This morning, my IR professor (whose baseball allegiances had previously been a mystery to me), was trying to explain the problem of indeterminacy in predicting the future of international relations. Simply put, it means that you can't predict certain things because their factors haven't yet fallen into place.
Getting more blank stares than usual, he decided to use a baseball analogy (if he hadn't waited until the last day to do so, I might have paid more attentions all semester).
"So, say you're asked to predict who will win the World Series in 2050. You might say the Red Sox, right? Because that would make sense... Or, if you're crazy, you could say the Yankees - although they do have all the money, but that's another story."
He went on to explain that through indeterminacy, it would be nearly impossible to predict something like that: the players won't even have been born yet. However, I was busy seeing IR in a whole new light: I've been writing my Cultural Studies essays about baseball all semester, and I did my final statistics projects on publicly funded baseball stadiums, but never had I looked at IR theory through a baseball perspective.
Thank god I picked a New England school. The fact that we're close to Yankee territory (with some Phillies fans here and there), just keeps things interesting.
Couldn't agree with you more.
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