On Gemara and Pedagogy

Analogies from the World of Sports

(I wanted to write this article for an actual publication but I could never write it to my satisfaction so I’m putting up a rough draft here)

We begin with a story of divine intervention. The story of Mariano Rivera, legendary Yankees closer, “learning” his signature pitch, the cutter.

By now, the legend is well established, that Rivera's lethal cutter suddenly appeared one day in 1997. "A gift from God," he has said, many times.

He and his old catch partner, Ramiro Mendoza, were throwing together one afternoon, Rivera says, "and I was blowing [saves] ... I wasn't doing good. I was trying so hard. Nothing was moving."

…..

Anyway, as Rivera threw with Mendoza on that now-hallowed day in Yankees history, the ball suddenly started to move.

"[Mendoza] was upset at me because the ball was moving and he thought I was making the ball move," Rivera says. "From that moment, I told Mel [Stottlemyre, then-Yankees pitching coach], I have no control over this. The ball is moving, and I have no control."

Rivera and Stottlemyre worked on it at old Tiger Stadium when the Yankees landed in Detroit in late June.

"Didn't matter how I grabbed the ball," Rivera recalls. "It was still moving. I told Mel that I won't be throwing no more balls in the bullpen because I need to be ready for the game. We worked a lot and this thing is still the same and let's leave it like that."

Rivera saved all three games in Detroit that series, career Nos. 23-25, and one of the singularly most lethal weapons in baseball history had launched.

"The Lord gave it to me," Rivera says. "Oh, the Lord. Def-i-nite-ly. I didn't change anything. No grip, no motion, anything. Nothing.

"The rest is history."

I put “learning” in quotation marks because Mariano Rivera didn’t learn his cutter. His cutter just sort of appeared. There was no process to him picking up the cutter. He just picked it up in a certain way, felt out a way to grip the ball, and wheee! the ball moved. Call it divine intervention, call it natural ability, Mariano Rivera did not go through any process of learning in order to learn his cutter, the pitch he rode pretty much exclusively to a Hall of Fame career.

There is an idea (“Littlewood’s Law”) that if we define a miracle as a one-in-a-million event, then a miracle occurs every million events, or about every 35 days, merely as a natural consequence of probability. Taking that idea for our own purposes, in a group of a million pitchers, there is a distinct possibility that one of them going to miraculously develop a pitch in a game of catch that leads them to a Hall of Fame career. It can happen. It’s rare, but it can happen. Given enough pitchers over a long enough period of time, one of them is going to naturally develop an unhittable pitch.

Let’s say the New York Yankees looked at Mariano Rivera’s success, and decided to implement a Mariano Rivera-based pitcher development program. Using their financial resources, they buy up as many young pitchers as they possibly can, let’s say thousands of them. And then they put them all out into a big huge field, give a ball to every other guy, and tell them to play catch, and only play catch, all day, every day, until you develop a pitch that moves funkily, and then we’ll throw you into the big leagues. No instruction, no coaching, no nothing. Only catch, played by thousands of young pitchers, betting on the probability that you develop some Mariano Riveras.

Would this work? Well, it depends on what you define as “work”. If you define success as “produce pitchers who possess a single unhittable pitch that leads them to a Hall of Fame career” then yes, it would work. All the pitchers who failed to develop a magical cutter aren’t failures of the system, they’re just the raw material your machine needs to produce Hall of Famers. Because the odds are so small for your desired product (someone who naturally picks up an unhittable pitch that makes them a Hall of Famer) you need a lot of people who will essentially be waste products of the process. But that’s the price you are willing to pay to produce Hall of Famers.

More than that, because your process involves your pitchers playing catch as often as possible, and because your odds of producing a hall of famer are so small that you must maximize every chance you get for them to play catch, you cannot afford for them to do anything else than play catch. Fielding drills? Waste of time. Conditioning? Waste of time. Free time to relax and unwind? Get out there and play catch! Any demands made on the time of your pitchers that does not involve playing catch is failing to maximize the chances that someone develops an unhittable pitch.

“Learning how to pitch takes time,” you begin to say. “There are no shortcuts. There’s no way to learn how to pitch other than playing catch as much as possible, and we can’t sacrifice any time away from playing catch. I mean, look at Mariano Rivera! Where would he be if he didn’t play catch? You just gotta get the feel for it! And then soon enough, like magic, you’ll start to throw something unhittable!” You tell that to all the pitchers, even though you know that the vast vast majority of them will not, in fact, magically pick up an unhittable pitch, that the odds of them doing so are so low they’re in the margin of error. And when pitchers come to you complaining about how their arm is about to fall off and their fastball is still straight as an arrow, you tell them to keep throwing, because maybe it’s just around the corner, even though it probably isn’t.

How many games do you think the Yankees would win under this system?

What I have described to you is the typical method of Gemara education in Orthodox day schools. We throw kids at gemara, try to maximize the amount of time they spend learning it, and hope they learn to swim, even though most of them are going to sink. This works in Haredi schools, because that’s what they’re designed to do. They are designed to produce gedolim, and what happens to everyone else who doesn’t become a gadol is besides the point. And how do you produce gedolim? By throwing everyone in the deep end as much as possible and seeing who swims and who drowns. Am I being unfair? No, I’m merely quoting R. Dessler.