The egghead-baseball connection, a long established fact of life in America, is renewed and deepened with the publication in The Boston Review of a letter John Rawls wrote to a friend in 1981 offering a six-point exegesis (the points were actually another's friends, and he was passing them along in obvious assent) on the superiority of baseball to all other sports.
It's been a long time since I've read Rawls. He's usually called America's greatest philosopher, and I have no quibble with that, although I do remember thinking back when I used to give these questions more thought than I do now that some of his theoretical notions had proven problematic in political practice (surely through no fault of his, I should note).
But he's wrong wrong wrong here. Football is superior. By which I mean American football, about which you'll be hearing a fair amount from me come the fall. For example, Rawls's first rule claims some special equilibrium for the baseball field (pitch, you would say). One hears this from intellectual defenders of baseball all the time; the "beautiful symmetry" of the diamond and so on. But a football field, and the arrangement of the players on it, is no less in equilibrium to my eye. Nor basketball players on a court. Nor soccer players on a pitch, I suppose, although that's a sport I don't really follow except to support my good friend in London who loves the struggling (last I checked) Spurs.
At any rate, the first Saturday of the college football season is a mere 16 days away. Stay tuned -- like it or not!
