It isn't rocket science

Some of the dumbest people I’ve ever observed have spent too much time in a dugout.

            Baseball is steeped in tradition and superstition; and ignorance is often celebrated through crotch-grabbing, prank-playing, spit-balling, bubble-blowing displays of arrested development and bravado that would make George W. Bush proud.

Catchers have the worst of it from the get-go, considering the self-fulfilling prophesy of the whole tools of ignorance thing. Most catchers have taken way too many foul balls to the head. Yet, they are in charge of calling a game. And after their playing days are over, they are often called upon to manage games. Kansas City manager Ned Yost, a former catcher, immediately comes to mind. When heavy-footed Billy Butler indicated to his skipper that he’d rather play first base than be a full-time designated hitter, Yost, who had a lifetime batting average of .212 in the majors and an on-base percentage of .237, semi-famously quipped, “You know what, I’d like to be an astronaut.”

At least Yost – he counts Larry the Cable Guy among his best friends – is smart enough to make a truly funny comment once a year. And there is definitely truth to the notion, Yost notwithstanding, that bad players can be good managers. It’s just that the formerly bad players should probably try to compensate by being smart. Off the bat, the smartest manager I can think of is Tampa Bay’s Joe Maddon. The son of a Polish mother and Italian father, Maddon went to Lafayette College, which later gave him an honorary doctorate. He was, in fact, a catcher in the minor leagues; and now he’s a very successful manager. He’s married to a law school graduate. You can look this stuff up on Wikipedia.

Great players rarely become good managers or coaches, no matter how smart (or dumb) they are. Last year, the Royals tried George Brett as their hitting coach because George was pretty great at hitting. Near as I can tell, Brett’s philosophy is See Ball, Hit Ball Hard, Run Like Hell. He is on record as saying that home runs kill rallies, which has a certain amount of backwards truth to it. Anyway, Brett was a lousy batting coach.

That brings us to the pitchers, the ones not named John Rocker or Nuke LaLoosh. Some of these guys are cerebral. Former screwballer Mike Marshall has a doctorate in kinesiology. Jim Bouton wrote one of best baseball books ever published. Dirk Hayhurst writes smart books about the stupidity of baseball’s unwritten rules.

As far as I know or care, no former NFL player has ever written a really good book (unless you count George Plimpton). But even the most barbaric NFL players at least had to pretend to go to college, while the majority of professional baseball players did not. And unlike Major League Baseball (as far as I know), the NFL has a way to quantify the intelligence of its prospects: the wonderfully named Wonderlic Test. Somewhat surprisingly, offensive tackles and centers had a higher average score in 2013 than quarterbacks, which ranked third as a group.

Regardless of sociological biases (race, language, etc.), you could probably make a case, I guess, that non-concussed professional football players are, on average, smarter than their lollygagging, non-pitching counterparts in baseball. Fortunately, you don’t have to teach any of them how to grow strong, react impossibly fast, throw thunderbolts, or run like the wind. They either have it or they don’t.

When it comes to the overall intelligence of fans and eggheads (who generally lack athletic skills), baseball is still, without much dispute, the most sophisticated, nuanced sport in America by far. Scholars and artists follow baseball, study it, write about it, and praise it with eloquence: James Earl Jones, Vin Scully, George Will, Ken Burns, Doris Kearns Goodwin, the late Buck O'Neil, et al. Meanwhile, sabermetricians had to be invented to slowly pull a lot of mouth-breathing players and managers, and especially reluctant scouts and front office people, into the post-modern era of baseball analytics.

The good news in all of this for many people is that there is no solid correlation between intelligence and success in sports. Professional athletes don’t have to be smart at all to succeed, and neither do you! Being dense, or just smart enough, is an advantage in a lot of occupations. (I am thinking about the Nirvana song: “I think I’m dumb, or maybe just happy.”)

We’ll leave the last words on this subject to a particular pitcher, a Cy Young Award winner who cannot tell a lie and might be a genius: “I don’t want to name names, but there were guys I played with that were so stupid that they’re really good, because their mind never gets in the way,” Zack Greinke told the Los Angeles Times.

P.S. One former Royal accidentally shot a female reporter with an air gun and another once got his head stuck in a rain tarp. Neither player was very good.

2P.S. My pick for smartest baseball player ever is Moe Berg, who was a catcher and a spy. More on that soon.

3P.S. Blaine Gabbert (Mizzou!) and Alex Smith (Chiefs!) had the highest Wonderlic scores among 2013 quarterbacks.

4P.S. Gabbert sucked.

5P.S. According to the results, the Chiefs were the dumbest team in the NFL.