Life is a carnival, an old song told us. Life is like a box of chocolates, a well-loved movie suggested. Perhaps so, but to me, life is baseball.
Now, I’m a baseball fan, have been since I was a youngster…but I don’t mean to suggest that baseball is all there is to life, nor that it’s the most important thing in it. Nothing like it. But I do mean that it is the best sport to follow to teach you how to deal with life. There’s a reason so many great movies have been made about it – Bull Durham, Moneyball, 42 – they’re great because they’re about people and struggles. The goings-on on the ball diamond are the backdrop rather than the core or essence. You don’t need to have a clue what a ground rule double is to appreciate the struggles Jackie Robinson went through to make it to the Major Leagues as the first Black man in it (depicted in 42) , or understand what an unearned run is to admire how Billy Beane (played by Brad Pitt) went against all conventional wisdom to win in Moneyball. I can well imagine since it came out, a new manager or two at a failing store might have decided to buck the system and try all new strategies after being inspired by how Beane had done so and created a winning team against improbable odds.
Being a baseball fan teaches you math. Whole groups of computer science/mathematician nerds now work in most professional ball team front offices, because there are so many numbers to take in and make sense of. So many averages. So many ratios. My sweetie works in a call department for a large company. Often she deals with customers with billing problems. They flat out don’t understand things like averages. “Why’s my bill higher than last month? I thought it was averaged out!” But a baseball fan has an idea that if you’re batter is hitting .250, what that average means, and understands that if he goes 0-5 …has a bad game … the average will drop. They understand that a hitter who hits for a .300 average is good, one who hits .200 probably not so good. Pitcher Justin Verlander’s ERA of 1.74 this season was one of the best of his generation; Mitch White’s 7.74 with Toronto one of the worst in recent memory. Baseball fans are nodding along. Non-fans are probably thinking this sounds a lot like Greek to them. Numbers. Lots of numbers to understand baseball.
But that’s secondary. Let’s get back to that batting average. It’s a way of expressing a percentage of times a batter gets a hit. How often they succeed. And .300 is good. That’s a 30% success rate; 300 times out of 1000. A .400 average hasn’t been done over a full season in some eight decades. It’s flat out hard to swing a rounded bat and hit a ball flying in its direction at over 90MPH, and then have it not drop right into someone’s glove on top of that. To be a baseball player means to know failure, left and right. And to be a fan, if you’re not going to drive yourself utterly crazy quickly, means accepting that.
That extends out to the actual teams. Major League Baseball plays a long season with 162 regular games played by each team. The surprising thing is the amount of “parity” ; how things even themselves out over that long season. Even the really “bad” teams win – more frequently than many would guess – and the “great” teams all suffer their share of losses and heartbreaking defeats. Not so football; their shorter season and less equal talent leads to things like Miami going the entire 1972 season without a loss or Jacksonville winning just once out of 16 games in 2020. Golf, tennis, they have stars who seemingly never lose. Not so baseball. In baseball this year, Philadelphia are playing for the World Series – the finals for the championship – after winning 87 of 162 games during the regular season. A .537 winning percentage; they won about 54% of the time. If they had lost three or four more games between April and September, they’d be sitting at home waiting for next year…like players in Tampa, who won 86 games and missed the playoffs, are. You know to make the most of every game, every chance in this sport.
Take a look at the list of the past eight World Series champions : 2014 – San Francisco, 2015 – Kansas City, 2016 – Chicago, 2017 – Houston, 2018 – Boston, 2019 – Washington, 2020 – Los Angeles, 2021 – Atlanta. Eight years, eight teams, no repeat winners. It’s worth noting that Washington, the champions in ’19, had the worst record of any team this year. So enjoy your victories!
I think of this sometimes when I’m having a bad day, or when something I try for falls through. If I succeed even a third of the time, that would be a good batting average! Don’t get too down, nor for that matter too high when things go your way. But especially the former. The Philadelphia Phillies might be drinking championship champagne a week from now, and they lost 75 games this year. 75 setbacks. If your teams loses 10-0 tonight; they could just as easily win like that tomorrow. Just keep getting back out there, taking your swings, day in, day out… and you’ll get there. Savor the victories. Don’t let the strikeouts ruin your day or keep you from going back out there to give it another try..
Life is baseball.
Everydave Life 