198. Playing the Percentages: Baseball and Literature

 

In an earlier post (#195) a baseball fan wanted a key player on his team to shun his dying manager for fear a hug from him would affect his emotions enough to make him lose his poise at a possible key point in a possible key game in the race for the league pennant.  I have finally concluded — you've been waiting five weeks? — that this says something, not about human pathology, but about baseball.

It's that that fan has gotten so accustomed to playing the percentages — the enforced strategy in baseball— that he just can't stop.  You bat a left-handed hitter against a right-handed pitcher, walk the eighth-spot hitter to get to the pitcher, and position your third baseman close to the bag with a man on first in the ninth inning of a close game because most of the time it pays off.

Baseball teaches you to go for the 1% advantage (the "edge") you'll get 1% of the time.  Like with the catcher backing up first base, an example that tests the limits like no other.  In this play you're trying to make sure the runner doesn't go to second on a throw that gets through the first baseman.  Ball gets through, there he is. 

And how often does a ball get through?  I'd say less than three percent of the time.  And only when the throw is coming from the second baseman will the catcher have a chance of fielding it.  From any of the other three infield positions the angle of the throw would make it necessary for the catcher to get to first faster than the runner does.   He, the catcher, leaping up from his tiring squat, is not going to be able to do that.  Even if he were the fastest man on the team he couldn't do it.

So why in the world do you have this usually heavy-set, sometimes glue-footed, always over-worked, probably (after the sixth inning) pretty tired fellow snatch off his mask and, at the risk of stumbling over the discarded bat, dig like a fool for first base?   Because, inside that 3% chance of an overthrow from three of the four infield positions, is the chance that the ball it is mathematically senseless for him to try to intercept will, after it shoots past him, ricochet off the stands back toward him in a way that will let him hold the runner on first. 

How many times in a season is that going to happen?  Once, twice, maybe three times.  How many times in a game is that going to make a difference, one runner being on first rather than second?  How many games in a season are going to turn on that runner being there?  How many of those games are going to make a difference in the pennant race?  Figure all that in and you've cut the 3% chance that a back-up sprint will pay off down to something well under 1%.  After observing 75 years of ricochets I'd say it would be less than one-tenth of 1%.

Yet I still want my catchers to do it!  Why?  Because I want to win the pennant.  And I am not alone.   Catchers, because they want to win the pennant, want to do this too, and if they don't, managers, especially of college teams, make them do it.  If you don't see it happening so much in the major leagues it's because the managers have made a more refined calculation, based on closer observation.  The chance of the right ricochet is set against the chance of over-tiring the catcher, a factor in a long game.

Players adjust the odds as they go.  A catcher walking into a ballpark notes the distance of the stands from the foul line.  "No point in a back-up run here; I'll be too far for a throw even with the best ricochet."  He calculates his stamina.  "Thirteenth inning and I've been running my ass off down to first base?"  And of course the manager calculates the stamina and quickness of each catcher. 

All those percentages are tiny.  Yet a fan like me wants his players and manager to play them. That's the way you win pennants.  And I can't quit thinking that way when I see Fred Hutchinson approach Deron Johnson for a hug.  "If it reduces our chances of winning the pennant even by .005 percent, Deron, don't do it.  Get out of there."

I hope this makes my cry understandable, as I think it might be to a few fans in St. Louis and Philadelphia, and, come to think of it, to fans of literature.  Put one of them in the stands watching Doris Lessing in 1949.  He knows she's got some great work in her, and has made a start.  If she gets to London, and feeds on the minds there, the chances are it will come out.  If she stays in Africa with her two young children she will reduce those chances, probably by a very small amount.  The fan of literature sees her on the train platform, looking at their faces, reconsidering.  Will she, before she turns them over to their father, give them a last hug?  Does the fan want her to?  No more than I wanted Deron Johnson to hug Fred Hutchinson.  It would mean that he might not get The Golden Notebook.