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.