Baseball chatter is like Homeric poetry. It relies on the frequent repetition of tropes: “swift-footed Achilles” and “wine-dark sea” in the Iliad and Odyssey, “whaddya say” and “hey now” in chatter. All it takes to come up with a line of serviceable chatter is to string together a few of these catchphrases: “Hey now, eighteen, whaddya say, one-eight.”

Some college teams’ chatter, I’ve noticed, is chronically derisive. I have no interest in them. My subject is positive chatter. It comes in four forms.

The first is upbeat but essentially mindless noise: “Hey now, double-two, come now, kid.”

Another is encouragement to the batter to do something specific: “Lot of confidence, eight, base hit, win the battle.”

The third conveys useful information in upbeat form: “Keep it up, baby, you’ve got that one-two count.”

Finally, there’s chatter whose purpose is to activate more chatterers...

Jason Wuerfel has no dog in the fight that begins tonight between the Tampa Bay Rays and the Philadelphia Phillies. He’s the vice president and director of baseball operations for the Traverse City Beach Bums, a Frontier League team in Traverse City, Michigan, that plays in Wuerfel Park and whose two chief officers are John (CEO) and Leslye (CFO) Wuerfel, Jason’s parents. An English major at the University of Michigan, Jason pitched for the Wolverines from 1999 to 2003. A couple years later he published his debut novel, Pray for Rain: A Baseball Story.

I stumbled across Jason’s book while searching Amazon for something else. Nothing about the book is auspicious. It was written by, well, a kid. The name of the publisher appears nowhere on or in the book. No blurbs from other authors or baseball players anoint the back cover. I bought the book because it was the only contemporary...

Baseball “fits America,” A. Bartlett Giamatti claimed in an essay called “Baseball and the American Character,” which is reprinted in a brief, posthumous collection of his baseball writings called A Great and Glorious Game. “Above all, it fits so well because it embodies the antithetical, complementary interplay of individual and group that we so love, and because it conserves our longing for the rule of law while licensing our resentment of lawgivers.” (Think of how much we value the Constitution while simultaneously despising the politicians who hold the offices created by the Constitution.)

Baseball “is primitive in its starkness,” according to Giamatti. “A man on a hill prepares to throw a rock at a man slightly below him, not far away, who holds a club. . . . The batter is, they say, on offense yet batting is essentially a reactive and deeply defensive act. The pitcher is,...

A. Bartlett Giamatti was famous for many things. A scholar of English Renaissance literature, he became the president of Yale University in 1977. (At age 39 he was the youngest president in Yale’s history.) Nine years later, in 1986, Giamatti was named president of the National League, and three years after that as commissioner of baseball — not the usual career path for a scholar but one that accorded well with both his lifelong love of baseball and the ability to lead difficult people (like team owners and tenured professors) that he developed as president of Yale. It was Giamatti’s misfortune to inherit the crisis created by baseball legend Pete Rose’s gambling on games involving his own team. As recounted by James Reston Jr. in his book Collision at Home Plate: The Lives of Pete Rose and Bart Giamatti, the crisis culminated in Giamatti’s painful decision to ban Rose from...

Years ago, a famous political scientist at a Washington think tank told me that during his years at a major research university he regarded teaching as the price he had to pay to do research. I disagreed strenuously with him at the time and still do. What he should have said was: Grading is the price you have to pay to teach.

I have two conflicting impulses when a stack of papers or exams is turned in, as happened yesterday. The better of the two is to grade them as soon as possible, on the theory it’s going to take just as much time to do them later as sooner, plus the low level buzz of dread, guilt, and anxiety that will permeate my days and dreams for as long as I put them off. The lesser impulse — and the one to which I all too often succumb — is to wait until a convenient time arrives, which, of course, never happens. Either way, a pile of papers almost always means a lost weekend...

On September 2, at the time of the Republican convention, I was pinned down for a prediction during a talk I gave at the University of Mississippi. Here’s what I said: “Obama will win the popular vote by 5 or 6 points and the electoral college with roughly 350 or 360 votes.”

If anything, I was too cautious.

Barack Obama seems headed for a victory in three weeks that will set the stage for an outbreak of new programmatic activity resembling those that followed Woodrow Wilson’s election in 1912, Franklin D. Roosevelt’s in 1932, Lyndon B. Johnson’s in 1964, and Ronald Reagan’s in 1980. Each of these candidates won what Vanderbilt political scientist Erwin Hargrove and I called an “empowering election” in our 1984 book, Presidents, Politics, and Policy.

Empowering elections are rare — only four in the last 100 years. They share three defining characteristics: The victor runs a...

Which is stranger?—Newsweek’s report that Sarah Palin, an evangelical Christian, compared her supporters to “the people of Joe Six-Pack like me,” or that beer was publicly served for the first time on the campus of presidential debate host Belmont University, whose Web site describes it as a “Christian community with a rich Baptist heritage” and which has an alcohol policy banning “possession, which may or may not include consumption, of alcoholic beverages” and even “presence at incidents where violations” of the school’s alcohol policy occur?

Surely the latter, but there I was, last night, draining a complimentary Bud Lite at Anheuser-Busch’s media canteen, the same as I did on debate night at Ole Miss and Washington University. Belmont wanted that debate badly — badly enough that President Bob Fisher sold donor Mike Curb on the gift to fund construction of the Curb Event Center by a...

Last Wednesday night, on the eve of the vice-presidential debate, I gave a talk on the vice presidency at Washington University in St. Louis, the debate site. Toward the end of the program, Steve Smith, who directs the university’s Murray Weidenbaum Center on the Economy, Government, and Public Policy, asked what question I’d like to hear put to the two candidates. I responded, “The Constitution doesn’t say much about the vice presidency, but I’d like to know whether Senator Biden and Governor Palin are familiar with what it does say. So I’d ask a question like, ‘If a serious doubt arose in your mind about whether the president was unable to perform the responsibilities of his office, what would be your role under the Twenty-Fifth Amendment?’ or, ‘How will you carry out your constitutional duty as president of the Senate?’”

Why those questions? Because of Alexander Haig. Haig was...

The first presidential debates occurred 48 years ago, in 1960. The first vice presidential debate didn’t take place until debates resumed in 1976, 16 years later. How come?

The answer is that three very significant things happened to the vice presidency during those 16 years.

1. Half of the six vice presidents in this period went on to become president: Lyndon B. Johnson succeeded to the office when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in 1963, Richard Nixon was elected president in 1968 and 1972, and Gerald R. Ford succeeded to the office when Nixon resigned in 1974. Half is higher than the historical average, which for all other periods has been less than one in three.

2. The 25th Amendment was added to the Constitution in 1967. It’s often referred to as the presidential disability amendment but it’s first and foremost an amendment about the vice presidency. Section ...

Here was the neatest thing about being in the media tent adjacent to the site of last night’s presidential debate: the ribs from Rendezvous, downtown Memphis’s famous barbecue restaurant, were free and abundant. So was the beer, pretty much everything Anheuser-Busch makes, draft or bottled.

A close second: seeing that nearly every political and media figure looks worse in person than on television — older, paler, more wrinkly and, in most cases, considerably shorter. At a certain age, this becomes a guilty pleasure.

Here’s the worst thing about being in the tent: You really are sealed in an information bubble, into which news from the world you’re supposed to be covering barely intrudes.

Case in point.

Throughout the entire debate, the consensus among the press people sitting around me was that McCain was cleaning Obama’s clock. (Translation: They thought voters were thinking ...