This tendency probably occurs more in baseball than in other sports, because baseball supports a stats-obsessed fanbase who participate in levels of erudition and nerdery that only the most astute academics can compete with. This statistical chicanery produces a sporting culture where the highest level of achievement is admission into the sacred “Hall of Fame,” where a player’s whole statistical body of work is canonized and stamped with a mark of superiority.
As with any major moment in sports, when Armando Galarraga pitched a “near-perfect” game last week Wednesday, June 2nd, there were various events bound up in the historical moment: the first is the event itself, the near-perfect game, where Detroit Tiger’s pitcher Galarraga threw 8.2 innings of baseball without allowing a single baserunner. Jason Donald, the 27th batter Galaragga would face, arrived with two outs in the ninth inning and hit a soft ground-ball that was fielded and tossed to the pitcher at first base.
Donald was out, only he was called safe by umpire Jim Joyce, who after the game reviewed the play and decided along with everyone else that it is an indisputable fact that the runner was really out. At that point, however, the call cannot be overruled by the umpires, and the game, officially a 1-hit shutout instead of a perfect game, was over.
In the aftermath, the umpire tearfully apologized for his mistake to the pitcher who had nearly hurled the third perfect game this year and perhaps because of this it has become one of the biggest sports stories of year, covered by NPR and all of the country’s major newspapers. Maybe this attention stems from the fact that the “perfect game” is a rare thing in baseball: 99% of all baseball games see runners on base by some means or other. In fact, the only other time there were two perfect games in a baseball season was in 1880 and there had never been three perfect games in a single season until this year. Joyce’s tearful apology becomes part of the event, adding to its legend.
Still, with everyone in agreement that this game really was “perfect” and in light of the fact that it will never officially be called such, the neatly bound-up reality of baseball has been brought into contrast with its messy cousin, actual reality. Baseball, of course, is a game that employs “an official scorer” who records everything that happens in the game. The official scorecard produced by that scorer is the gospel of all baseball statistics and anything outside of it is apocryphal. In the vast majority of cases few disputes are allowed to survive beyond the game, so this official scorecard stands without challenge. In this case, however, fans, players, and even umpires have been forced to admit that this official version of reality contains an error.
This problem has led to a heated discussion that the call should be overruled by the commissioner of the sport, Bud Selig, who has refused to do so on the grounds that it would allow future calls to be considered for negation as well.
All these events, the moment, the aftermath, the discussion, are participatory in the same way that professional sports generally are, but the unusual complexity surrounding discussions of this imperfect game reveals some interesting tools in the sports world for understanding cultural value.
For instance, it allows us to ask the following question: what draws so much attention to a moment like this? In other words, why is the conflict between actual reality and baseball reality felt so painfully by fans? Obviously there are historical moments of greatness involved for particular athletes, but why do the fans yearn to see the record-books turn this moment into the canon they know it should be? Another way of phrasing this idea more generally is to ask, why does it appear so important for fans to see something that is going to be in the record-book some day?
This tendency probably occurs more in baseball than in other sports, because baseball supports a stats-obsessed fanbase who participate in levels of erudition and nerdery that only the most astute academics can compete with. This statistical chicanery produces a sporting culture where the highest level of achievement is admission into the sacred “Hall of Fame,” where a player’s whole statistical body of work is canonized and stamped with a mark of superiority.
Last week, for instance, while I was watching a baseball game, a friend of mine sent me a text message that read, “The Padres have a 28% chance of winning right now.” In the following inning, he sent another that read, “Now it’s down to 15%.” His source for these statistics was fangraphs, a baseball statistics website that he says “will totally change the way you watch a baseball game.”
Baseball is so nerdy that lots of historical nerds have been obsessed with the sport and its propensity for cerebral wheel-spinning. Jack Kerouac, for instance, famously made up his own players and obsessively charted their careers pitch-by-pitch in games that were played entirely in his head. Indeed, it’s the perfect sport that someone will someday let computers play for fun.
To some fans, this is the relevance of baseball games where watching any single one may produce some event that becomes part of baseball lore. To me, this statistics obsession seems to devalue the sport by turning it from a momentary event into a cog in the sport’s long history of statistical production.
This conflict, therefore, is one of permanence versus momentary importance. Indeed, one of the most interesting commentaries on the game comes from a New York Times Op-Ed penned by Paul Clemens, who watched the game on TV.
Clemens writes comments on the day following the perfect game:
The Tigers won Thursday afternoon’s game in a blowout. Before that contest began, General Motors gave Galarraga a Corvette.
“They should have given him a Saturn, or a Pontiac,” my father said, mentioning two of G.M.’s defunct brands. He meant no disrespect to Galarraga, or to Saturns or Pontiacs. He owns a Pontiac. It was merely his Detroit practicality reasserting itself, part of the collective return to earth the day after something that had been, briefly, so elevating. “They need to clear out all those discontinued models,” he said.
It’s a funny comment, but it draws a painfully clear picture: sports are always briefly elevating. No one seems to assume the glory awarded is permanent, and this impermanence makes it even more painfully obvious that sports history ultimately doesn’t matter. There’s always another game to play and eventually will always come along a better pitcher, batter, third-baseman, etc.
Thus, this collection of important moments in sports, of which Galarraga’s game is included, is yet another moment in the statistical production of the sport, and as such pretty meaningless in the long run. And yet it does matter to lots of people. So how do viewers experience this meaning and its almost immediate evaporation?
Perhaps the question is not why it matters, but why we engage in another error: assuming that other types of glory are permanent in contrast to sports. Maybe baseball, for instance, simply reminds us of the fleeting impermanence of everything.
That answer is too glib, certainly. I like watching baseball games, but it seems to me there is nothing redeeming about the sport and it can be just as easily watched or forgotten about for long periods of time. It’s always there, spinning its wheels in effect. Some would argue that it exists as a form of entertainment and as such is beyond the ken of critical engagement, but this answer is never satisfactory.
Instead, we should look to our obsessions with the sport and its status as “the National Pastime” as a commentary on our ability to make and define meaning. In general, I see it as a kind of success that events can be extremely important at a particular moment in time without having to last forever, and the absurd tenor surrounding the calls to reverse the umpire’s decision reveal a yearning for permanence that is, ultimately, self-defeating.
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