As I sit down to begin this post, Philadelphia Phillies pitcher Aaron Nola is carrying a no-hitter into the bottom of the third. He’s retired eight of twenty-seven up in Fenway Park against the Red Sox—currently the best team in baseball—and is working a 2-2 count on Sox catcher Sandy Leòn. It’s reaching dusk in Boston, and the field is starting to darken. Soon the only illumination will come from the floodlights far above the field and the comparatively meager analog lights that line the park’s iconic scoreboard.
Nola last started a game seven days ago, on the evening of July 24th. That one, against the Los Angeles Dodgers, began at 7:19 PM in Citizens Bank Park after a 14 minute rain delay. And it ended at 1:14 AM the following morning—5 hours and 55 minutes later—when, with one out and two on in the bottom of the sixteenth, Trevor Plouffe launched a 400-foot bomb into the right-field stands.
I was sitting in the second deck of those stands, along with the friend who’d bought the tickets for that night’s game. We’d come both for this year’s new-look Phillies, a young, exciting squad I’ve started to think of as a kind of Next Generation to the 2008 team’s Original Series. But we’d also come to see Chase Utley, one of the final players from that fateful championship team still playing in Major League Baseball. He came up in the twelfth inning that night and, even after hitting a one-out single while wearing Dodger blue, still received his (worthy) round of cheers.
Everyone else in that color, of course, got boos.
There are very few stimuli in the entirety of human civilization that produce the kind of acute delirium that live, extra-inning baseball creates. It comes from the understanding that this game can end at any moment, that any errant pitch could send you out of this tired, dwindling collection of people and into the constantly deepening night, alongside the equally-sobering knowledge that, in all reality, any given pitch probably won’t. In fact, according to Baseball Reference, exactly 406 pitches were made over the course of those 16 innings, thrown by a collection of pitchers that included the starters, Nola and Kenta Maeda, and virtually the entirety of each team’s bullpen. The final pitch itself came from the hand of a position player—Dodgers’ utility infielder and starting second baseman, Kiké Hernandez. His final stats: 0 for 7 at the plate, .1 innings pitched, 1 hit, 3 earned runs, and an earned run average of 81.00.
In theory, that means he would allow 81 earned runs for every 9 innings pitched.
In reality, it means he threw one bad ball.
Baseball is weird like that—a game governed by probability and statistics, with swings in momentum befitting systems that lose coherence at smaller sample sizes. One night, a team might score 9 runs; over the following three combined, they might only total two-thirds of that mark. Average those out (as statistics do), and that might be 2 or 3 wins. In reality, it’s 1. And in general, baseball trends towards the average; hitters go hot and cold, and by the end of a 162 game season they’ve found their mean. Teams might go on hot streaks, but their records will never be nearly as disproportionate as in basketball or football. In the former, the best record ever was achieved by the 2016 Golden State Warriors, at 73-9, for a win percentage of .890. In football, the undefeated 2007 Patriots batted 1.000 (before, of course, losing to the Giants in the biggest game of all). The best record in baseball over a 162 game season is held by the 2001 Seattle Mariners: 116-46, for a meager .716 ratio. If football is a game of inches, baseball is a game of averages.
This, however, might indicate as true that storied insinuation that baseball is boring. And, looking at the sport from the outside—say, seeing the box score for that 16-inning match the next morning—it may seem that way. But those averages mask the uncertainty inherent to the game, in its streaky hitters, in the differences between its unstandardized stadiums, in those swings that can make its daily moments so categorically entrancing. (“Casey at the Bat,” one of American literature’s most iconic poems, centers on this exact concept.) Those averages undersell the sheer euphoria of watching that one bad pitch sail into the stands at 1:14 AM on a night when, really, with work the next morning, we should not have been out that long. And they encapsulate the irony inherent in baseball: that a game of averages is made exciting by the very moments that don’t adhere to their predictions.
So, what is baseball? A game of averages and standout moments? A meaningless mess of contradictions? At its heart, what is the sport even about? Because all sports come from somewhere—the games at their center have a historical basis, and a ludological (if not ludonarrative) core. Go, the oldest continually-played board game in the world, is about territorial control; so, in essence, is American football. And baseball—maybe baseball is about probability, about the capacity to predict the results of a 162 game season, but to never quite know what’ll happen in any given game. And, of course, its playoff series grind that down, lowering the game’s colossal sample size to a small, at-maximum 19-game set where those probabilities can’t help but fuzz. That 19-game playoff versus a 162 game season gives us a ratio of .117; for football, 4 to 16 gives us .250; for basketball and hockey, which have easily the longest playoffs compared to their regular seasons, that ratio goes up to .341. Baseball might have the most predictable regular season of the major American sports but, going by length, it has easily the most volatile playoff.
So maybe then, baseball is a game of contrasts—of hours of tedium granted significance by a few key moments: some strikeouts with the bases loaded, a tying home run in the seventh (a full game’s worth of innings away from Plouffe’s walk-off bomb), and a city legend coming up to hit in the away team’s colors and receiving his standing ovation. For some of us, those moments might just make it worth it; for others, the drought of the surrounding hours might just be too much. But, if we peel those layers away, we can see the craftwork there at the core of the sport—the design, perhaps intentional, perhaps subconsciously built over decades of development, that’s allowed this game to survive for so long. If I’m there, I still find something hypnotic on that field; if I’m not, I might rather have it on in the background.
Back in Fenway Park, Leòn knocks the next pitch above Nola’s head, a little blooper out into the no-man’s land between the mound and the infield dirt. César Hernandez does his best to field it, but his glove-hand flip goes over Carlos Santana’s head. Bottom of the third, no-hitter gone, lost on an infield hit. It’s as if it were never there. Baseball’s weird like that: this fleeting, quantum mix of phantoms and possible outcomes that rarely, if ever, come to pass. One week ago, a position player pitched a tied game the bottom of the sixteenth—a phenomenon that happens maybe once or twice a year. I’ll probably never see that live again, but I can still loosely quantify those odds. Say it happens twice a year, out of 2,430 games. And say I go to four of those—a realistic estimate based on the years I’ve actually lived near a major league ballpark. That first number gives us a 0.08 percent chance of it happening in any given game; multiply that by four, and where are we?
0.32
A third of one percent; that’s the chance I’ll have to see that again, in any given season, for the rest of my earthly life. And a tenth of one percent: that was, in effect, the chance I had to see what I saw last Tuesday night, when Trevor Plouffe walked Kiké Hernandez off in the bottom of the sixteenth.
See, that’s the weird thing about probability, and chaos, and, by extension, baseball. There’s always a chance, however small, to see something rare and special; to watch an electron tunnel through a barrier, or a particle burst into existence, or a hitter bat a home run off a position player nearly six hours after their game had begun. On any given night, by the nature of the beast, those .0032 odds might just return a 1.
And if not, baseball tells us, the only solution is to keep on swinging.
Sunset Over Ithaca 