My sleep cycle is on the way to be reset to where I want it. This morning I awoke on my own ten minutes before my alarm went off. It took me too long to fall asleep last night so I’m somewhat sleep deprived but one day of that should fix things. Going out in the sun will help.
I watched the World Series last night, my team lost, but it reminds me how much I love baseball. Objectively some guy with a stick trying to hit a ball thrown by another guy is not important. Objectively the problem of three little people doesn’t add up to a hill of beans in the crazy world. That doesn’t stop people from caring about it. I’m always the defender of objectivity but that’s as a criterion for decisions. It doesn’t change the fact that how we feel matters to us. Baseball makes me happy. It’s not just the game, the greatest game ever invented, it sends my mind going in so many directions. It tells us about ourselves. Why do we root for a team? Is Seinfeld right? Do we root for the laundry? If the Mets and Yankees traded their entire rosters would I stay a Met fan? I think the Yankees have a much better organization than the Mets, but my loyalty remains with the Metropolitans. The heart wants what the heart wants.
Baseball connects with religion.
The movie had me at the opening credits. When you are at a game with a crowd feeling just what you are feeling it’s a religious experience. I bet if we looked at brain scans of someone at a game and someone in a revival meeting, they’d look the same.
I’m a math science guy and baseball and numbers and physics love each other. The analytics revolution was made for me. As I learned the game, I couldn’t understand why people judged hitters by rbis and pitchers by wins. They are so dependent on opportunities and circumstances. It took well over a century, but that point of view has taken hold. People finally learned that what it takes to win baseball games is objective and should be decided by scientific method not received wisdom.
The revolution now incorporates physics, with modern technology they discovered what happens to a moving baseball. We could have had the fly ball revolution without it, Ted Williams preached it, but now it can be quantified. Launch angle is hugely important, and people always sort of knew it. It has always been considered a virtue for a pitcher to induce grounders. Yet somehow the obvious corollary, that it’s bad for a hitter to hit grounders, eluded conventional wisdom.
I love that we have reached the point where players can be taught to become great players. Little Jose Altuve became a slugger by learning to hit the ball in the air. Houston could trade for the hard throwing but disappointing Gerrit Cole and turn in him into one of the most dominant pitchers. Verlander looked like his career was on decline till he was traded to the Astros. They changed his pitching strategy and once again he dominates.
We can learn a lot about psychology by talking to fans. I see how many view the game so differently than I do. They hate that things are being analyzed; they just want things to be like they were when they were kids. Where I see innovation, they see heresy. I’ve done an informal study and found that those that feel that way overwhelmingly hold conservative political positions too.
More than any other game, baseball is about anticipation. The half-second that the ball travels from pitcher to plate is a critical point, small changes, the position and timing of the bat by a few percent have huge consequences. I love watching a ball seemingly dart around a hitter’s bat, at least if it was thrown by my pitcher. I love watching the bat’s center of gravity hitting the ball and driving it over the fence. I love when it’s hit not quite perfectly and an outfielder instinctively does the calculation of where the ball will land and runs right to that point, turns, and catches it. I could never do that. Baseball is a game of concentration. While fans and broadcasters love effort, you can’t will yourself to hit a ball, throw a pitch, or catch a ball. It’s about tunnel vision, there is the ball and there is you, nothing else exists.
Hell, even food tastes better at a ballgame. There is something primal about a hot dog at the ballpark. Sure, it’s overpriced, but the pleasure is real.
That got me hungry. I better make breakfast. It’s a bacon and eggs day. No, it’s a grits ala Horvendile day. I’ll decide when I get in the kitchen.
Wise Madness 