In Memorium: A Box of Surprises

Memorial Day is for remembering our dead. (No, Kent Hrbek isn’t dead. He’s got a bit part in this post.)

My dad is most prominent in my mind today, his death being only a little more than two years ago.  But Dad wasn’t a baseball fan.  He got dragged to a few games, never on his own initiative, never grumbling, just along for the ride.

I remember one game, in Detroit in the early 1980’s. We were high up in the second deck in the old Tiger Stadium, along the first base line, in a game against the Twins. The only play I remember was a Kent Hrbek homer down the right field line that reached the third deck, a sort of narrow porch in front of a row of abandoned little rooms just under the roof.   The only other thing I remember is something Dad said, out of the blue, after that blast: “Baseball is mostly a box of surprises.”

He was right, except.  Right, because the crux of the game is the pitch and the bat.  Neither the pitcher nor the batter can completely control what happens there.  Chance is the biggest factor in each outcome. This is why we remember Babe Ruth’s mythic “called shot” 90 years later. He seemed to defy the effects of randomness to predict the unpredictable. Even he couldn’t hit a homer on demand. He had 10,616 plate appearances. Let’s say he faced 4 pitches per plate appearance, that would be over 40,000 pitches.  He hit 714 home runs. He hit home runs on fewer than 1.8% of the pitches he faced. If he had called a homer on every pitch, he’d have failed more than 98% of the time. If we cut him some slack and only held him to his called homers in each plate appearance, he still failed about 93% of the time.

Even for Babe Ruth, each homer was a surprise. Not as surprising as each of Maury Wills’ 20 homers in 8304 PA — a failure rate of 99.8%. But Babe Ruth’s plate appearances were still a box of surprises.

Dad was right, except he didn’t articulate what makes the game so interesting.  We are watching professionals struggle to bend the laws of chance, to get a few more of the surprises to come out their way. The pitcher wants his pitches to be just a bit more effective than random.  The batter wants his swings (or takes) to bring a skoosh better than random results.  Fielders try to catch better than randomly, and make throws better than randomly correlated with their targets. The team behind by 5 runs in the ninth is trying to do what 99.5% of those who have gone before have failed to do. They are trying to be one of the 0.5%.

And when they succeed, it feels like they made it happen.  We treat the events as pure will applied with outstanding skill.  And there IS skill involved: the Yankees have a pattern over the last 100 years of doing better at bending the laws of chance than the Mariners do.  But it takes a gargantuan effort (or at least intelligent use of a gargantuan pile of money as compared to your rivals) to make that happen a little more often than average. Baseball is a box of surprises mostly, but it is also the spectacle of people so good at what they do that they can bend the laws of probability ever so slightly in their own favor, delivering surprises fast enough to make us notice how amazing they are.

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