Baseball and the Mystery of Life

Spring training is finally here.  I am a baseball fan.  Since I was a boy I have rooted for the New York Yankees.  For the last 35 years, I have also become a Minnesota Twins fan. I seem to not have problems with dual loyalty. No surprise there.

I love the game and relax as soon as I begin watching.  But there is a mystery about baseball.  This mystery is not new to baseball fans.  It has been a part of the sport since its very beginning.  Major league baseball teams play 163 games in each of their seasons.  But, and here is the mystery, even the best teams will lose close to one third of their games.  At the end of each season the teams that go to the World Series will have won 90-100 games and will be hailed as having a spectacular season.  Meanwhile in the process of having this great season they will have lost over 60 games.  How can a team be so good and yet lose so many games? Conversely, some of the worst teams will at least win one third of their games.  How did they do that?  I could understand a bad team winning a few games here and there by accident.  But to win over 60 games and still come in last place is a mystery.  If they are so bad, how did they manage to win all those games?  And if some teams are so good, how do they manage to lose so many games? 

I know, some of you will say, this not a mystery.  It is just the way the game and sports in general goes. You win some. You lose some.  Right, I get it. But why are baseball teams so inconsistent?  And, sometimes, a baseball team has a “great” season, wins over 110 out of 163 games, and goes on to lose the World Series in 4 games straight.  What is that?  I know, it’s a short series, 4 out of 7, so anything can happen?  But why should that be?  You’re a great team that has just had a great season.  You have great pitching, hitting and fielding and yet you go and lose 4 straight? 

The game is unpredictable and crazy. I love it but do not understand it.  And by the way, the team that sometimes wins the World Series is a team that struggled the whole season, a wild card team that barely made it into the playoffs, and they become the World Champions?!   I find all this quite mysterious.

The fact is baseball is a game played by human beings.  And human beings like baseball players are consistent and inconsistent, predictable and unpredictable, have the capacity to act well and the capacity to act poorly. That’s what makes them human. On any given day, a pitcher who is having a terrible year can pitch a great game.  As a boy, I recall going to a double header at Yankee stadium when the last place Washington Senators played the first place Yankees.  The Senators won both games.  The Yankees looked terrible; the Senators played like champions.  For good or for bad, such is the nature of the game.  What makes the game interesting and crazy is its unpredictability and inconsistency. 

And that is what bothers and enthralls me the most.  You can plan effectively, cover every position, spend tons of money, do everything right and still lose due to chance. A vital hitter or pitcher, all of a sudden, gets hurt.  A player swings awkwardly at a pitch in the bottom of the 9th, ends up hitting a perfect bunt that allows the winning run to score. 

Baseball like life itself is full of chance events that can radically alter the tenor of the entire game or your entire life.  There is nothing that can be done about this.  And yes, just like our lives, it makes the game fun, crazy, strange, scary, sad and mysterious to watch.  And yet, I love it and cannot get enough baseball.  Like life, the season can be a wild ride, but we rarely feel we’ve had enough and always want more.