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.
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