April 15, 2016

BP Unfiltered

The Wonderful Things That Vin Scully Might Lead You To Think About

by Meg Rowley

During the Los Angeles Dodgers home opener on Tuesday, broadcaster Vin Scully used Socrates Brito’s at-bat in the first to provide an on-air lesson in philosophy. Socrates, Vin told us, was “a Greek philosopher, smartest man probably in Greece, he started teaching and the government didn’t like what he was teaching and they put him in jail. They tell me, or at least I’ve read, that he could have escaped and he wouldn’t do it, he said ‘I want to go to trial, and prove that they were wrong and get a dinner every night free.’ Well anyway, with our friend Socrates, he stayed in jail and eventually drank the hemlock, I guess back in Rome that’s the same thing as we say ‘He must have had the Kool-Aid.’ Well 470 B.C. or whatever the heck it was, they drank the hemlock. Socrates Brito boy that gets your attention.”

And boy, doesn’t it, though? This isn’t the first time someone has had a bit of fun with the outfielder’s name. Our own Annual comment is an extended joke concerning Socrates’ theory of knowledge. But it got me wondering about other baseball players who might share their names with famous philosophers or thinkers. I did a little digging around on Baseball Reference and found a few gems. Just imagine that Vin is reading them to you.

There is no Bertrand Russell, but there was a Lefty Bertrand, who pitched two innings for the Phillies in 1936. Given his own political proclivities, I imagine Bertrand would have approved of his name if not his resolve.

There are two Augustines—Jerry and Dave. While St. Augustine fails to include WARP alongside Faith, Love, and Hope as a theological virtue in his Enchiridion, if he had, we might expect Jerry’s 0.4 career WARP to fare marginally better than Dave’s -0.4.

Edmund Burke finds his baseball proxy in Eddie Burke, a left fielder and second baseman from 1890 to 1897 who played for the Reds and the New York Giants. Both might later have noted that the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to waste a few seasons of Joey Votto, but I suppose we can’t be sure.

Johannes Kepler was a German mathematician and astronomer best known for his laws of planetary motion. That is a perhaps unfair and too-lofty accomplishment against which to judge Max Kepler, the young outfielder for the Twins, but if he helps Minnesota get their first win, their fans might view the two men with roughly equivalent esteem.

Thomas More wrote Utopia. Tommy Moore was a pitcher whose last season was spent with the Seattle Mariners in their inaugural season, a situation that can be described as more dystopic than anything else.

Carl Stumpf was a German psychologist and phenomenologist. He also contributed greatly to the study of musicology and aesthetics, and would no doubt have had something to say about the musicality of the word dehydrochlormethyltestosterone, the steroid for which Phillies Rule-5 pitcher Daniel Stumpf was recently suspended 80 games.

Steve Foucault pitched for a 1973 Texas Rangers team that went 57-105. One wonders if he considered baseball to be a Panopticon.

Baseball-Reference has no Thomas Hobbes, but there was a Bill Hobbs and a John Hobbs. Similarly, there has been no John Locke, but there has been a Chuck, Jeff, Marshall, Bobby, and Ron Locke.

If epistemology is more your thing, we sadly can't offer Immanuel Kant in his truest form. But a man named Erv Kantlehner played from 1914 to 1916. His nickname was Peanuts. We can only hope he treated his teammates as ends in themselves.

Arquimedes Euclides Caminero manages to cover both Arquimedes and Euclide. On September 18, 2015, he pitched in relief against the Dodgers, replacing Jeff Locke (!!). As Caminero walked Andre Ethier and got Chase Utley to ground into a force out, Vin Scully gave us a lesson in geometry, "Euclide is the father of geometry. Mmmm didn't we all love that? And Arquimedes devised a formula, determines the volume of an irregular shaped object using water displacement. Yeah, I didn't do too well in that either."

And lastly, shifting gears to American political thought and its acolytes, Thomas Jefferson didn't play baseball, but a George Washington did. He played for the White Sox from 1935-36. Jon Jay is active for the Padres, and his nickname is "The Federalist." John F. Kennedy was the 35th President. John I. Kennedy played for the 1957 Philadelphia Phillies, and John E. Kennedy was a second baseman for the Red Sox, among others. John Tyler was the 10th President of the United States; John “Johnnie” Tyler was a left fielder for the Boston Braves. Speaking of John Tyler, no variant of William Henry Harrison player baseball that I could find, which is just as well. Harrison’s early demise is the presidential equivalent of peaking in Single A, while Tyler is the presidential equivalent of getting called up when a starter suffers a career-ending injury, making the All-Star team, and then annexing Texas. Okay, maybe that last part doesn’t have a baseball equivalent.

Meg Rowley is an author of Baseball Prospectus. Follow @megrowler
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