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Very little of what goes on among human beings, very little of what
goes on in so limited an activity as a game, is merely conventional (done
solely for convenience). In baseball, it is merely conventional for the
home team to take the field first or for an umpire to stand behind the
catcher rather than behind the pitcher (which might be safer). In the former
instance it is convenient to have such a matter routinely settled
one way or the other; in the latter instance it must have been more
convenient for the task at hand, e.g., it permits greater accuracy in calling
pitches, and positions an official so that he is on top of the plays at home
plate and faces him so that his line of sight crosses those of the other umpires.
More or less analogous advantages will recommend, say, the Gerber
convention in bridge. But it can seem that really all of the rules of a game,
each act it consists of, is conventional. There is no necessity in permitting
three strikes instead of two or four; in dealing thirteen cards rather than
twelve or fifteen. -- What would one have in mind here? That two or four
are just as good? Meaning what? That it would not alter the essence
of the game to have it so? But from what position is this supposed to
be claimed? By someone who does or does not know what “the essence of the
game” is? -- e.g., that it contains passages which are duels between pitcher
and batter, that “getting a hit,” “drawing a walk,” and “striking a batter
out” must have certain ranges of difficulty. It is such matters that the
“convention” of permitting three strikes is in service of. So a justification
for saying that a different practice is “just as good” or “better” is that it is
found just as good or better (by those who know and care about the activity).
But is the whole game in service of anything? I think one may say : It
is in service of the human capacity, or necessity, for play; because what
can be played, and what play can be watched with that avidity, while not
determinable a priori, is contingent upon the given capacities for human
play, and for avidity. (It should not be surprising that what is necessary
is contingent upon something. Necessaries are means.) It is perhaps not
derivable from the measurements of a baseball diamond and of the average
velocities of batted basseballs and of the average times human beings
can run various short distances, that 90 feet is the best distance for
setting up an essential recurrent crisis in the structure of a baseball game, e.g., at
which the run and the throw to first take long enough to be followed lucidly,
and are often completed within a familiar split second of one another;
but seeing what happens at just these distances will sometimes
strike one as a discovery of the a priori. But also of the utterly
contingent. There is no necessity that human capacities should train to just
these proportions; but just these proportions reveal the limits of those
capacities. Without those limits, we would not have knowsn the possibilities.
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Stanley Cavell, The Claim of Reason. pp 119-120