Why Jim Joyce Wasn’t Wrong: Baseball and the Euthyphro Dilemma

Abstract

In 2010, pitcher Armando Galarraga was denied a perfect game when umpire Jim Joyce called Jason Donald safe at first with two outs in the bottom of the 9th. In the numerous media discussions that followed, Joyce’s ‘blown’ call was commonly referred to as ‘mistaken’, ‘wrong’, or otherwise erroneous. However, this use of language makes some not uncontroversial ontological assumptions. It claims that the fact that a runner is safe or out has nothing to do with the ruling of the umpire himself, but rather with some state of the universe that does not depend on the umpire for its existence (e.g. the runner’s reaching the base before the ball or not). In this paper, I recast the problem as a version of Plato’s Euthyphro Dilemma and argue that the view implied by the above assertions is actually misguided. Instead, I hope to show that an alternative view – what I call ‘restricted umpire voluntarism’ – is actually more in line with the spirit of the game of baseball and is not as counterintuitive as it may appear at first glance.

KEYWORDS:

• baseball
• Plato
• Euthyphro
• voluntarism
• intellectualism
• umpires
• officiating
• Austin
• rules

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Brett Gaul, Kristopher Phillips, Matt Drabek, Tim O’Connor, Paul Guyer, Jochen Briesen, Martin Rempe, Randy Auxier, Pam Sailors, John Russell, and countless others for their comments on earlier versions of this paper and the ideas found herein – and to Arie and Kris Griffioen for instilling in me my undying love of baseball. I would also like to take this opportunity to encourage MLB to consider hiring a professional philosopher to help clear up their conceptual ambiguities. My resumé is available upon request.

Notes

1. Major League Baseball (hereafter, MLB) defines a ‘perfect game’ as occurring ‘when a pitcher (or pitchers) retires each batter on the opposing team during the entire course of a game, which consists of at least nine innings. In a perfect game, no batter reaches any base during the course of the game’. See http://mlb.mlb.com/mlb/official_info/about_mlb/rules_regulations.jsp for further miscellaneous rules and regulations.

2. Cf. Official Baseball Rules (2014), especially Rule 9.00 – ‘The Umpire’. Although the 2013 edition of the MLB regulations was much more ambiguous regarding the nature of umpires’ calls, the MLB Replay Review Regulations (2014) leave no doubt that baseball is moving in what I call below a more ‘intellectualist’ direction – in my opinion, much to the detriment of the sport.

3. It is important to note here, however, that I am limiting my remarks here solely to the game of baseball – and even more specifically, to MLB. I agree with Mitchell Berman that ‘sport-specific practices and participant understandings bear on the values or principles that constitute the normative content of the particular sport’ (Berman 2011, 187). Thus, whether the view I am putting forward here is applicable to other sports remains an open question.

4. Plato (2002), at 10a.

5. I will generally use the masculine pronoun in this paper when referring to MLB umpires. This is not meant to promote but rather only to reflect the (unfortunate) gender bias already present in MLB.

6. For some of the limits of the analogy between sport and law, cf. Russell 2011.

7. There are various ways to phrase the problem, depending on the relevant normative predicate(s), the nature of the divine willing (loving, commanding, intending, etc.), and the type of dependence relation postulated. This will become important later.

8. Official Baseball Rules (2014), Rule 9.02(a). Graham McFee (2004) has plausibly argued that most if not all calls by officials in sports contexts are judgment calls, and I am inclined to agree. But for purposes of simplicity, I will restrict myself here to those examples given by MLB.

9. For this reason, Collins (2010) refers to this as being a question regarding an umpire’s ‘ontological authority’.

10. Interestingly, Rule 2.00 of the MLB rulebook defines a ‘strike’ as ‘a legal pitch when so called by the umpire’ and which meets at least one of several criteria. Here, it is unclear whether it is the umpire’s call or the meeting of the various criteria or some combination of the two that make a pitch a strike.

11. Russell (2004, 89).

12. Russell (2004, 91).

13. Russell shifts between talk of events, states of affairs, and facts, so for the purposes of this paper, I will take them to be roughly coextensive, despite certain controversies in metaphysics regarding the applications of these terms. In general, I find ‘fact’ to be the most helpful term to use, so I will primarily refer to facts in what follows.

14. Russell (2004, 89).

15. Searle, quoted in McFee (2011, 233).

16. Russell (1997, 22), my emphasis.

17. Russell (1997, 22), my emphasis.

18. Cf. Russell (1997, 24, 29).

19. It is not clear, however, whether he takes ‘basis’ to mean something like ‘ground’ or ‘reason’, or rather something more like ‘essence’. If the latter, then we run into the same confusion as above.

20. Austin (1962, 152).

21. Austin (1962, 152).

22. Austin (1962, 150).

23. Austin (1962, 150).

24. Austin (1962, 153).

25. Russell (2004, 90), my emphasis.

26. Russell (1997, 24).

27. Russell (1997, 24).

28. The case is especially unclear with regard to strikes and the strike zone.

29. Cf. Searle (1969, 50–53).

30. Websites such as the German ‘Wahre Tabelle’ (or the ‘True Standings’, http://www.wahretabelle.de/) appear to endorse such a position.

31. However, as I discuss below, the prescriptive utterance by the umpire need not be grounded in a verdictive, even in cases where there is some more ‘cognitive’ element that informs the umpire’s call.

32. Of course, an umpire’s rulings may be overturned by MLB, as instanced by the expansion of instant replay during the 2014 season. Yet I think that the way MLB has implemented instant replay is problematic, in the sense that it does not allow for the cultivation of certain intersubjective relationships and virtues that we take to be crucial to the game of baseball. By sending the video to an off-site ‘Replay Command Center’, the play under review is taken out of the context of the game itself. Indeed, ‘singularizing’ plays out of context in these ways makes the game more about individual, discrete events than about the flow and continuity of a game that relies on context and intersubjectivity in important ways – ways that bear on how certain plays are to be understood and assessed. Giving the power of reviewing a play to umpires themselves allows them to exercise certain virtues in ways that are more strongly responsive to both epistemic and practical reasons – and this should be a welcome change to intellectualists and voluntarists alike.

33. Russell (2004, 90).

34. Russell (2004, 90).

35. Cf. Austin (1962, 14ff).

36. This way of viewing ‘calls-gone-wrong’ mirrors one in Kantian ethics often pointed to by critics – namely that morally wrong actions, by virtue of being heteronomous, are not actions at all.

37. Russell (1997, 32).

38. Russell also claims that ‘incompetent’ calls are non-calls. Yet it is less than clear what he means by ‘competence’, since it might turn out that any time an umpire gets a play ‘wrong’ on Russell’s view, this is due to some kind of lack of competence (attention, correct observation, concentration, etc.), in which case all ‘bad’ calls would, in fact, be non-calls.

39. In the 1988 film, Detective Frank Drebin (played by Leslie Nielsen) impersonates a MLB umpire during a game in order to figure out who among the baseball players is a ‘sleeper’ assassin. Needless to say, hilarity ensues. (The culprit, for the record, is a hypnotized Reggie Jackson.)

40. Cf. the famous scene in the film Bull Durham. I am grateful to Tim O’Connor for raising a version of this objection.

41. Cf., for example, Adams (1987), Alston (1990), and Quinn (1990). For a good overview of the various permutations of theological voluntarism, cf. Murphy (2012).

42. Murphy (2012, 683).

43. Russell (1999, 27).

44. Cf. Official Baseball Rules (2014), Rule 9.01.

45. Russell (2004, 91).

46. Note here that the mere fact that umpires (may) consult each other in such cases does not imply that voluntarism is false. First, the agreement of the umpires on a certain call – even if making reference to epistemic reasons – can still issue in a prescriptive illocutionary act. (Perhaps this might be similar to a polytheistic divine command theory.) Second, as I argue, any verdictives they might make are not sufficient for a call to be made, even if they might partially ground it. Finally, some appeals to umpires – as with the appeal to the first- or third-base umpire on a non-called third strike – are appeals to non-calls, not to calls. That is, it is a request that a call be made in the first place. This is also consistent with voluntarism.

47. For a detailed discussion of the morality of makeup calls, cf. Hamilton (2011).

48. Further, as I hope to develop in a future paper, there is an important relationship of trust established between umpires and players. Umpires trust players to conduct themselves appropriately and play fairly, and players trust umpires to make fair and balanced calls. Both of these expectations yield certain obligations – obligations which hold by virtue of the social relationship between these parties. It is this relationship of trust, perhaps, that grants the umpire the authority to be the source of the facts determined by his calls – and it provides players with reasons to fulfill the obligations that arise from those calls. Adams makes a similar claim in his defense of divine voluntarism. Cf., for example, Adams (1999, 242ff and 252ff).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Amber L. Griffioen

University of Konstanz, Dept. of Philosophy, P.O. Box 22, Konstanz, 78457 Germany. E-mail: [email protected]