Help This Man Find Honest Work

I’m starting a personal campaign to help Chuck Klosterman find a new job. For those who don’t know, Klosterman is the latest in a line of writers for “The Ethicist” column in the New York Times Magazine, a parade that began after Randy Cohen was let go in early 2011.

Klosterman is no ethicist. His background is sports and pop culture, having written for Spin magazine, Esquire, GQ, and ESPN’s Grantland.com web site, among other publications.^[1] He was hired by The Times Magazine’s new (2010) editor, Hugo Lindgren, who also has a background of writing extensively about sports and music. What a coincidence.

Okay, so what’s gotten my goat? It was the answer to this ethical question in Klosterman’s column Sunday, the headline of which was “Foul Ball.” As posed by Jeff McNear of Larkspur, California, the question was:

At a baseball game in San Francisco, my friend Fritz managed to catch a foul ball. A kid sitting a few rows behind my friend was also among those scrambling for the ball. Urged on by 50 surrounding fans, my friend gave the ball to the kid. The fans cheered. Not two minutes later, a rival fan showed up and offered the kid $100 for the ball. With his parents’ encouragement, the kid exchanged the ball for the cash. My friend was outraged. Should the kid have refused the cash, split the money with my friend or given all the cash to Fritz?

Klosterman replied that it was “profoundly depraved” to sell the ball. He wrote, “The boy wanted the ball for motives that had nothing to do with its resale value.” It was “an intangible gift … a memento from a live event that can’t be replicated, an expression of camaraderie between two people who (in theory) love the same game, and the physical representation of a unique memory.” 

Baseball, hot dogs, and apple pie. Blah, blah, blah.

In addition to the offense of weepy sentimentality, Klosterman is guilty of assuming facts not in evidence. Here are some things that are missing from his reply:

• We don’t know whether the scenario is described accurately. This is Klosterman’s rendition of what McNear said that his friend told him, so it’s double hearsay.
• Even if the description is accurate, there are some important things we don’t know: how old "the kid" is, for example. Is he seven? Seventeen? It could make a big difference.
• We don’t know why the kid wanted the ball. Even if, as Klosterman assumes, he wanted it for reasons other than resale, we don’t know what those reasons were. Maybe he was going to throw it back on the field because it came from someone on the visiting team.
• We don’t know the economic status of the family. Maybe the parents desperately need the money and the boy knew that.
• We don’t know the boy’s baseball background. Maybe he doesn’t much care about the game, or maybe he’s a player himself and has tons of baseballs at home and doesn’t really need this one.

Facts are essential to any discussion of ethics, and the sketchy details of this case and the insufficient factual analysis make me question Klosterman’s qualifications to be writing an ethics column. I am bothered by his shallow reasoning. I am bothered by his lack of intellectual rigor. And I am bothered that he uses The Times Magazine to express an opinion on something he doesn’t know enough about.

If the scene painted by Mr. McNear were used as a springboard to some witty and insightful social commentary, I could forgive the factual gaps. But Klosterman’s profound conclusion is merely this: “Though the family had every legal right to sell this gift, it was wrong of them to do so.”

He should go back to writing about sports and pop culture.^[2] 

—End of Part One—

(Continued tomorrow.)

____

[1] See http://pages.simonandschuster.com/chuckklosterman.

[2] Apparently, many readers agree: surveys show that only about 20% of them agree with the answers in his column. See http://6thfloor.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/07/18/how-often-do-readers-agree-with-chuck-klosterman-as-the-ethicist/.