159. Baseball Anxiety

    Anxiety in baseball is generated by the fact that the outcome of a game can be determined by such little things.  A catcher turns the wrong way going back after a foul pop, the ball drops, and the batter hits the next pitch over the fence and three runs score.  There's the ballgame.

The thing is, you never know which little thing is going to be a ballgame turner.  Your team scores ten runs in the last three innings who cares that the catcher missed the pop?  But in the preceding six innings you don't know that.  In those innings you see the anxiety of the caring fan, uptight through all those innings the laid-back fan finds dull. Every missed bunt, every failure to move the runner over, every error or balk that lets the other guys do this, can cost you the game.  But you don't know this yet.  So you're anxious.

Now anxiety is a good thing here because without the pain of it you'd never have the pleasure of relieved anxiety, one of the greatest pleasures a fan (maybe anybody?) can feel.  

Who is the most pleasured fan?  The one who knows how much can go wrong with a play, how much damage it can do, how far-reaching the consequences can be. The fan who feels the greatest total pleasure will be the one who has suffered the most on the greatest number of occasions.

This means that many who appear to be having pleasure, those settling back in their seats with their beer and their bratwurst, those watching happily in the sun, or wandering off to the souvenir stand, or doing the wave, are not having pleasure at all.  Not baseball pleasure.  They are not prepared for it, and probably are not capable of it.  They are not anxious.  So they can't experience the great relief.

In the course of a game players have so many chances to relieve a fan's anxiety.  When there are opponents on base every grounder is a thing to worry about.  Handle it and we've got a double play, the threat behind us.  Muff it and we face runners on second and third with just one out.  Things can get out of control so quickly.  The pitcher gets upset, misses his spots, walks, balks, mishandles a bunt and before you know it they have six runs on the board and the ballgame.  All that riding on one ball bouncing toward your rookie shortstop.  Ah, the catch, the flip, the DP, ooooh does that beer you can now sip taste good.

All that is denied the carefree fan.  Carefree fans are like carefree bridge players.  They don't, if you'll excuse me, know what the hell the game is all about.  What games are all about.  Winning.  And that means anxiety.  A game that doesn't generate anxiety in you isn't worth playing.  And it's no more worth watching than a tragedy that doesn't generate anxiety.  (What Aristotle thought a tragedy had to have; he called it "terror.")

I am writing this at a moment of greatly relieved anxiety.  The Reds this year are a team of many weaknesses.  The on-base percentage at the top of the batting order is very low, there's only one really reliable hitter in the clean-up positions, Joey Votto (hitting .342; the highest of the others is Brandon Phillips at .287), the bench (relied on mainly for pinch-hitting) is weak, and the percentage of successful sacrifice bunts must be the lowest in the league.  What has saved them is good pitching.  Very good.  Third best in the league.  With that and Votto they managed to climb into first place and even stay there through eleven games on the West Coast against those tough teams.

Now the anxiety and what raised it so high: we come back from the coast, stay ahead of the surging Pirates by extending our winning streak to six games then boom, Votto gets hurt (lost for 3-4 weeks) and the pitching falls apart.  The Arizona Diamondbacks, who had lost nine of their preceding twelve games, pound us in two of the first three games of the series and through six innings of yesterday's game, leading 6-0.  Seasons can fall apart just as innings fall apart, especially with young teams.  Everybody gets rattled or down on themselves, loses the poise so essential to winning in baseball, and there you go.  It's so easy for a team with a record of losing (only one of the Reds' last eleven seasons has been a winning one) to say, "Here we go again."  And I was afraid that's what I was going to have to say.

So what happens?  The young guys suck it up, Phillips hits a homer in the sixth with two on, hits a double in the seventh that ties it, and rookie Todd Frazier knocks him in with a single.  We lead 7-6.  Sean Marshall masters a two-on threat in the 8th, Aroldis Chapman, great rookie pitcher if he's not wild, comes on and blows away three hitters in the ninth, and we walk off the field with a very rare comeback ("My God, down 6-0 in the sixth? That's a 40-1 chance!") that keeps us in first place.

OK, if you understand that my essential worry was about the character of this team you'll understand my relief.  I've had a good sign that they're not going to fall apart, that they'll keep their poise.  And if you're an experienced fan, the passionate kind, you'll understand that this relief is only temporary and that I know it.  Baseball teaches that things can fall apart at any time and that even if they don't you can still lose — to a team with even better poise, or just more talent.  Full relief, elsewhere called joy, can come only when the season is over ("Call no man happy till he's dead") and, with the Reds, veteran fans know that now we're very unlikely to feel joy.  Odds are we'll never get through a month without Votto, however well the rookies maintain their poise.  Years of baseball teach you to look realistically at the odds.