Let’s Watch JJ Bleday’s HR Swing Over and Over

According to Plato’s “Theory of Forms,” the physical manifestation of a form can never be as perfect as the idea. In other words (i.e. found on Wikipedia because it’s a Saturday and I’m not digging through my old philosophy books and notes for this):

For Plato, forms, such as beauty, are more real than any objects that imitate them. Though the forms are timeless and unchanging, physical things are in a constant change of existence. Where forms are unqualified perfection, physical things are qualified and conditioned.

[...]

A Form is aspatial (transcendent to space) and atemporal (transcendent to time). Atemporal means that it does not exist within any time period, rather it provides the formal basis for time. It therefore formally grounds beginning, persisting and ending. It is neither eternal in the sense of existing forever, nor mortal, of limited duration. It exists transcendent to time altogether. Forms are aspatial in that they have no spatial dimensions, and thus no orientation in space, nor do they even (like the point) have a location. They are non-physical, but they are not in the mind. Forms are extra-mental (i.e. real in the strictest sense of the word).

A Form is an objective “blueprint” of perfection. The Forms are perfect and unchanging representations of objects and qualities. For example the Form of beauty or the Form of a triangle. For the form of a triangle say there is a triangle drawn on a blackboard. A triangle is a polygon with 3 sides. The triangle as it is on the blackboard is far from perfect. However, it is only the intelligibility of the Form “triangle” that allows us to know the drawing on the chalkboard is a triangle, and the Form “triangle” is perfect and unchanging. It is exactly the same whenever anyone chooses to consider it; however, time only effects the observer and not of the triangle. It follows that the same attributes would exist for the Form of beauty and for all Forms.

Last night, JJ Bleday provided a counterpoint:

The Ancient Greeks had a word for that swing: Arete (ἀρετή). The Ancient Greeks also bathed by coating other men in olive oil and slowly scraping it off with sticks, and established the Olympics primarily to wrap blue ribbons around the best body parts.

Let’s stop talking about the Ancient Greeks and watch that swing again.

Game two is tonight at 8pm CT on SEC Network.

Until then: Να είστε άριστοι μεταξύ τους.

In other news, Bryan Reynolds is making his major league debut today. Shine on, you moustachioed teenage dirtbag.