It doesn't make any sense

Baseball is made for young minds.

The perfect time to be a fan of the erstwhile national pastime is that awkward stage of pre-teendom when you’ve got nothing but time on your hands and a hunger to define yourself by the obsessing over the things you love. Baseball rewards that; from April to October you’re blessed with a ludicrous bounty of games, more than a dozen most days. It’s too much for even the most avid fan to watch in its entirety, but each of those games leaves behind a permanent data-set of hard, quantifiable information to be digested and dissected. As a kid, I spent long, lonely hours in my room poring over old statistics, divining meaning from numbers, forming passionate opinions about players who'd often retired long before I was born.

When you're young and need anything to make sense, baseball makes sense.

It’s cold and clean and logical, a series of discrete one-on-one interactions between batter and pitcher, between ball and fielder, runs and outs. There’s some nuance and strategy, to be sure, but in 150 years of the sport, no one’s come up with a better offense than Willie Keeler’s admonition to “hit ‘em where they ain’t.” 

My son played his first season of rec-league baseball this fall. I served as a tertiary coach, mostly herding players in and out of the dugout, occasionally tying shoes or finding misplaced helmets. Together, we studied the logic of baseball–him a first-time student, me a middle-aged remedial learner–memorizing all the if/then scenarios that make plainly clear what to do in any situation. 

If you’re on first base and it’s hit in the air, run halfway to second; if he catches it, get back to first, but if he drops it–and these are fourth- and fifth-graders, he probably will–it’s a force-play at second and you need to be running through. 

If you’re on second, go a third of the way to third, and be ready to run.

If you’re on third, stay close to the bag so you can tag up if he catches it. 

His first season as a player went hand-in-hand with his first season as a fan. He went to his first professional baseball game in a carrier on my chest, and we’ve always made it to a few Louisville Bats games each year, but something flipped this year. His interest in the games suddenly extended beyond hot dogs, Dippin’ Dots and mascot races; he decided he had to know everything about the games. Naturally, this delighted me: I am exactly the kind of middle-aged man who loves nothing more than to Remember Some Guys. I could talk for hours about the greatness of Cleveland’s lineup in 1995 or the beauty of Barry Zito’s curveball and the terror of Randy Johnson's slider or how Greg Maddux never struck out Tony Gwynn once in the sizably-intertwined part of their Hall of Fame careers. Now I’ve got someone who lives in my house who wants to hear about those things.

(You'd think this would finally spare my wife, but no: now she's got two guys talking about that stuff.)

I’m thrilled. 

Less exciting is the fact that he decided he’s a Los Angeles Dodgers fan, despite our living 2,000 miles from Dodger Stadium. I could choose to be appalled at the front-running, but I remember the Dallas Cowboys sweatshirt I proudly wore to school in Cleveland at his exact age, and I can recognize how unappealing “my favorite baseball team hasn’t won a title in your grandparents’ lifetimes” is as a sales pitch. I will choose instead to be happy he found a way in, and that it kept him engaged for the entirety of October, long after my beloved Guardians’ quixotic postseason push was extinguished. 

By Thursday morning, it looked as though his choice might not be rewarded. 

The Toronto Blue Jays led the Dodgers three games to two, with the World Series returning to a raucous Rogers Center for what looked like an unexpected coronation. Now, let’s be fair: the Blue Jays weren’t a plucky underdog any more than Toronto is a small-market city. The only reason they seemed like one (aside from most Americans forgetting that there’s a major metropolis right across Lake Erie) was their contrast with the Death Star Dodgers, a team that plugs every new roster hole with a fresh half-billion-dollar wad of cash. As a baseball fan, I would have loved to see the Jays pull it off; as a father, I was preparing for the sadness that might introduce into a corner of my household. 

When Toronto took a three-run lead on Bo Bichette’s home run in the pivotal Game 7 and the prospect of a crushing loss loomed in front of him, I could only offer him the coldest of comfort:

“Hey, bud. It’s baseball. Anything can happen.”

This sounds like an empty platitude, and it was received as such in the moment.

If you watch the sport long enough to truly love it, though, you realize that for all the statistics, all the probabilities, all the if/thens and remember-whens, it’s the only thing that’s actually true. As long as there’s a single out left, anything can happen, and the postseason is when the boundary between mundanity and immortality or infamy becomes thinnest. A single moment–a single pitch, a single catch, a solitary run toward home–can turn a role player into an all-time hero, turn a lights-out closer into The Guy Who Blew It, turn two inches into the difference between indescribable joy or a long winter of wondering what if. 

I’ve made no secret of my disdain for the so-called “artificial intelligence” being pushed by Silicon Valley charlatans into every corner of our lives. My first objection is an ethical one; as a writer, the theft of others’ writing to create “new” writing is a crime both on a legal and a spiritual level, even if it’ll never be prosecuted on the former. My second objection is an aesthetic one; the writing that results from AI is uniformly bad, cheery-yet-stilted in the tone of a statement written by a celebrity’s PR team after they’re caught saying racial slurs on video. (And the visual art is even worse.)

My deepest objection, however, is the notion that art is something that can be solved if only you have enough inputs. Plug the contents of the Louvre into this box, and just think of the art it’ll produce! We can finally see the Mona Lisa’s legs!It’s a fundamental misunderstanding of what art exists for in the first place, and that’s to feel something we didn’t know we should be feeling.

Well, baseball’s nothing if not a massive data set.

We plug thousands of games, tens of thousands of at-bats, hundreds of thousands of pitches into our computers, and we can learn a lot from it. We can learn how likely a player is to make contact on a high inside fastball, and how likely that ball in play is to become a hit. We can learn how a 5% increase in spin rate can turn a good pitcher into a great pitcher. We can learn that the best player in the league was worth 9.7 more wins than a replacement-level player would have been, and 11 more wins than Jhonkensy Noel, who took postseason at-bats for my favorite team this year. We could easily crown a champion at the end of the regular season, because if 162 games doesn’t tell you everything you need to know about who’s best, then what good are a dozen or so more games?

We don't, though, and that’s the art of baseball.

Saturday night’s Game 7 could’ve easily turned another way. Maybe Isiah Kiner-Falefa gets a larger lead off third and beats the throw at home. Maybe Andy Pages’ decision to barrel over Kike Hernandez to catch Ernie Clement’s fly ball doesn’t pay off, and Pages goes down in the annals of all-time postseason goats alongside Bill Buckner, Tony Fernandez and Mitch Williams. Maybe a light-hitting utility infielder doesn’t hit one of the most clutch home runs in a century-plus of baseball. Maybe an exhausted Yoshinobu Yamamoto doesn’t have enough left to break Alejandro Kirk’s bat. We played seven months of baseball and nearly 2,500 games to see it all come down to a series of coin flips, any one of which could’ve turned the worst night of some people’s lives into the best, and vice versa.

It’s madness, and it made all the sense in the world.

–Scott Hines (@actioncookbook)