A Question

For reasons I’m sure any mental health professional would consider totally sane and rational, I watched nearly none of the World Series. Therefore, I must turn to our dear, devoted readership to answer this question:

Before Game 5 was resumed, did they play the national anthem?

Ecstatic Truth Keys to the Game

Maybe, once upon a time, the Keys to the Game portion of Fox’s MLB coverage made sense. Maybe, in this hypothetical long ago, supposed “analyst” Tim McCarver actually pointed to what he considered critical factor to each team’s success—things like “working the count” or even “trying to score more runs than the other team.” Were that ever the case, it very definitely no longer is. Now he (ie McCarver) says mind-blowingly obvious things like “Tampa: Don’t want to go down 0-2″ (as he did last night), or legitimately crazy things like “Remember Aug. 30” (which Fire Joe Morgan mentions in one of their recent gallimaufries).

What I’d shout at Fox executives, were I given the chance, is that, as long as no baseball-specific knowledge is required for these various Keys to the Gameses, it might make sense to just let a different, beloved personality take a swing at it (pun! intended!) every night so that we hapless fans didn’t have to spend that portion of the game hating Tim McCarver, Keys to the Game official sponsor Ford, and our own selves for watching in spite of our own better judgement.

So that you might get a better idea of what I mean, I’ve taken some time out of my very busy day to ask some of these aforementioned personalities what they think the Keys to the Game might be for Game 3 of the Rays – Phillies World Series. Below are their totally real, so-not-fabricated responses.

BUILT FORD TOUGH KEYS TO THE GAME

Tampa at Philadelphia, Game 3 2008 World Series

Bill Cosby

Phillies: Eat a pudding pop!

Rays: Stop using race as an excuse for your Game 1 loss.

Frank Caliendo

Phillies: To help your offense, do an impression of Tampa Bay slugger BJ Upton. A kind of short, chubby impression.

Rays: Convince the Phillies, by means of an aggressive, slightly desperate-seeming ad blitz, that they should watch you win the World Series.

Every Professional Athlete Ever

Phillies: Just play hard, take advantage of your opportunities, and grind it out.

Rays: Just grind it out, play hard, and take advantage of your opportunities.

My Teenage Neighbor Who’s Really Into Settlers of Catan

Phillies: Try to establish a monopoly on wood resource cards, so that you can horde all the bats.

Rays: Try to get the development card called Win Baseball Game.

A Small Child Who’s Never Even Watched a Baseball Game but Has an Idea of What the Rules Are

Phillies: Score more runs than the other team.

Rays: see “Phillies, Keys to the Game”

Enthusiast’s Notebook: The (Late) Morning After the Night Before

When you talk about Carson Cistulli, you talk about a guy who, after the Red Sox win a playoff game in improbable comeback fashion, watches every last postgame interview.

Highlights Include:

• Coco Crisp discussing outfielder discussions during pitching changes. He seems to trip over his words a bit, which suggests to me that either a) these conversations are so uninteresting as to render them totally forgettable, or b) these convos are either really nasty, or otherwise deeply heartfelt—just taboo in some way that he’s totally not at liberty to reveal. Though the former is probably true, I’m just going to believe the latter because it’s more interesting.
• Coco Crisp’s obvious joy at having participated in what he calls, “The best game he’s ever played in,” or something to that effect.
• Francona describing the scene at Fenway. Just the way he says the words “unglued” and “magical”. It has more pathos in it than an entire Cormac McCarthy novel.

***

One glaring omission in all of those interviews—and really in any interview with any professional athlete ever, it seems—is any acknowledgment of the role of chance. In Game Four, for example, the Rays had an unbelievable rate of hits per balls-in-play. Granted, they put a lot of balls in play, but not nearly enough to merit their gaudy hit total. Likewise, last night, Dice K gave up 3 HRs versus 7 fly ball outs. The major league average of HRs / fly balls is around 11%, so you’re looking at 2 more HRs that you’d expect. Finally, you want to talk about chance, the Red Sox’ chances of winning after B.J. Upton’s double off Papelbon were 0.6%. And yet Papelbon says there was never any doubt.

I understand that it’s important for an athlete to believe that he has the ability to will his own greatness (or his own facial hair, if Ross McSweeney has anything to say about it). I’m sure that such a frame of mind enables athletes to play to their potential. But I also believe—just as a normal guy who has had experience with both success and failure—that having some understanding of randomness and chance can be very liberating. It can allow you to write off your failures a little more easily and also to stay modest through your successes. Like, for example, Ross won our wiffleball game this past weekend. From what I know of chance, I know that he was bound to win one at some point. Still, I know that it probably won’t keep happening with any regularity. That knowledge, like my belief in myself, also helps me to perform to my potential (aka to throw nasty wiffle slide pieces).

***

In a different, but not totally unrelated story, Kenneth Koch writes in his poem “Some General Instructions”:

Do not let your fear of ignorance keep you / From teaching, if that would be good for you, nor / Should you let your need for success interfere with what you love, / In fact, to do. Things have a way of working out / Which is nonsensical, and one should try to see / How that process works. If you can understand chance, / You will be lucky…

Koch writes here what Emerson is always constantly saying, which is also what the Red Sox repeat ad absurdum in their interviews—namely, that it is essential to trust your talent. Things really do work out if you are able to maintain faith in yourself.

If my understanding of this blog’s readership is at all accurate, you, the Reader, are both a) young and b) talented. There is also a good chance that you aren’t totally satisfied with your current station in life. You feel perhaps that said talent is not being utilized in the proper way and that your prospects for greatness are fading. Well, greatness is probably best understood not by fame or by scale of production but, ultimately, as the faith one has in one’s own talent.

To have such faith requires a great deal of courage. Courage is a concept which is abused quite a bit, whether in the narrow and excessively pious way it’s used to describe members of our armed forces, or in the similar, but ritualistic way it’s used to describe certain moments of athletic heroism. But courage exists in less conspicuous, less dramatic ways, too. It exists anytime someone chooses to forgo the guarantee of personal comfort for a state that is, ultimately, more pleasant but also maybe a little scary for whatever reason.

If you are smart and talented, it’s your responsibility to do something a little silly-seeming with that talent, I think. Only in those acts which are totally useless, done totally for their own sake (see: autotelic)* do we realize what is best about being alive.

*A. Bartlett Giamatti discusses this concept admirably in Take Time for Paradise, which book Father Thomas Dailey invokes here in an excerpt from short piece on the importance of play. While Dailey’s emphasis is on physical play, I would suggest that intellectual play is just as important, and would encourage anyone to read the following with that in mind:

Play is what the philosophers deem an autotelic activity, one whose sole purpose is contained in itself. It usually involves some physical activity, thus distinguishing it from mere idleness (and thereby providing some health benefit). But the activity we call play is defined as such by being freely chosen for its own sake, something more desirable than necessary, more enjoyable than useful. In this respect, play is contrasted with work and the culture of business that absorbs the vast majority of our time, and risks absorbing our very selves in the process.

Play responds not only to the physiological need for activity but also to the religious longing of the human spirit. As A. Bartlett Giamatti, the former baseball commissioner, once wrote, taking the physical acts of toil and turning them into means of play “is to replicate the arena of humankind’s highest aspiration. That aspiration is to be taken out of the self.” Beyond the avoidance of inertia wisely counseled by healthcare advocates, or the enabling of endurance chemically activated by laboratory researchers, play opens us to what Giamatti calls the “condition of paradise … a dream of ourselves better than we are, back to what we were.”

***

“Any time you come back from 7 runs down to win Game 5 of the 2008 ALCS, that’s something special.”

—Every last Red Sox player, in a veritable orgy of periphrasis.

***

TBS had a shot last night around the Top of the 7th of a not insubstantial number of people making for the exits. Wha-? It was surprising, I thought, how many people wouldn’t just wait the extra three innings—to see their team for the last time until April, if for no other reason.

Here’s a quick stat. The number of people who feel sorry for the early departees: 0.

We cannot say what we cannot say. We can’t whistle it, either.

So clearly the Sox heeded my warning and got to growing some facial hair. And what success!

But, even in the glowing afterglow of victory, a question forms itself in my mind: why was JD Drew’s game-winning hit only scored a single?

Check it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NqH35SBwFEE. The ball sails over Gross’s head (and why again was he playing so shallow? Two outs, tie game, man on second–the one thing he can’t allow is for a ball to go over his head, right?) and then one-hops into the bullpen.

This is an automatic double, as stipulated in Rule 6.09(e): “A fair ball, after touching the ground, bounds into the stands, or passes through, over or under a fence, or through or under a scoreboard, or through or under shrubbery, or vines on the fence, in which case the batter and the runners shall be entitled to advance two bases.” Note: this is NOT a ground rule double; ground rules govern events particular to specific parks, such as a flyball that lodges in the roof of the Humphrey Dome or a grounder that is carried away in the beak of a Tsetse fly while playing in the Guatemalan bush–these are gound rule doubles.

Anycrap. So Drew hit what was, by rule, a double, but was only credited with a single. It doesn’t particularly matter, because Youkilis scored, and as soon as he reached home plate, the game was over. But still.

But still if he had hit a home run, the final score would have been 10-7 rather than 8-7. Even though the extra two runs wouldn’t make a difference to the outcome, they would have to be counted because they happened, no? So why not in this case? If it matters some of the time, shouldn’t it matter all the time?

End-of-game scenarios present a lot of dilemmas along these lines. Ferinstance: tie game, bottom of the ninth, bases loaded, no outs. The batter lofts a flyball deep to rightfield, clearly deep enough to score the runner from third and end the game.  Does the rightfielder make a play on the ball? Catch it, don’t catch it–the game is over either way. His every defensive instinct is probably compelling him to track down the ball, but why bother? It’s futile.

Now let’s rewind the tape and change up the scenario a bit. Instead of no outs, how about bottom of the ninth, tie game, bases loaded, but two outs. Is there a batter in the on-deck circle? There’s no possible way he could get an at-bat–either the current hitter gets on base, forcing home the winning run, or he makes an out, sending the game to extra innings. So would the next guy in the lineup actually go through the motions of putting on a helmet, selecting a bat, and stepping onto the field, knowing full well as he times his swings against the reliever’s pitches that what he’s doing is irrelevant?

How do we behave when it becomes clear that our actions can have no possible influence on the world? What happens when rationality produces absurd results? What if knowing the future is possible but also pointless because we’re powerless to do anything about it?

Wittgenstein said that questions such as these can’t be answered but must be asked.  For him, asking them was the same as morality or ethics or the Point Of Being Alive or whatever. It’s how we choose to behave in the face of the absurd and pointless and vague and rationally-untenable that matters. 

So I think that I’d slip the donut on the bat and take a couple of cuts, and I’d probably try and catch that ball no matter what. After all, if I just let it fall, it would negatively affect my defensive zone rating, weakening my position during salary arbitration.

Chin of Destiny

Well, ouch.

It is an acknowledged certainty that, at times of great adversity, there’s only one thing to do: grow and/or cut your hair.

The Rays have the first mover advantage, having already partially shaved their heads in what is undoubtedly an homage to the youth culture of Thatcherian England. And the results are undeniable: a commanding 3-1 lead in their effort to dethrone the Red Sox.

Obviously the Sox can’t beat the Rays at their own game (and anyhow they’re missing their most follically gifted player of recent memory). This leaves growing playoff beards as the only available countering maneuver. Some of the Sox have taken matters into their own hands, which is commendable. But it seems like an insult to the Fates for one or two players to invest themselves so earnestly while their teammates blithely stay the course. 

These players are young. Maybe they don’t fully grasp the severity of the situation they find themselves in. Or maybe they can’t grow beards yet. That’s immaterial, but don’t take it from me. As someone in the position to know a thing or two about the world-historical significance of facial hair once said, “The world itself is the will to power–and nothing else! And you yourself are the will to power–and nothing else!”

So will it, Red Sox. You’ve all got exactly 24 hours to grow beards. Sleep upside down and rub some peanut butter on it if you have to, but get it done!

Varitechnicality

Why aren’t caught foul-tips outs? Why isn’t an alley-oop goaltending?

Questions like these often fill my mossy mind, but more especially at moments like the top of the ninth inning during last night’s ALDS game betwix the Red Sox and Angels. 

For those of you who weren’t watching (or who were looking online for dresses to wear to a friend’s upcoming wedding while waiting for the game to get over so you could watch “How I Met Your Mother“), Red Sox catcher, captain, and hero Jason Varitek tagged out Angels pich-runner Reggie Willits (who, to my eternal surprise looks like this, while teammate Howie Kendrick looks like this) at 3rd base on a botched suicide squeeze attempt. 

HOWEVAH–after applying the tag, Varitek’s heroic legs gave way (as yours would too if you had just sprinted 90 feet while wearing the tools of ignorance), and when his mitt hit the ground, the ball jostled loose.  Angels manager Mike Scioscia argued that since Varitek had lost control of the ball, the out shouldn’t be counted. The 3rd base umpire, in his Solomonic wisdom, rightly countered that the runner was out at the moment the tag was applied, and it mattered not what happened after since the play was over.

In sports, the objectives are agreed upon beforehand and clearly established. Cross this line, touch this base, googly these wickets. OK, so maybe cricket isn’t that clear. Still, it’s obvious what one is supposed to achieve, and how one is supposed to achieve it. It’s written down in things called rulebooks. But what happens when the rules are incomplete, or inconclusive? Like the examples above: any ball that is hit by a batter and subsequently caught by a fielder is an out…except if the batter hit the ball in a very certain way, called a “tip” that causes the ball to move sharply and directly backwards. Then, even if the catcher catches it before it touches the ground, it’s not an out. Unless it happens on the 3rd strike, then it is. Or, how about goaltending? No player on offense or defense is allowed to touch the ball if it is either a) within an imaginary cylinder that extends upwards from the rim, or b) on the downward portion of its flight to the rim. That’s basically the definition of an alley-oop, yet in this special case, not goaltending. Huh.

New rules are often enacted to eliminate gamesmanship, or the use of legal but dubious methods to win. Ferinstance, if there is a baserunner in a force situation with fewer than two outs, an infielder can purposely drop a routine flyball, forcing the runner to advance and easily throwing him out. The Infield Fly Rule was designed to prevent this.

But such designs often lead to even more gamesmanship. A few years back, the NCAA wanted to speed up the play of football games, so they decided that the clock begins running when the ball was kicked off, not when it was received. Wisconsin coach Bret Bielema realized that this change could be used to his team’s advantage.

After taking a late first-half lead against Penn State, Bielema instructed his kickoff team to intentionally line up offsides. Wisconsin kicked, the clock started running, and since the players were offsides, they easily tackled the Penn State returner for no gain. Zombie grandad Joe Paterno, allowed to either accept the penalty or have Wisconsin re-kick, opted for the re-kick and, in his mind at least, a chance at a better return. Except Bielema told his team to do the same thing. And, when Paterno (who again is really old and probably didn’t quite puzzle out what was happening in time) declined the penalty again, he (Bielema) had his team do it again. All the while, the clock starts running whenever Wisconsin kicks. Which they keep doing, again and again. Until the half ran out. Pretty freaking awesome.

What was I saying? Oh yeah, rules. Many players, fans, commentators, bloggers, and the like often view the action through the prism of the rules, which typically is fine because the rules are pretty clear on most things. But, every once in a while, the rules remain clear and inarguable but the action does not. And those whiles seem to occur with greater frequency when the games matter more. And when AJ Pierzynski is involved.

It reminds me of what little I know about the law. Richard Posner, eminent legal dude and professor at UChicago, said something once something like how most of his students think that The Law is just a book of rules to memorize, and that it’s Posner’s job to make it really hard to find that book. His learned opinion is that there is no such thing as The Law, no such thing as a collection of rules to be applied to settle disputes–otherwise, court cases wouldn’t be so contentious, or make for such excellent drama, like Night Court.

The Cistulli’s Anxiety at the Fantasy Draft

The traffic lights on Broadway in Portland—like the traffic lights on many one-way thoroughfares the country over—are synchronized such that, if one is traveling as a certain, constant speed, said one will hit every green light for about twenty blocks.

Thing is—and I don’t know what causes it—but the thing is, sometimes one light is off its game a little and, even though one had been going The Good Speed and hitting all the lights just as/after they turn, sometimes a light doesn’t turn green, and one (ie me) is forced to brake with some considerable urgency, so’s not to drive through the intersection and risk hurting oneself and/or one’s “precious cargo” (ie Wiffleballs and -bats).

Adding to the drama of this experience is that—through a combination of gas-saving measures and a weird perversion of vanity—I now regard any use of my car’s brake as a personal failure. Really. I view it as a last resort and will often, if I see traffic ahead, begin to coast—sometimes very slowly—so’s not to have to come to a total, gas-wasting, soul-crushing stop. Mind you, I don’t mention this as an invitation to the reader to marvel at how “quirky” I am. I’m as surprised about this personal development as anyone else, and regard it as merely another example of human frailty.

Moving on. What I want to say is, is that usually this stretch of Broadway is good for preventing any extraneous use of the brake. But occasionally—occasionally—I’m forced into an unenviable situation. I’m driving on Broadway and I’ve caught the light just right such that, say around 17^th Ave, I’ve just gone though a green and the next light is still red. In most cases, if I maintain a steady pace, the light at 16^th Ave will turn green before I get close enough to make it an issue—and the same for 15^th, 14^th, etc. But sometimes, in the middle of what I’ll call my “flow,” the light up ahead stays red even when it seems it should be turning green.

And stays red. And stays red. And stays red.

Until, finally, I’m forced to choose between two equal, and unsavory, alternatives: either crash my car and face the various consequences of that particular contingency (ie death or worse), or commit what I have come to regard as one of the gravest mortal sins a young Enthusiast can commit.

I’m not particularly good at describing sensation, as I try to avoid it (ie sensation) at all times, but I guess the feeling that ensues is called panic. As the conflict between potential outcomes (ie crashing or braking) becomes more and more possible/potent, my eyes begin to roll into the back of my head. I clench my jaw. Something indescribable occurs in my manparts. In short, I feel my grip on “waking life” loosening.

What happens next is almost always that I slam on the brakes. I’m sane enough to realize that running a red light, driving through a busy intersection, and possibly causing major injury—to do all that so’s not to have had to apply my brake—that would be difficult to explain to people like the police and my fiancee and the families of the deceased. But it (ie the decision) comes with that same sense of failure which I was trying to prevent.

What I mean to say is, is that what I’ve just described above is the same feeling I got yesterday in the 9^th round of my Yahoo! Fantasy Basketball Public League draft when, with 10 seconds left, I still had no idea who to pick. I mean, it’s still early enough to secure real talent. There’re still some finds out there. Amir Johnson? He’ll be starting at Power Forward for the Pistons. Jamario Moon? He’ll give you a lot of Blocks. Andrea Bargnani? He’s, uh, Italian.

There’s a lot of pressure, is what I’m saying. And I felt it. Really felt it. Like, enough so as to consider it unhealthy. And also, I ended up picking Ronnie Brewer, which is probably unhealthy for my fantasy team.

And that has made all the difference.