What Heilman Was Thinking About

Perhaps you remember that Sunday game at Shea against the Houston Astros where Aaron Heilman made a play that will go down in baseball history along with Merkle’s Boner (Giants/Cubs 1908, 19 year old Fred Merkle left the field prematurely and caused the Giants to lose the big game) as one of the most inexplicably dumb plays to ever have occurred. The ball off the bat went back to Heilman who made a very snazzy play in picking up the ball. Then as he was running towards Delgado who was standing at first, Heilman stopped running and refused to throw the ball as well. The runner went unchallenged to first as Houston’s ponies scored like race horses. The PA should have played the hot top ten country song “What Was I Thinking?” Just days before the trade deadline, and facing Roy Oswalt, the Stros’ starting pitcher whom the Mets were mightily interested in, some might conjecture that Heilman was angry about some trade rumors he had heard about himself, and that LoDuca had placed 3 to 1 odds on Heilman and Solare going to the Astros for Oswalt.
I happen to know that Heilman is deeply interested in philosophy, (as I am by the way–no criticism there) and when you’re a philosopher you just never know when those deep thoughts are going to grab you. Perhaps the significance of the relationship between Pythagoras and Socrates (via Parmenades of course) and THEREFORE PLATO just hit him. YES! Its all interconnected! The ENTIRE Greek tradition of ethics arose out of face to face debate and discussion, but also out of an interest in numbers and the golden mean. In FACT, hey Plato was an ATHLETE, a wrestler, which means that there’s a competitive, strategic aspect to ethical living, and therefore a relationship between BASEBALL and LIFE, and what our purpose in life is EPISTOMOLOGIALLY SPEAKING!!! THAT’S IT!!! EUREKA!

I was at the game and managed to capture his thoughts using a special photographic technique, and here it is!

…………..WHAT HEILMAN WAS THINKING ABOUT!