Can Baseball Teach Us Virtue?

The Ancient Wisdom of Baseball, by Christian Sheppard (Greenleaf Book Group Press, 184 pp., $27.95)

Can baseball teach us virtue? As Ichiro Suzuki emphasized in his speech at Sunday’s Hall of Fame induction, it certainly can illustrate its rewards. (Its record in punishing vice is rather more checkered.) A new book goes further. In The Ancient Wisdom of Baseball, Christian Sheppard argues for baseball as a lens to re-examine the virtues of the ancients. “Every baseball game, if viewed from the right angle,” he writes, “reenacts an ancient myth.” And so, Sheppard traces the parallels between those ancient myths — especially mining the Iliad and the Odyssey, those foundational Western yarns — and the stories of the national pastime. For Carlton Fisk in Game 6 of the 1975 World Series, as for Odysseus wielding his mighty bow, “both stories show virtuosity rewarded with victory and joy.”