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.

181. Baseball Pain (3)

Until September 23 the pain in Cincinnati was so dull it's not worth measuring.  We were out of the race and had never really been in it.  Right from the beginning it had been the Giants and Phillies, really talented teams, they had been the ones, up there jockeying back and forth for first place, May, June, July, up there where losses really hit you, up where pain was significant.  Then Philadelphia had pulled away in August and few really sharp jabs were possible.  Cincinnati had stumbled around in third or fourth place, occasionally bumping into St. Louis, down in fifth, and by mid-September all either city was feeling was the old ache of the loser.

"Then, boom, Chico Ruiz!"  That, for the sake of drama, is what I'd like to say, but no, baseball fans understand numbers too well for that.  After Chico's steal, no matter how hard the Phils are taking it (I understand that their manager, George Mauch, was walking around the locker room saying, "Chico Fucking Ruiz, Chico Fucking Ruiz") the Reds are still five and a half out.  No, the boom doesn't come until after the win on the 23rd, and then it's a small one.  We're suddenly three and a half out.  With ten left to play.  Some hope is justified.  Excitement rises.

The other two cities, I assume, are still in the dumps.  They're five back, well outside the hope circle.  San Francisco fans have probably had more pain up to this point than St. Louis fans.  On June 15 the Giants were tied for first place.  "Ho, ho, this could be the year."  The Cards were in 8th place, three games under .500.  "Guess these guys don't have it."  On August 23 they were eleven games behind.

If you're a Cardinal fan you're depressed but you're not pained.  Not sharply, anyway.   Sharp pain is what you feel when your demonstrably strong team, up there battling for first with another strong team, blows a game.  That's what the Giants did in August.  Again and again.   August 16: Error by Hart gives Milwaukee its winning unearned run.  August 18: In the eighth inning pitcher Bobby Bolin goes to second with Marty Keough's bunt, an intended sacrifice, but the runner, Chico Ruiz, Chico Fucking Ruiz, beats the throw.  Bad gamble.  Two grounders and Ruiz has scored.  Final score 1-0.  August 21: Giants give up three runs in the ninth inning and lose to the Cards 6-5.

The Phils, the team Giants fans expected to battle down to the wire, pulled away.  The expression for what happened to the Giants, the one the fans could expect to find in every season summary in the future, is "fell out of contention."  The Reds "fell out of contention in June."  It's neutral but it hurts.  On goes the writer to the teams that counted.

It's less painful to fall out of contention in August than it is in September, when you're closer to the prize.  But the city that does that is not free of pain in September.  That's the month for spectator pain, for watching, from a distance, the drama of close contention, the struggle of the last few on their feet in the arena, knowing that, if only a few things had gone differently, you could have been there.  "If only Bolin had gone to first with that ball.  If only...If only...."

But Giants fans not only had retrospective pain in September, they had immediate pain.   It was a combination, and the team made sure of it — by winning just enough to keep hopes of contention alive.  In early September they nosed into third place, and kept clawing, from fourth place, to get back into the ring.  Right up to the last week.  There were many September nights, I'm sure, when San Francisco fans could have turned off their radios feeling the pain of the August losses that put them where they were.

Would we, in Cincinnati, have found that odd, that Giants fans should be grieving because they wouldn't have a chance to be as wounded as fans in two of the three contending cities would be?  Not at all.  We had grieved that way for decades.

If you haven't put in that kind of grieving time, or if you are an outsider, you're going to find that kind of understanding hard to come by.  Maybe you could do it in a season, but you'd have to have a good imagination.  Can you imagine, in '64, what those fans of the teams under San Francisco are feeling?  Put yourself in Pittsburgh, or Chicago, or Houston, way down there, 6th, 8th, 9th place.  Where the Phils and Reds spent so many years.  Can you imagine it?

Now I don't ever want to say that watching a baseball game is dull.  With the poorest team there's always individual drama, a rookie trying to make it, a veteran trying to hang on, a marginal pitcher trying to master the pitch that will save him.  But that's the little picture, and what we're trying to understand is the pain in the big picture, particularly when it is impressed on you that your team is not in it.  And hasn't been for years.  And isn't likely to be.

(Remember here that the seventies, the years that sweetened the Cincinnati imagination forever, are still to come.)

So there's something to remember about the pain you're going to witness, or experience, in future posts: that below those feeling it are many, many others who would be glad, so glad, who would give their eye-teeth, to feel it.

180. Baseball Pain (2)

   

First you have to understand the pain of the Philadelphia fan, since that is the pain I am going to have to compete with. 

It's not a hidden pain.  The cries of old and middle-aged men, and a few women, have been sounding in newsprint and blogs for forty years.  "It hurt so much I couldn't even watch baseball for a year afterward."  "All I had to do was look at [my father's] face to know the horrible news."  "I saw those [happily printed] 1964 World Series tickets framed in my cousin Donnie's den, and I almost cried."  

Your handicap, youngster of today, is that you live in a time when teams come to the end of a season competing for ten places in the postseason playoffs.  In 1964 ten teams competed for one place.  It was go to the World Series or go home.  If you were a loser like the Phillies (17 last place finishes between 1919-1947, only two league championships in 81 years) that meant that if you missed your chance here you might go decades before getting another one.

Another possible handicap is living in a city with a lot of really good sportswriters writing about a really good team.  You won't know what it's like to be condescended to when those writers, knowing your team's record, come to town.  In Philadelphia your stadium will, after Yankee Stadium, "seem to be made of Tinker Toys."  In Cincinnati it will be "The Great American Small Park."  Your city will be "dowdy, conservative Cincinnati," and your team, though it burns holes in the base paths stealing bases (nine in one game), will be "conservative" because its square management demands haircuts.

I won't draw out the pain of 1964, since the Philly collapse, one of the two or three most famous in baseball history, is probably already known to you: the team lost ten straight and finished in a tie for second.  The game, and maybe the play, that started the losing streak is the one pictured on my theologian's blog, the one that has the catcher looking backward.

The man is looking at a baseball that has sailed past him.  The reason it is doing that is that his pitcher, Art Mahaffey, has been emotionally unsettled by the sight of Chico Ruiz running for home plate. 

"And what should be so unsettling about that?" even a European, watching the game, might wonder.  Home plate, he can see after an inning or two, is where the pitcher normally throws the ball.  The need to throw it very hard, or put various spins on it, makes throwing the ball exactly over the plate difficult, as his American host may explain, but now there is no batter there.  All Mahaffey has to do is throw the ball at moderate speed within the catcher's reach.  Ruiz has many yards to go before he gets there.  If anything in baseball is duck soup, this is duck soup.

Philadelphians know a lot now about the man who made it so ducky.  Chico Ruiz was a rookie, a fill-in, who never quite made it to journeyman.  In 1964 he apparently hadn't been around long enough to know that managers would kill you if you tried a naked steal of home (as opposed to a steal covered by a teammate stealing second) against a right-handed pitcher (one who's looking right at you).  And he'd double-kill you if you did it with a hitter like Frank Robinson up, somebody who had a good chance of bringing you in with a hit anyway.  Double-kill you, that is, if Robinson, not noticing you, hadn't swung and taken your silly head off already.

Well that's the salt the media have been putting in the Philadelphia wound for 48 years, that their heroic masters of the game were done in by a twit, and I don't want to add to it.  I just want to note the special nature of their pain: that it's nearly all retrospective.  If the 1964 Phils, after their bad spell, had gone on to win the pennant and then the World Series as the 1950 Phils had done, there would be no pain at all.  Just a little relieved wonderment, if that.

Try a little counterfactual experiment here.  In 1950 the Phillies had an even bigger lead, seven and a half games, on a comparable date, September 20.  They blew it and had to beat the Dodgers on the last day, October 1, to win the pennant that took them to a World Series victory.  Suppose they hadn't done that.  Suppose they'd lost the tiebreaker.  Philadelphians would be looking at the 1950 bad spell the way they're looking at the 1964 one now, and picking out moments, a tipping point, with an image, probably, the way they're doing now. 

We don't have any images because those moments have been forgotten, buried by the glorious successes that followed. And that prompts me to put a question to Philadelphia fans:  Would you really like to have this painful image buried?  Would you like to have Ruiz mean nothing to you, emotionally?

That's a harder question than it looks, as years of teaching good fiction have taught me.  It's a question, I think, of how much we value images that fit into a story, and how much we value stories that give us understanding.  And that's going to vary with individuals, especially when they're looking at a painful image.  I don't know about the theologian who started me on this series of posts, and I can't contact him, but my guess — based on I don't know what — is that he would not like to give up this painful image, even for a triumphant one.  Nor would certain other Philly fans, the ones who would value the same thing in fiction.  They've got a great story, it helps them understand life (that time and chance make it so cruel), and they would hate to give this up.

If anybody else can testify to this response, I'd like to hear from them. The image can be found at Chico‑Ruiz‑Steals‑Home.jpg

179. Baseball Pain (1)

  

A man in Philadelphia is grieving over the approach of the autumnal equinox.  Because it tells him winter is approaching?  That his powers are declining, that his days are dwindling down to a precious few, that yellow leaves, or none, or few, are hanging on his life's bough?  No.  It's because it brings back memories of the Phillies' loss of a baseball game to the Cincinnati Reds on September 21, 1964.

That's 48 years ago.  One game.  No, narrower than that.  One play: Chico Ruiz, of the Reds, stealing home.  He heads his blog post with a picture of it: Ruiz with his foot in the air, starting his slide, Frank Robinson, the batter, standing back, looking at the plate where the foot is soon to go, Clay Dalrymple, the Philly catcher, one knee on the ground, looking (of all places!) at the backstop behind him.

This picture comes back to this man every year as, he tells us, it does to many Philadelphia fans. Those fans must have lived through pretty many other things by now.   He, a grandfather, has (by his profile) had a career as an academic, a theologian.  His Ph.D. thesis was on Paul's theology of justification.  Who knows how deeply he has been engrossed in philosophical problems.  And every fall, that play at the plate.

Well, I have some painful memories of those days in September, 1964, too, and so, I dare say, do some fans in St. Louis, and San Francisco.  It was a record year for pain.  Teams so close in the standings, so much depending on each game.  The last two weeks were like having a kidney stone.  And only one team would pass it.

Why would anyone ever want to relive a kidney stone?  Masochism? Maybe, but with fans of teams with a history of losing it's more likely to be pride.   A need to win at something, some way.   "You think you've suffered, listen to what I went through."  I've heard that enough to think it's pride.

It's sort of what I want this fellow in Philadelphia to hear now.  I see him over there crowing away (he'll call it moaning): "Nobody knows the trouble I've seen."  Well, buddy, I know it.  And my friend in St. Louis knows it.  And there are probably a lot of guys in San Francisco who know it. 

So there's one reason to display my pain: to get even with this theologian.  Another reason is to educate.  There are so many people, particularly in Europe, particularly in football cities, who still don't understand the appeal of baseball.  And I think that if they can just understand the pain of it, and how this pain is different from the pain of other games, and superior to it, and how it makes this game superior … but then I lose them.  How can degree of pain signify superiority?  I guess you have to feel it.

And you could feel it, if I could just recreate it in words.  That, though, is so difficult that I have pretty well given up — until now.  Now, thanks to the wonderful new statistics, and the passionate fans who, profiting from the cyber miracles of our age, have managed to fill them out, I have a chance.  Do you know that I can now expose my heart to the meeting, or not, of bat with ball in every plate appearance in every game the Reds have played in the last seventy years or more? 

These geniuses have come up with a way to quantify what every heart in every stadium is doing.  To graph it.  They can give you a line representing, batter by batter, your team's progress to victory or defeat.  Up or down, sloping or sinking, soaring or diving, there it is.  And of course, since victory or defeat is everything to a fan, there's his heart.

You might take a look at this line, examples of which you can find at http://www.baseball-reference.com/boxes/.  Go to 23 September, 1964, the game between the Cardinals and the Mets.  I hope you see how much the line conveys.  It's like the line some teachers put on the blackboard to show a moral defeat.  Like (for me) the defeat of Eve by Satan in Milton's Paradise Lost:  down as she's tickled by Satan's praise, up as she recognizes it as flattery, more steeply down as she accepts his lies about the tree, up as she asserts the truths she has been taught, then vertically down, off the cliff, as she shows, by eating the fruit, that she doesn't believe those truths.  You can't see it on the board without realizing what a process moral defeat is.  The line at baseball-reference.com does the same thing for you.

Look at it now for 23 September, one of the days in my period of agony, squiggling along the center line for six innings at Shea Stadium, nobody scoring, few men getting on base.  There's the Cards' high point in the seventh, Ken Boyer's single after Bill White's home run.  One run in, nobody out, maybe a multi-run rally starting.  Win Expectancy 73%.  Now look at the change.  The line teeters at the top, as Boyer is sacrificed to second, descends some as the rally fizzles (McCarver and Javier ending the inning by grounding weakly to the pitcher) and then plunges as the Cardinal pitcher gives up two straight doubles and throws away a sacrifice bunt in the eighth.  The line shows it all.  Long inaction and uncertainty, then prosperity, crash, and a wiggling depression.

All right, in the '64 season we've seen our four teams emerge as contenders in June, then seen Philadelphia take a four-game lead in mid-August (worry in the other cities), raise it to five and a half on September 1 (big worry), and to six on September  15 (near despair).  By September 20, with the lead at six and a half, the rest of us have pretty well given up (or told ourselves we have given up).

Before I go ahead with my project, to relive, with the help of the new statisticians, the fans' last two weeks of the season, I want to make sure non-baseball people understand how rational our despair was.  Games ahead in the standings represent what has to happen for the team behind to catch the team ahead.  If you're one game behind entering the last day you have to win and the other team has to lose.  That has to happen six straight times if you are six behind with six days remaining.  As the sun rose on 21 September the Reds were six and a half behind with 13 games left to play.  The Phils had 12 left.  That meant that if the Phils won just six games the Reds would have to win all of their games.  Any Reds fan (or any St. Louis fan, whose team had the same record the Reds had) who wasn't in despair was crazy.  As for the Giants fan, he was even crazier, though only by a little bit.  His team was seven back, with 12 to play.

Very well, the next post will relive the game that has burned itself into the Philadelphia theologian's memory, first in his skin and then in my skin, in Cincinnati.  After that I will relive, with commentary, some of the other games played by these teams, to the extent that they contribute to our understanding.

178. Absolutism in Congress

 

It isn't often that we get to see three cases of thought-stopping absolutism play out at the same time but that is now our privilege.  The Norquist pledge, the Second Liberty Bond Act (debt ceiling), and the Budget Control Act (fiscal cliff) are all about to do just what our Philosophy 101 instructors were trying so hard to do: teach us to bear the pain of critical thinking.

Carefully assessing the present situation, making your best projection about the future, weighing all the options, and finally striking a workable balance — that was mentally painful.  But, if you wanted to find the best solution to a problem and a good grade in the course, there was no way to avoid it.

Not that freshmen didn't have a way.  My instructor called it "the absolutist escape."  Any time you declared that there was one value, one course of action, one thing that you would never do or always do, you were taking it.  And yes, you'd get a period of ease.  No more thinking, no more pain.  "That's settled.  Whew!"  But, sure enough, there would be the instructor (or the textbook) with a case that unsettled you.  "Non-violence, you say?  Well, here's this monster whose greater violence your violence can prevent."  There went your declaration.

Absolutists were, in the card-playing analogy my instructor liked to use, one-card-trumps-all people.  They were a drag in any complicated game, like morality, or politics, or life.  Among other people they contributed little.  Among themselves they wound up with solutions that seldom fit the problem.  It could hardly be otherwise.  As soon as they said, "X, whatever the situation," they doomed themselves to a misfit for every situation that wasn't exactly like the situation in which they said X.

Grover Norquist, who has been to college (Harvard BA, MBA), must have known this.  Yet with his offered pledge he was willing at the start of the 112th Congress, to turn 238 members of the House and 41 members of the Senate into absolutists.  "I will not raise taxes, whatever the situation."  We college teachers have to wonder.

The debt ceiling operates a lot like Norquist's pledge.  It says, "You will not budget more than X whatever the situation."  Only in this case X is an exact number, declared first in 1917.  That has been a misfit so many times that by now you'd think the absolutism would be clear, but apparently not so.

Who can miss the absolutism in the Budget Control Act?  "Budget cuts will be made on this date whatever the situation."

See who the absolute authority is in both of those last two?  Members of Congress.  Only at an earlier date.  Both are acts saying, "Congressmen in a different situation are wiser than Congressmen in the middle of the situation that has to be dealt with.  Accept their authority."

The debt ceiling will, according to Timothy Geithner, kick in sometime in February or March.  The Budget Control Act takes effect on January 1.  The Norquist Pledge hangs over the whole period — about the length of a college quarter.  Plenty of time to measure the pain of absolutist playout against the pain of critical thinking.