The Punning Pundit

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July 12, 2006

Buy me some peanuts and Crackerjacks!

The very cool Afaeyremaede took me out to a ball game this weekend. I had forgotten how much I enjoy that game. It didn’t hurt at all that my team (the Oakland Athletics) were playing the team I most despise (any team from south of Fresno). And even though the Good Guys in Green lost, I was still able to walk away with a smile...

Baseball is a game of yards in which all the important measurements are done with centimeters. It is this quality which leads to the improbable statement that “baseball is boring”. It’s true—if frenetic motion is the only measure of excitement a fan can understand baseball has very little to offer. Any pitcher can hurl a ball faster than a young athlete can force a Ferrari; putting it within a dime’s diameter of where he wants it requires the skill which allows him to only get community service for trying...

Pitcher battles batter ninety, or a hundred or more times. All the while the pitcher gets more tired, less able to put the ball where he wants it. He begins to give into the temptation of simply letting the ball go forward down its most predictable arc...

Batter battles pitcher—Casey stands ever ready. Perhaps this will prove more explicable to baseball foes. The difference between a game winning home run and a game losing pop fly is less than a single inch—a half an inch before the ball is even released. The entire less than one second the batter has for the ball to travel 726 inches is eaten up in hauling the bat into position. Imagine pool played out at 85 miles an hour! It seems remarkable that batters are ever able to connect by more than accident...

And then a rally gets going. These are the rare moments of electricity. The pitcher throws a rock and the batter is all over it with paper. The next batter chooses sees paper forming in the pitcher’s mind and so brings forth scissors. The pitcher has now been dominated; both the bat and ball are now instruments of the batter’s will. The pitcher tries to shake himself out of it, slam his algorithms into new pathways. He can’t take too long between pitches, though—the runners might decide to advance themselves. The pitcher either gets himself out of it, or is replaced by someone who hasn’t been owned by the opposition...

Baseball plays itself out in small increments. On any given pitch any given outcome might occur. It may not—and probably won’t. Over the course of an entire game, though, it will. When that happens it is because everything was in simple and perfect alignment. Few things in life are more beautiful than watching everything work out perfectly...

Posted by Andrew at July 12, 2006 02:13 AM

Comments

Posted by: punchusout at July 15, 2006 10:16 AM