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.
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