172. Baseball Is as Unfair as Life.

 

The Cincinnati Reds, though they had the second-best season record in all of major league baseball, have just lost three games out of five to the San Francisco Giants and are out of the postseason playoffs to determine which team gets to be called "the best team in baseball."

I think that that call, "best team," is one of the worst calls the public can make.  Under any common meaning of the word "best," the playoffs are not what determines the best team.  They are not even baseball.  Baseball is a game of random, uneven, unfairly distributed tests.  It takes 162 games to determine who even comes close to passing these tests best.  It just cannot be done in the 11 to 19 games of a team's postseason play. 

We recognized this feature of baseball right away when we first set up the World Series way of determining "the best."  Not a single game, not two out of three, not three out of five, but four out of seven.  We were trying to allow for the odd, the atypical, the sometimes weird events that in baseball can give a victory any time to even the worst team in the league. 

To see the injustice (I'll use the Cincinnati word) in a five-game series all you have to do is divide a team's season record into five-game segments.  In a 162-game season there are 158 of these.  In the 2012 season the Reds, who blasted through their division with 97 victories and a nine-game lead over the second-place team, lost three out of five 28 times.  That, 28 out of 158, gives you an idea of how easy it is for a really good team to suffer the crushing elimination they have just suffered.  Though the competition is stiffer there is no good reason to think a playoff is anything more than a slice of the season.

And, inasmuch as life is a series of random, uneven, unfairly distributed tests, the playoffs are a slice of life.  With no assurance of how things are going to turn out you just play the percentages.

That expression "playing the percentages" is used so often, and with such simple reference (dice probabilities in a crap game), that we forget what rich challenges it presents us with.  Like the one it put before Brandon Phillips in the just-concluded series.  In the first inning of the third game, played in Cincinnati after the Reds had won two in the enemy park, Phillips, stealing second with none out, saw that the ball had gotten through the Giants' catcher, Buster Posey.  Should he try for third?

There is so much to be considered in answering that question that I'm almost sorry I raised it in a blog post.  But this is baseball, and worth your understanding (particularly if you're a foreigner), so I'll do it.  Page four, here we come.  Start with the conventional wisdom, which is that you should never take a chance on making the first or the third out at third base.  The percentages confirm that wisdom.  You have a good chance of scoring from third with one out, a much less good chance of scoring with two outs (no grounder or fly ball will do it), and a not-much-better chance of scoring with no outs than if you had stayed on second.  Add in some other things, like that it's early in the game and a good time to preserve outs and go for the big inning, and it's clear that Phillips would have to see a sure thing before he's justified in going on to third.  The reward is not worth the risk.

Well, Phillips tried for it and got thrown out and after a walk and two singles we had one run instead of two.  Now here's baseball, and maybe life: that missing run cost us the ballgame.  If we'd had it we'd have won 2-1, and won the series 3-0, having given our opponents only three total runs, and gone on to the League Championship Series looking like champions, the Big Red Pitching Machine.  Instead we were tied 1-1 at the end of nine and lost it in the tenth, 2-1, followed by the two losses that eliminated us.

But more baseball.  I here in this blog lay out for you the percentages that had to be played and the things that had to be done.  Phillips had to do that instantly, balancing so many things — how far the ball had gone past the catcher, the strength of the catcher's arm, the likelihood of an accurate throw — and then deciding whether he had a sure thing or not.  With sure things you're past percentages.  And grabbing this one — if it were one — had certain psychological advantages, to be cranked into your computing mind: inspiring your team, bringing the crowd's noise down on the visitors, upsetting them maybe, getting them to press and make more errors, producing a really big inning. 

Those big innings, though.  If the Reds had had one at any time in the remaining eight innings all that I'm talking about would have been wiped out.  If the Giants had had one.  So what that a misjudgment got a guy caught at third.  Phillips (and I) could now be sleeping at night.

Certainly a high percentage of the time your error, your inattention, your bad judgment, doesn't matter.  Then along comes the moment when it does.  And in baseball you won't know that it's the moment.  Not unless it's the last play of the game.  So you've got to play as if the game were riding on every ball that comes to you, every step you make on the base paths, every decision you weigh.  A saint, they say, is one who sees the crisis in every moment.  Ballplayers have to be saints.

They know that, oh they know that, and they blame themselves for falling short.  In the tenth inning of that crucial game Scott Rolen muffed the grounder that let in the winning run.  It was a play he makes 99 times out of a hundred.  "I lost the game," he said.  Was he too aware of crisis?  Did he look at that ball coming toward him knowing that it carried disaster?  Did he say to himself, "I'm going to have this game, this series, this team's future, in my hands?"  The go-ahead run was charging in from third.  And he bobbled the ball.  Would he have done so anyway, or was it the pressure, the knowledge of the crisis?

Baseball, though a team game, is essentially a series of individual performances.  But there is a dependence.  Scott Rolen wouldn't have been under such pressure if Ryan Hanigan hadn't put that runner on third by letting a pitch get through him.  And neither one would have been under that or any of the other kinds of pressure, terrific pressure, awaiting them in the coming two games if Phillips had decided to stop at second.

Well, that's too fraught for me to go on, as I intended, to what it all says about America and life so I'll quit, though maybe take it up in another post.