Can I curse if I'm quoting an Ivy League philosophy professor?

The title of the paper is surprising given the author’s pedigree.

Harry Frankfurt earned a doctorate in philosophy from Johns Hopkins. He taught at two different Ivy League institutions. In fact, it was while the esteemed Dr. Frankfurt was at Yale – the country’s third-oldest college – that he became increasingly concerned with what he believed was a declining level of respect for the truth.

The result was “On Bullshit,” a 21-page paper published in 1986 in the Raritan Literary Journal.

Boy would I have loved to see ol’ Harry apply some of that scrutiny to Jerry Dipoto. 

Alas, Harry Frankfurt passed away in the summer of 2023. He was 94 and while much of his professional writing centered on human will, he was best known for that irreverent paper which – in 2005 – he turned into a best-selling book that established him as a national authority in distinguishing bullshit from other deceitful rhetoric. 

You see, Frankfurt believed there was an important difference between liars and bullshitters. A liar, in his mind, is actually concerned about the truth. He (or she) just want to conceal it. A bullshitter, however, need not be concerned with the truth at all. A bullshitter is concerned only about the impact his or her words are having on the listener. 

Using that standard, here is an incomplete list of people I believe qualify as bullshitters:

• Some (but not all) marketers

• Pretty much all politicians

• Every single solitary person who has ever described themselves as an “influencer”

• The Mariners president of baseball operations

Dipoto’s statements on Monday provide a great example of why I believe this to be true:

Is he lying?

Not entirely. There is an advanced metric called wRC+, which purports to tell you how many runs a given player created while filtering out external factors like ballparks, pitching, etc. Over the past three seasons, the Mariners ranked seventh in that category in away games. They’re 10^th in runs scored in that time according to some guy on the Internet.

So while you can find a way to argue that Dipoto’s statement is technically true, I think his answer is absolute bullshit, and the reason I think it is absolute bullshit is he’s trying to have a very specific impact on the audience. He’s trying to counterbalance the negative public opinions about the Mariners lineup. He wants people to believe the real issue with the Mariners offense is that it happens to play 81 games in a park that is particularly difficult to hit in. That if you look at the games the Mariners play outside their home park, the offense is actually good.

It was not, in fact, good. At least not last season.

Luke Arkins – whose Mariners Consigliere newsletter is among my favorites – respectfully provided a statistical counterargument to Dipoto’s statement by pointing out that on the road in 2024, the Mariners ranked 12^th in runs scored, 15^th in slugging percentage and 22^nd in batting average. They also scored three runs or fewer in 36 of those 81 games and went 2-34 in those games.

Now if the the only thing we were all interested here was the truth, we’d be able to move toward finding common ground. We could agree that Seattle’s lineup is not as bad as some people seem to think, and we could talk about the best ways to measure the productivity of Seattle’s offense going forward and how this might inform our projections for the upcoming year.

However, I do not believe Dipoto’s primary concern is offering a truthful assessment of Seattle’s lineup. I believe his primary concern is combatting the perception that the Mariners lineup is unacceptably ineffective. I believe that he feels compelled to do for a number of reasons that range from the benign (he wants to express faith in the team he has assembled) to the practical (he wants to inspire some degree of excitement in his team’s fans) to the more self-interested (he would presumably like to remain employed as the president of baseball operations). He is deploying bullshit to try and accomplish his objectives, though to be fair, there are times he lies, too.

The statement is observably false. The Mariners had holes at three of the four positions on their infield. What they didn’t have was the spending room to acquire players who would constitute an upgrade from the players currently slotted to fill those positions.

Jerry didn’t want to say that, though. Or more likely, he knew that his bosses didn’t want him to say that so he lied by saying the reason the team brought in so few new parts is because there was nothing to fix.

Here I’ll quote from Frankfurt’s initial paper in discussing the discipline that an actual lie entails:

Bullshit has no such restriction. You can say something that’s true and totally unrelated to the point. You can say something that’s half true. You can say something that’s patently ridiculous.

Now, in terms of the ethics and morality of it all, I’m not sure whether lying is better or worse than bullshitting. What I do know is that bullshit is much more difficult to combat, and that’s because the bullshitter isn’t beholden to the truth at all. He (or she) is playing a different game entirely.

Jerry Dipoto certainly isn’t unique in his proficiency at slanging bullshit nor for the frequency with which he does so. I tend to believe that anyone who speaks into a microphone for any extended period of time will (repeatedly) say things that are not entirely truthful. I know I did in the nine and a half years I was paid to talk on the radio.

What sets Jerry apart, however, is the ambition of his bullshit. He’s not trying to point out that the hitting struggles of his team are overstated. He’s trying to tell us that it’s actually good.

He’s also pushing up against his innings limit. He has spent too much time standing tall in the pocket here in Seattle, delivering a wide array of bullshit behind a single, solitary playoff berth over the past 10 years. At some point, it becomes impossible to ignore the gap between what he has said about the team his organization fields and what we have seen.

I thought Nathan Bishop captured this fact quite eloquently:

Bishop also has a newsletter on the Mariners — “The Light Bat” — which I highly recommend. He has spent many of the past few years pointing out the reality distortion that tends to occur when Dipoto talks in public. The difference, however, is that Nathan is too polite and too mature to do several hours of research on an Ivy League philosophy professor just so he can call someone a bullshitter.

I am neither polite nor particularly mature.

🐂 💩 

See?