go out in a V, and as they get further and further away from each other, there is a feeling of great expansiveness.
I remember that as I’d approach home plate I’d look out over the field and be swept by its gorgeousness: the green grass, the reddish brown earth of the infield, the sweep of the outfield fence in the distance and the vast sky beyond. There was a sense of something enclosed, intimate, and also distant.
The batter steps up to the plate; the pitcher winds up and throws the ball; the batter swings, connects, sends the ball deep into the outfield.
There is that moment, after contact is made, when the ball is beginning its flight: what was near is now speeding somewhere in the distance, 400 feet away. And if that ball happens to sail out of the park for a home run—
and thousands of people leap to their feet in joy, what they’re cheering is the structure of the world—the opposites of near and far—suddenly and magnificently become one.
In life, near and far can fight in our minds. For example, as I was growing up in Brooklyn, I saw the outside world as a harsh and unfriendly place, which I had to hide and protect myself from. I clung to what was near, my home and family who made a lot of me, and used them to feel other people were distant and cold.
Meanwhile, sitting at the dinner table, I didn’t see the persons nearest to me as having insides, feelings about many things—not just me. I didn’t see them as real living, breathing persons with emotions and thoughts to be understood. This is very common but people don’t see, as I didn’t, that this is a form of everyday contempt that hurts our lives and is the cause of all cruelty. For there to be kindness among people and nations, we need to see our relation to other human beings—a loved one, a teammate, a person we may see on the street, a co-worker, a person of another nation. We need to put together near and far. And we can learn, so surprisingly, in outline, from the outfielder’s catch.
For example, Here’s Roberto Clemente. When the ball is hit, the outfielder breaks instantly, keeping his eye on the ball as he runs to where he thinks it will come down. It is awesome to see that little white sphere soar above the stands and roof into the big sky—sometimes hardly seeable—reach its high point, then fall gracefully towards earth where you are running to catch it.
Here’s Willie Mays in the 1954 World Series. When the ball hits the glove with a thump, you feel something of the distant universe is welcomed, embraced, lovingly taken into oneself. This is how we want to see all the time. We want to be affected by and fully engaged with what is not ourselves, including as we hope to care for a person.
I’m very glad to say that through what I’ve learned and continue to learn, I and the woman I love, my wife, Maureen Butler, are in the midst of the deeply romantic, happy and grand study of how to use each other to be just to the world and people, both near and far.
Order & Wildness
In the journal The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known, Ellen Reiss writes about the relation of these opposites in baseball:
There is that diamond, so symmetrical and unchanging, with its four bases….There is not suddenly a fifth base in the third inning, nor do people start running in a triangle in the fourth. There are always three strikes to an out; there are always nine innings (except when the score is tied). Yet baseball is beautiful because its order can suddenly be at one with wonderful chaos:
A ball is going we know not where. People are running to field the ball. Others are running toward bases. Who has the ball?
Will that runner make it to third? And this multitudinous eruption may swiftly be composed in a clear, neat double play.4
I love that description of the double play—swift and neat!
The batter rips a ground ball to third. The third baseman backhands it, whirls and fires it
to the second baseman who in one swift, graceful motion catches the ball, touches the base, leaps high above the sliding runner, and fires it to first, just ahead of the runner.
Off the field, I shuttled back and forth between wanting to have order in my life and wanting to be wild. People usually feel, as I did, that to really “let go,” be “free” is to assert oneself, do whatever you want, not be pinned down by having to think or be accurate about anything including what people or objects deserve. But when I was wild I felt reckless, selfish, not rooted, flighty. Then I’d decide to curb my wild impulses, get my life in order, give it structure, be strict with myself, only to feel confined and unexpressed. I saw order as a necessary grind and being wild as irresponsible, a source of shame. I felt these could never be together. Baseball shows they can.
Here’s another example: A runner is on second and there’s a base hit to the outfield.
The outfielder races towards the bounding ball, and without breaking his stride, judges where to position his glove, catches the ball, takes it into him, grips it with his bare hand
and throws it with all the energy and force he can muster with pin point accuracy to the catcher—who may be 250 feet away—as the runner slides home.
That’s wildness and order as one thing—and the crowd loves it! And in the midst of this action the known and unknown play their devilish, tantalizing, wonderful game as thousands hold their breath: Is he safe or out? We still don’t know. The umpire has not yet decided. And he has had over 70 years to make up his mind!
I’m grateful for the opportunity to say some things about the beauty of baseball, and what it shows us about how we want to be. I close my paper with lines from a poem by Eli Siegel, which I care for very much. In them is the eternal meaning of baseball:
Playing baseball well is an observable sign
A skill of ours can be at one with a divine,
Great cause of this. What enabled us to field a ball?
What enabled us to run at all,
Let alone around four bases? It was the world of long ago
Become ourselves. Both art and science tell us so.5
¹ Mantle, Mickey and Phil Pepe. My Favorite Summer 1956. (New York: 1991 Doubleday, 1st Edition), p. 205
2 “Where Have You Gone, Mickey Mantle?” New York Magazine, April 21, 1980.
3 The Mick by Mickey Mantle with Herb Gluck. (New York: Doubleday, 1985), page 21.
4 The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known, #866, November 8, 1989
5 Siegel, Eli. “About Ernest DeFilippis and His Ice Skating,” The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known, #1087