the locale of J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy. Interviews with Schwarber perhaps don’t give the impression of someone deep in thought, but such an observation misses the point in the way that assumptions about Gronk have long missed the point. When it comes to baseball, Schwarber’s knowledge is much more than extensive. Put another way, when Kyle Hart (a former teammate of Schwarber’s at the University of Indiana) was asked about Schwarber’s intelligence, he noted that while Schwarber was “not going to get into macroeconomics and get an A,” when “you get on the baseball field, that kid might as well be Albert Einstein.” In baseball, much like Gronk in football, Schwarber is showcasing intensely unique genius. While there’s little doubt that Gronk and Schwarber would be caught tongue-tied if asked to talk public policy on Fox, CNN, and MSNBC, so would the smug pundits on those cable channels have deer-in-headlights stares if they were expected to knowledgeably discuss the intricacies of football and baseball with these masters of two incredibly brainy games. What’s obnoxious is that no one asks members of the pundit class to swim outside Belichick made about Gronk and other football savants with minds sufficient to play for him... Physical skills are nowhere near enough in football or baseball. Will made the point about baseball players that
have social and political opinions? And even assuming they do, why should we care? The previous question shouldn’t be construed as an insult to baseball players, nor is it an implied paraphrase of Fox News host Laura Ingraham a la “shut up and swing.” It’s instead a comment about what difficult jobs professional baseball players have. They’re doing what few can do, and a major reason they’re doing it is because they understand the game in ways well beyond instinct. As George Will long ago put it about baseball’s cerebral nature in his classic 1990 book Men at Work ... “I do not deny that extraordinary (literally: not ordinary) physical ability and natural talent are prerequisites for playing baseball at the major league level. But neither do I believe that those gifts are sufficient. The history of baseball is littered with failures by players
who thought their natural physical endowments would be sufficient.”
Will made the point about baseball players that Belichick made about Gronk and other football savants with minds sufficient to play for him... Physical skills are nowhere near enough in football or baseball. MINDING THE GAME Take Kyle Schwarber, a star for the Chicago Cubs in their 2016 run to the World Series title. It would in some ways be hard to find a player more everyman than Schwarber, including that he attended Middletown High School in Ohio, with Middletown being
American Consequences
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