188. Baseball Pain (9). September 27, 1964.

 

All right, those three teams coming down the stretch in 1964.   Drama in everything they do.  Has to be.  Every move they make now is going to make a difference.  Everybody following them is anxious, but in different ways.  Here's what we've got on September 27.

The Phillies.  Losers for eighty years, over-achieving this year but having a hard time keeping it up.  The pitching is in terrible shape.  Starter Ray Culp has hurt his elbow and is in the bullpen.  Starter Dennis Bennett's tendinitis won't clear up.  Starter Art Mahaffey is in a slump.  The close fans know this, know that their team has no stars to match the Cards' Ken Boyer or the Reds' Frank Robinson, and know that they've had a lot of luck in those early games.  But they, judging by the way they talk to reporters, have a good idea of what makes up for all that: their team has grit.  How else do you explain the fact that they just keep winning?  Six times so far in September they have squeaked out one-run victories.  Count on it: now that we're down to a six-game crunch their grit will show.  They'll gut it out.

The Cardinals.  Haven't contended since 1949.  Trying to get along without Stan Musial, who had retired the previous year.  They monkey around in the middle of the league, get a spark when Lou Brock is brought over from Chicago in June, but fall back to 9 1/2 behind in July.  For a while fans see what looks like chaos at the top.  The owner, Gussie Busch, fires the general manager, Bing Devine, and gives signs of firing others.  Now in the stretch they've got their manager, having heard that Busch had talked to Leo Durocher about managing in '65, not knowing whether or not, even if he survives this year, he's going to have a job next year. 

The Reds.  Here the struggle is to keep the back story from becoming the story, which is supposed to be about winning the pennant.  Their manager, Fred Hutchinson, is dying.  Knowing he has had lung cancer since December he has continued to manage through the early summer and on into July, showing reporters (in his thinning figure, his slowing walks to the mound) the makings of the "great story," the Hollywood-familiar story, the George Gipp story, that they can't let themselves write.  Courageous death as inspiration.  Rising to the heights in memory of the heroic leader.  You might play those strings later, maybe, but you can't touch them now.

Taste restrains the reporters.  What restrains the players, who, if they can help it, aren't even thinking that way?  Wisdom.  About baseball.  Poise, self-control, concentration, that's what's required in this game.  They know that a surge of adrenalin can wreck it.  "Win one for the Gipper" is the last thing you want to hear, or say to yourself, when that grounder is coming toward you.

So, fans in the stands above these stands, do you see the Reds' problem, how severe it is?  They get on the field they've got to put Hutchinson entirely out of their minds.  They can't let the gauntness of his figure on the bench say anything at all to them.  "Just listen to what he's telling you."  After he has gone from there (going early into the clubhouse, or, finally, just sitting in the stands in civilian clothes) they have to arrange their minds so that he is gone from there too. 

Maybe this is still hard to understand.  I'm thinking of those foreign to the game.  For them maybe turning back to Posts 172 and 173, the discussion of the 2012 disaster, would help.   You had the game-deciding grounder bounding toward Scott Rolen there.  If you've been able to put yourself in his place, trying to resist all the pressures on him as the ball approaches, maybe you can estimate the resistance each Reds player, as he prepares to field each ball in the coming series, is going to have to find in himself.  Say you're already able, in crucial situations, to silence the voice that says, "Do it right, do it right for the ballgame, do it right for your teammates, do it right for the town."  Will you be able to silence the voice that says, "Do it right for Hutch"?  Can you see the pressure that will add?

By the end of play on the 27th it looks like every Redleg is doing everything right.  The team has completed a five-game sweep of the Mets with a double-header win in New York that couldn't have been more convincing.  No errors in either game, hits when they were needed, good tight baseball.  Only one error the whole series, every attempt to sacrifice successful, and never, in any game, more than eight runners left on base, total.  They have won nine straight games and will return home in first place.

Meanwhile, over in Pittsburgh, the Cardinals have just finished their own five-game sweep with a shutout.  They can't have been doing much wrong either.  And the Phils, oh the Phils.  They are doing the right things, yes, just the right things to set up the three-team drama.  Gene Mauch pitches Jim Bunning again on short rest and he gets clobbered, seven runs in three innings.  By the time they come to bat in the fifth, at home, they are behind 12-3, and will clearly lose their seventh straight game.

What do you think we get if we put the anxiety meter on one of those fans there in Veterans Stadium in the bottom of the fifth?  We asked earlier whether you could "see the pressure."  Let's try to see it on a gauge. At nine runs down the LI (Leverage Index, how much difference the at-bat can make in the game) in successive at-bats goes .06 to .03 to .01 in this inning.  Considering the importance of the game (measured by POFF differential) this fan's anxiety (9.5 on the Index) is pretty low. 

The baseball-curious from overseas may wonder what a fan does during these low-pressure spells.  What's the attraction?  The game is lost, there's nothing to root for.  What a contrast with soccer, where you're nearly always within one or two goals of tying it.

The question arises from over-attention to the big drama, which now has lost its attraction.  There remain the little dramas.  The close fan will know which rookies are struggling to make it, which slugger has to learn to hang in there against a left-hander's curveball, which speedster has to gain the savvy to add base-stealing to his attractions, which flame-thrower has to add a change-up.  He (or she — there are plenty of women among the close fans) will also know the problems of the veterans those rookies are trying to replace, the sluggers whose bats are slowing, the speedsters whose jumps are dragging, the pitchers whose change-ups are getting hit.  Even when, in the great struggle, his team is thirty games and nine runs behind, the close fan will find enough in these small struggles to keep him in his seat.

If that's not enough there's this left: the beauty of the fielders' motions.  I don't know how it actually works but somehow the need to move efficiently (to retire or hold the runner) just seems to make ballplayers' bodies move gracefully.  I recommend watching a shortstop.  Going into the hole he's got a long distance to go and a long throw to make.  And he's got a runner who's going make his success a matter of milli-seconds.  Can anybody less afford waste motion?  Self-interference?  The need for the throw shapes the grab and the need for the grab shapes the steps and anything less than harmony loses the out.  Harmony is beauty, as it is in any sport, but here it's a special beauty, an isolated beauty, one you can see all of.  Because baseball, almost uniquely among team sports, separates offense and defense, there's no interruption in the performance, and nobody obscuring it.  Furthermore, it's a performance by a normal body, not a special body, not one given advantage by abnormal weight or height.  A body like ours.

I can hear the Philly fan now: "Oh great.  I'm watching my guys throw away the pennant and you see me admiring their beautiful bodies.  What am I supposed to be, a Buddha contemplating the art of baseball?  Get real.  That's Jim Bunning those Milwaukee bastards are clobbering."

OK, all the little dramas have been overwhelmed by the big drama, the tragedy he's wrapped up in.  But what will we find in him after Bunning is thoroughly clobbered?  Ache, yes, the ache of the loser.  But here's Richie Allen coming up, leading off the fifth.  Hitting .348.  What a rookie season!  Can he keep it up?  I am going to claim that this Philly fan is not going to take this moment to go back behind the stands for his consoling beer.  He's going to stay, and think about Allen, and his drama, and how it might work into next year's drama, and think about whether maybe, just maybe, the denouement might be, ho ho, a pennant. 

Since my claim is based on assumptions about the nature of baseball, and how it works on human nature, that I can't argue for (certainly not here), and I don't want to give it up, I think I will just have to appeal to fellow fans.  Is this the way it is?  Is this what you do, over there in Philadelphia, when guys like Bunning get clobbered in a big game?  Sit back and enjoy guys like Allen?

187. Removed

 

186. Baseball Pain (7) Philadelphia continues to lead the league in anguish.

Whatever their own pain Cincinnati fans have to admit that for repeated anguish in the closing weeks of the 1964 season the Philadelphia fans are hard to beat.  Even if the anguish had stopped after those two games reviewed here, the 1-0 Chico Ruiz loss and the twelve-inning double-comeback loss, even if the rest of the games in their ten-game disaster had been blowouts (dull pain, not anguish), they would have been setting pain records.

But no, the very next day: anguish.  And not just ordinary anguish, not the anguish of a game tipped away from you by some little bounce or mistake.  No, this was a game ripped from you, after it was yours, with a pain the gods set you up for, and make more exquisite.

Those gods gave Philadelphia a 4-0 lead in the fifth inning, with Win Expectancy 92%.  They let Art Mahaffey, suffering a worrisome end-of-season slump, pull out of it with four strong innings.  Then after letting him frighten the fans with a weak fifth inning (two runs scored) they had him show his toughness in the sixth, when with two men on and nobody out he got Dennis Menke (who had earlier hit a home run) on a pop fly and with one out and the bases loaded got a strikeout and a bouncer back to the mound.  If you don't believe that that was pressure pitching take a look at the Leverage Index on the last two batters: 4.26 and 4.29.  (LI shows the damage a batter can do to you.)

OK, Mahaffey has shown that he wasn't unmanned by that wild pitch he made while Ruiz was going for home (remember?), and when in the next inning he puts down Lee Maye, Hank Aaron, and Eddie Mathews in order the Philly fans can sit back.  They'll read next day that their slumping pitcher has "regained his mastery."

But then in the next inning, after he has put two men on base, the gods (through Gene Mauch) take Mahaffey out.  So that Bobby Schantz can show his mastery.  Which he does, getting out of a bases-loaded jam with a strikeout and a popup — but only after a passed ball has let in a run, the run that makes it a one-run game and ups the heat on the ninth by about 20 degrees.

The gods need that increase because, painful as the anxiety is, it raises the prospect for pleasure.  Pulling out a close one is always more satisfying than winning an ordinary one.  And doing it when your fears are high, when you're doubting your toughness, that's really satisfying.  "Yeah, ole Bobby showed 'em what we're made of."  So Philly fans, in addition to the pain of loss, get the pain of lost pleasure, envisioned pleasure.  And it isn't such a distant vision.  All ole Bobby has to do is continue his mastery for three more outs. 

Nothing doing.  Not with Hank Aaron leading off.  It's a single.  It's not a home run, thank God, but it's not the strikeout you can often get when a hero opportunity brings big swings out of a slugger.  Then another slugger, Eddie Mathews, under the greatest pressure so far (LI 4.65), follows with a single.  "Oh God, we're in the cooker now.  C'mon, Bobby, we know what you're made of."  (Philly fans had seen the 39-year-old Schantz on the mound eight times in September and only once had he let in as much as one run, and that was in a game where he went seven innings. Now he's making his fourth appearance in four days.) 

“The one thing we never got in ’64,” Jim Bunning said, years later, “was the one performance, the one big hit, the one huge pitching performance that could have stopped the bleeding.”  This could have been the one huge pitching performance he was hoping for.  Schantz was already huge.  Now all he had to do was wiggle out of this jam.  A popup here, a ground ball there, especially a ground ball, that would do it.

And he gets the ground ball, to the shortstop!  Could be a double play!  But oh no.  Tony Taylor muffs the throw to second.  Bags loaded.  And sure enough the next batter, Rico Carty, hits a triple and clears the bases.  There's the ole ballgame.

Tony Taylor, good guy, reliable fielder, Tony, the player whose dive had saved Jim Bunning's perfect game back in June, Tony makes the crushing error, the one that comes at just the time that will kill your soul.  Just as Scott Rolen made the error that lost the Reds the game that lost the 2012 series (remember, Blog Post #173?).  Why does it happen so often to losing teams?  Why does it come when you have your one big chance?  Why does it never happen to the Yankees?

185. Baseball Pain (6). Games of September 25, 1964.

 

Here's the closest a committed baseball fan comes to peace: early lead, ace on the mound, enough batters retired to show that he's in form, manager sitting back in the dugout, game official, sun shining.  The win you get that way is a win by brute force.  In the tense final days of a race it's about as relaxing a win as you can have.

For us the next games after the Cards had joined us were like that.  Jim Maloney gets a couple of runs in the first and then mows down Mets for nine straight innings, winding up with a one-hitter.  You might say the Mets are easy harvesting, but yeah, this is what it means to have the talent.  Here it is, exerting its force.  Brutality to them but peace for us.  A Reds fan can work on his car and barely listen to the game.

And then Bob Purkey does pretty much the same to the Mets in the second game of the doubleheader.  Three hits they get.  While over in Pittsburgh the Pirates aren't doing much better against the Cardinals, who get three runs in the first and then coast as we did.  We know in both Cincinnati and St. Louis that the peace can't last but we're enjoying it.

As I enjoy now looking at the graph of my peace.  The probability-of-win line for the Maloney game (as you can see at http://www.baseball-reference.com/boxes/NYN/NYN196409251.shtml) jumps up to 72% and then slopes smoothly higher until the win is salted away in the ninth.  Not a single wrench-dropping point.  Nearly the same for the Purkey game.   And it must be the same in St. Louis.

How different things must be in Philadelphia!  I never saw such a graph.  The Phils take a 1-0 lead into the seventh.  Win Expectation 71%.  The line has been sloping their way ever since the fourth, when Callison scored their run.  Looks a lot like Maloney's line.  But Chris Short, this day, is not a Maloney.  A mistake by the catcher (interference) puts a man on first and then (is Short upset?) bang, bang, bang the score is 2-1 Milwaukee.  The probability line is way up in Brave territory, at 68%.

Then, just as in the Maloney game, it starts, behind Chi Chi Olivo, its slow climb to a Milwaukee victory, the 100% line.  Hank Aaron and Joe Torre add a run to the lead in the eighth and bring it 88%.  Then, with two outs in the Phillies' eighth and the probability of a Milwaukee win at 90%, Johnny Callison refuses to be a Met.  He hits one over the fence, Allen scores ahead of him, and they're all even.

Is that dull to you, all those numbers and lines?  If you're not a Philly fan (much less a baseball fan) no matter.  You're not in this.  Fine, go your way.  If you are a Philly fan, though, then you are answering a question other Philly fans (and other baseball fans) are curious about: what's inside you?  Something inside a certain kind of Philly fan will glom onto those lines and numbers.  "Yes!  That's exactly the way it was.  My heart was that low.  Ten percent chance of coming back.  I had forgotten."

I'm not saying that that fan is the true fan.  I'm just saying that he's a fan who needs to know how to relate to you.  Relations here are complicated, there are freaks and there are normals, but, whatever, he will be very satisfied to see that, despite the pain in those numbers and that geometry, you too look at them and say with satisfaction, "Yes, that measures the amount of pain there was, and that shows the direction it took."  He hardly has to know anything more about you.  Human understanding.

On the 25th Philly joy alternated with Philly pain, and was the greater for it.  Twice a Braves victory was more than 90% assured and twice the Phils fought back, jerking the line back to 50%.  Expand your screen and look at it, those cliffs in the 8th and 10th innings.

Imagine yourself in Veterans Stadium in the 10th inning, down two and no room left to wiggle.  Briggs starts you off by striking out.  Only 4% of teams come back from what you have now: one out, two runs down, extra inning.  Ah, but Rojas singles.  Something?  Forget it, Gonzalez strikes out.  Worse than 4% now.  Then Richie Allen (we called Dick "Richie" then) whacks one into center that goes to the wall and while it's bouncing around decides to keep going.  That moment when the crowd realizes that the runner is taking his triple all the way ("He's going to try for the plate!") is exciting enough, but when he carries the run that will save the game or lose it once and for all, my!  If you were there you must have been going crazy.

Well, he makes it, and life is good.  Briefly.  The Braves score two in the twelfth and this time the Phils can't match them.  Five straight losses.  The feeling of helplessness.  Awful.

Think what chance and perspective do to that game on the 25th.  Here we are looking at it in 2012 as one in a string of losses in a distant city.  It's the string, losing so many in a row, that has brought it to our attention.  After we look at the box score (our older habit) it's the string we'll go back to and talk about.  "What a streak!  What losers!"

Yet two of those losers, Johnny Callison and Richie Allen, stepped to the plate that night and, under very intense pressure, performed as heroically as any winner has ever performed.  In one at-bat they saved their team from a loss.  By doing the one thing that had to be done to save it. 

Just imagine how that would look to us (much less to Philly fans!) if we were looking back on it from a point of final victory.    Suppose the Phils had squeaked home a run in the eleventh, giving them the W that would squeak them into the World Series.  Can't you hear it?  "Remember the night ole Richie came carrying the mail around third?  After ole Johnny hit that ball into the seats?  Man, that was the night!"  It would be bigger than the Chico Ruiz night.  Hell, we wouldn't even remember the Chico Ruiz night.

Well, in the actual eleventh inning we didn't know that Callison and Allen hadn't done that.  Outcome of game and season were still in the air.  We just looked at their performance and heard it tell us this essential fact: they had inside them the stuff of heroes.  Character.  Now that's all changed and we look at them differently, or indifferently.  Anxiety is lost.  Pressure is lost. 

Ah, but the numbers.  Would you like to know just how much pressure was on Richie Allen?  Take the pressure put on him by his ability to change the outcome of the game as he came to bat in the tenth, the LI (see preceding post).  Add to it the pressure put on all Philadelphia players by their ability to change the outcome of the season by winning the game, the POFF difference.  (It's more than 14 times what it was on his first bat on opening day; see note below.)  You've got the Pressure Index, which for fans is the Anxiety Index.

Those numbers aren't affected by chance and they don't change with perspective.  And they don't give us the human experience, at the plate or in the stands.  What they give us is a better chance (if we have the imagination) to reproduce that experience than we've ever had before.  They give us a better chance of understanding character, and speaking of heroism.

Note: To obtain the Pressure Index (PI) multiply the LI indicator (the measure of the difference the at-bat can make in the game) by the change in POFF (the measure of the change the game will make in the probability of the team's qualifying for the playoffs).   The PI for Richie Allen's first AB of the 1964 season on April 14 was 1.67.  For the AB in the 10th inning on September 25 it was 23.7.  There was 14.19 times more pressure on him in the September AB than in the April AB.  And, since PI also measure fan anxiety, there was 14.19 times more anxiety in the fan.

184. Loss of a Good Word: "Stupidity."

 

 

Fifty years ago John Fischer, editor of Harper's, wrote that America's greatest problem in years to come would be, in one word, "stupidity."  How easily that word flowed out of his typewriter into his weekly column.  Sure, folks, when we get into the complicated, high-tech, society of the coming decades there aren't going to be enough smart people to keep it going.  "Yep," his readers said, or were expected to say, "there'll be too many stupid people."  Those are the kinds of words your mind fell into in those days.  His title, "The Stupidity Problem," greased the way.

Now the right word for that habit, I am sure, is "insensitivity," and I think our efforts to deserve its opposite, "sensitivity," are all to the good.  But there are times when the old, blunt word cries out for you to use it.

Right now I'm having a hard time resisting that cry.  Before me is an observation after the Connecticut classroom slayings by Congressman Louie Gohmert (R - Texas) that "mass killings happen where citizens tend to be unarmed."  Oh, if only the teacher in that classroom had had gun. 

There's only one thing you can say about that.  It's so goddam stupid that if you say anything else you're a language moron. 

Some statements these days, and from this camp, are so stupid that naming them is not enough.  You want to address the speakers directly.  Like those militia types that quote Ron Paul on the need for protection against an out-of-control government.  "You expect people to shoot it out with the government?  Using Bushmasters?  Don't you know that the Army can bring a tank in there and shoot their asses off?"  Gun people are so dumb they don't even understand firepower.

But I don't want anybody to think "stupidity" is applicable only at one end of the political spectrum.  Here's the socialist President of France, Francois Hollande, giving as his reason for abolishing homework in the schools that "homework gives children whose parents are able to help them with it — more educated and affluent parents, presumably — an advantage over children whose parents are not" (New Yorker, 12-17-12).

The President, according to Louis Menand, "wants to give everyone an equal chance."  By making the smart ones dumber.

I can't use Fischer's word for that without thinking of the future Fischer tried to foresee.  He missed the compensatory comfort: we'll be incapable of keeping a complicated, high-tech society going but we'll all be equally incapable.

183. Baseball Pain (5). The Fan Anxiety Number.

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On September 24, 1964, St. Louis Cardinal fans joined Cincinnati Reds fans in the circle of hope.  Their team, too, had jumped to just three and half games behind the Phillies.

My guess is that you would have found few people in either city expressing their hope.  Each knew too well the pain that hope, premature hope, exposed you to.  St. Louis, though it had come close, had not won a pennant in 18 years and Cincinnati, though it had won a pennant in 1961, had a lot more losing than winning in its past.  (Remember, neither city was looking back from 2012.)

If you're a careful fan you avoid hopeful talk because it can jinx your team, but careful fans in Cincinnati go further.  They badmouth their team.  A sportswriter in town for the '95 playoffs noticed this.  When he said some admiring things about his waitress's supposed heroes she heard him out and then said, "Ah, they'll blow it."  The writer, from New York, just didn't understand the Cincinnati thing the waitress was doing: protecting herself from disappointment.   It's what Cub fans, after so many swoons in June, do every May.  The name "Bums" was produced by the same kind of fan in Brooklyn.

The closer you get to the end the more a dashed hope hurts.  When you've got seven games left one loss can kill you, as it did the Giants.  And the pain goes up as the count goes down — 6, 5, 4 — each day you stay in the race. 

Would you like to know exactly how much the pain goes up?  Now, thanks to the genius statisticians, I can tell you.  They have given me a number that shows me, for each game on my team's schedule, how much a win or a loss will affect its chances of making the playoffs (see http://www.coolstandings.com/baseball_standings.asp).  Lose a game in April, their chances go down barely 1%.  Lose one in late September and they go down 20%.  We fans don't really need these numbers, since we know cruciality in our guts, but its nice to have them, and they're useful in explaining fan behavior (like refusal to leave a radio for the sake of a party) to non-fans.

Interesting things can sometimes be done with these numbers.  You can add this one, called the POFF (Probability of Making the Playoffs) number to the LI (Leverage Index) number and get a number that will show what I would call Total Cruciality. The LI number, you may remember, showed how much each at-bat or play could affect the outcome of the game.  That's part of cruciality.  The other part is how much the outcome of the game affects the outcome of the season.  Add them and you get Total Cruciality.  If you're interested in how much pressure is on a player, or how much anxiety is in a fan, you've got a number for it.

What you call this number, beyond Cruciality Index, will depend on whose behavior you want to explain (or excuse).  If it's the player it will be the Pressure Index.   If it's the fan it will be ... what?  If you just want to explain him then you'd want something like Fan Attraction Index.  "This is the force that holds his ear to the radio."  If you want to justify him then I think you'd want something like Fan Anxiety Number.  "This is how tense he has a right to be."  In any case, the number shows potential pain.

That's fine for us, looking back at 1964, since if our imaginations work right we can see potential pain becoming actual pain, but it leaves out an important kind of pain, the kind Cardinal fans felt as soon as they arrived in the hope circle, the pain of regret for past performances.  It's a pain that goes with the territory, contender country.

My guess is that as soon as Cardinal fans found themselves three and a half back they started going over their loss to the Reds four days earlier, back when they "didn't have a chance." Bob Gibson had had a 5-0 lead with one out it the sixth and would have had a second and possibly a third out on a ground ball that was misplayed.  The Reds went on to score three and then won it 7-5 on a three-run homer by Frank Robinson in the 9th, Gibson still pitching.  ("Oh, if only Keane had taken him out.") I see that ground ball, and maybe Keane's face, popping up in mental replays all over St. Louis.  Lose the race by one game, Card fans, and they'll be popping up all winter. 

They know this in St. Louis, and it's hurting them.  I in Cincinnati know they know it.  I'm glad it's hurting them.  Not deep-down glad (the Cards are too Midwestern hard-ball, too old-National-League-West, too brotherly close, for that) but surface, passing glad.  I'm glad simply because we were the ones to hurt them.  We made ourselves felt.

Don't be surprised.  It's not an uncommon pleasure in the losers' circle.  I know it's the pleasure lifetime losers feel when they take down high-achieving statesmen, I know when I sit next to Card fans I'll be sorry I had it, but at the moment I feel it.  And I'm grateful to the statisticians who stepped in between that moment and this one.  I can now quantify the Card fans hurt.  I've got a number for it.

And since I'll probably use that number again I'd better name it.  Let's call it the Regret Number.  It would be obtained by measuring the change in the Cruciality Number (POFF plus LI) after the at-bat or play went against you.  Or, for poignancy, after you blew it.

182. Baseball Pain (4). The Pythagorean Number

 
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When you're a fan you become so focused on your own ballplayers that you get to thinking they're the cause of everything.  The other guys don't "get" three hits; your pitcher "gives them up."  He "gets" batters to swing at bad pitches, hit the ball on the ground, pop up, even line out.  When your guy comes to the plate and does that it's all his fault.

Other teams are known mainly by what they have done to you. The Phillies beat us up in the first two series we played with them in 1964 and after that they were "the mighty Phils," kept on their eminence by memory — and, of course, the numbers in the won-lost column.  That's why I referred to them (in the preceding post) and the Giants as the two "really talented" and "strong" teams, up there battling for first place.  Well the Phils weren't nearly as strong as they appeared, as I recently found out.

One number in one of those genius statisticians' columns, called "the Pythagorean number," made it all clear.  The number is the percentage of wins a team "should have," given their talent, measuring talent by the differential between number of runs scored and number of runs allowed up to that point (see note, below).  You can see right away whether or not a team is "playing over its head" — that is, beyond its basic talent — or not.  If it is, you're not so surprised at a fold.  Class will tell.

Well, on September 21, the day Ruiz greased their skids, the Phils had a Pythagorean number of  .561.  Their won-lost percentage at that point was .600.  They had been playing "way over their heads."

What a useful number!  How much it tells us about past pennant races.  Knowing that on the 21st the Phils were playing .39 over their heads I check the Reds and see that their Pythagorean is .564 while their actual won-lost is .557.  They're playing a little under their heads.  If there had been a Pythagorean number in '64 I'd have been saying, "Yeah, man, we'll catch 'em.  We got the class."  To a Philly fan after the fold I could have said, "Don't take it so hard, buddy.  It was in the cards.  Class told."

In the cards.  In the cards.  Easy to say but when I think about that old fatalist expression, especially during a game, it troubles me.  In my seat I don't for one moment believe that Brandon Phillips' game-changing break for third base (see Post #172) was in the cards.  It was a decision he made, and it came out of his character.  Everything my players do is a manifestation of character.  I see it in every action on the field.  I can't help it.  That's the way I watch and that, I think, is the way most fans watch.  Do the numbers show that we're fools?

If we are fools some of us, the nuts for whom "in the cards" will suggest simulated games, should know it well by now.  Robert Coover, the novelist, certainly should know it.  One of his heroes matches every percentage event in a baseball game to a comparable percentage throw of the dice.  Most nuts use playing cards (jack for a single, queen for a double, and so on) with the proportion of cards in an arranged deck adjusted for event (only one ace for a home run, for example) and player (more face cards for sluggers).  Play that game over the winter and you'll have no doubt that "in the cards" refers to a mathematical outcome independent of human agency.  Or, where the shoe pinches, that winning a pennant has nothing to do with character.

A cynical, illusion-smashing statistician could really drive this home.  "Oh sure, you can find parts of a season — winning streaks, losing streaks, sudden turns — that appear to be character-driven, you can use words like 'confident' and 'demoralized' and 'momentum.'  You can talk about 'psychological advantage' and a player 'choking.'  But those are just you, constructing something dramatic and intelligible." 

And you know, as you learn more about statistics you begin to wonder if that killjoy has a point.  Do you know that 100 random win-lose tosses will produce, more often than not, at least one six-game winning streak?  Look at that streak in your winter game and try not to make up a story about it.  Hell, that's the point of playing the game, to trigger your imagination.  Turn over one card and a team boards the train home fired up, turn over a different one and they're in the dumps.

If you upped the technology and had ballplayers running on batteries wired to a talent program that cranked out their performance would the season they produced be in any way distinguishable from a season produced by human ballplayers?  Might you produce the 1964 season this way?  How, to go Cartesian with this, do I know that the 1964 season wasn't produced that way, by some all-powerful demon?

What a prospect!  Every team's line on the graph wobbling toward its Pythagorean number, every player's line showing more and more accurately how much a victim or beneficiary of his basic talent he is.  But then there are those streaks at the end of 1964, by all three teams we're interested in.   Once you acquire the statistician's view you can't get rid of it.  So, fair warning.  The drama in the rest of this narrative could have no basis in nature.  An evil demon could just be playing with my mind.

Note: The Pythagorean number was first obtained by dividing runs scored² by the sum of runs scored² and runs allowed².  The exponent was then changed to 1.83 in order to bring the number closer to results in the world.