Seventh inning stretch: Talkin' baseball (divinity)

Please sit down for this rumination on our national pastime... even if you don't care for baseball...

Saturday night the Angels lost to the Yankees in an extra inning game that lasted over five hours, putting them down two games in the best-of-seven league championship series.  That's what the box score will report.  The highlights showed how the Angels got the lead and ended up having their "closer"—the pitcher whose role is to pitch in the last inning and "close down" the other team with overpowering stuff—gave up a home run to put the game back in a tie.  The play that will be forever associated with the game is the error made by the Angels' second baseman in the bottom of the 13th inning that allowed the Yankees' winning run to score, which the analysts could blame on the bitter New York cold.

Maybe.

The Angels were playing the Yankees in the championship series because they'd defeated the Red Sox in the earlier divisional round of the playoffs.  That was noteworthy because the Angels had never beaten the Red Sox in the playoffs previously.  Going back 23 years when Boston played California/Anaheim/Los Angeles (of Anaheim) in the post season they'd won every time, including eliminating the Angels the last three times they'd been in the playoffs.  The Red Sox certainly seemed to "have the Angels' number" when it came to these post season match-ups.  However, this year the Angels defeated the Red Sox not only by sweeping that series, but by scoring three runs with two outs in the top of the 9th.  Getting that proverbial monkey off their back seemed destined to occur.

Not that there's any logical reason why the events of the past have any direct influence over the current situation.  Certainly a player who had been on the team before and suffered those losses might experience some psychological effect on his confidence, but given how many games these professional athletes play that shouldn't be much of a factor.  It's superstition, and as someone I used to know was apt to say, the only person who made anything off superstition was Stevie Wonder.

More so than any other sport baseball thrives on these superstitions.  Certainly the fans in Boston know about that, given the longstanding belief in the "curse of the Bambino" where the fact that the Red Sox didn't win a World Series from 1919 to 2004 was attributed to some superstition regarding the trade of Babe Ruth from Boston to the Yankees back in the early part of last century.  There was the infamous Bill Buckner flub in the 1986 World Series where the Red Sox were on the verge of winning and an error allowed the Mets to pull a come-from-behind victory.  The heartbroken Boston fans had to blame it on something, and attributing it to supernatural forces going back to before anyone on the field had even been born seemed as reasonable as anything.  It couldn't be just dumb luck.

Of course, the Red Sox were in that position to lose the '86 Series because they'd come back to defeat the aforementioned Angels in the league championship.  There the Angels were at one point a single strike away from going to their first World Series and ended up blowing it.  There had been a very real likelihood at many points that the Sox would not have even been there to lose to the Mets, but they appeared to have fortune on their side—but fortune that did not extend from the playoffs to the Series.

And maybe there really are forces operating beyond our human comprehension that influence these events.  Maybe there's some storyteller in the sky who knows the drama of a streak of losses in a big game, or to a particular opponent, that makes for something easy for people to understand (and easy for sports reporters to milk for air time or column inches).  And eventually that story plays out with the team breaking the streak. 

The Red Sox won the Series in 2004, with talk of the curse having been broken.  When they won another title in 2007 Bostonians seemed to have forgotten there ever was a curse.

This year's story line featured the Angels breaking their curse with the Red Sox.  That was the fortune allotted them by the proverbial baseball gods.

However, that doesn't make it the only story line in the 2009 post-season.

Between the regular season and playoffs the Angels had been very successful against the Yankees over this past decade.  They're one of the few teams with a winning record against the Bronx Bombers during that time.  In certain ways the Halos have had the Yankees' number in a manner similar to what the Red Sox had over them.

And even before the Yankees jumped out to a 3-to-1 lead in the series, I couldn't shake the feeling that this year's story may feature the Yankees breaking their pattern of losing to the Angels.  They haven't won a World Series since 2000, which may not seem that long but by Yankee standards that's a hideous drought.  Or at least it's something that the New York-biased sports media will be able to spin into a story.

Does any of this make any sense?  Of course not.  It's far more logical to suspect the Yankees will win because of their strong pitching staff and batting order laden with All Stars; they did win more games than any other team in MLB this season, so by all rights they should be favored to win the most games in the post-season.  However, that's not how it works with these intuitions; they're gut feelings that merely get justified by analysis.


~

Make no mistake:  I am not rooting for the Yankees.  Not in the slightest.  I was raised an Angel fan, and although I had to stop being one after the heartbreak of 1986 (I was in the stadium at the game where they were one strike away and then blew it--as I mentioned way back in this post) I certainly continue to root for them.  I just can't believe in them.

And that's the nature of all of this.  My superstition may be that if I get my hopes up and believe they'll win that undermines all possibility of it happening.  In 2002 when the Angels did win their first (and only) World Series title I was pleased but at no point did I think they'd actually do it.

It's sheer folly to claim any credit (in a reverse sort of way) for them succeeding that year because I refrained from having any confidence.  There's no absolute pattern of victory since they fell from my grace; they've lost plenty of times even when I had no faith in them.  And just to reiterate: I do not claim to be a fan; as noted, that stopped 23 years ago (out of emotional necessity).  At most I can claim to be a follower.  The "real" fans would be completely in their rights to declare me as vanquished from the kingdom (although I'd say I left of my own accord).

But I'd be lying if I claimed there wasn't that little part of me that didn't harbor a tiny suspicion that I need to maintain the lack of confidence in them—not because I can influence the outcome in a reversed way, but out of deference to the team I once actively supported; there's no guarantees that me giving up on them will make them win but there seems the likelihood that me believing in them will eliminate that possibility.

Which is absurd, of course.  However, it seems to operate on some level of my psyche that cannot be completely overwhelmed by intellect, that is not utterly dismissed due to its illogic.

It's probably a self-defense mechanism, and suggests that my lack of belief is really delusional; deep down I never stopped being a fan but I had to convince my conscious mind that I did because I couldn't take the disappointment over and over.  Maybe so.

But it remains the case that one cannot prove that there isn't a connection between me having faith and them being thwarted by the baseball gods.  Not that the baseball gods are just looking to screw me but that they do regard my ostensible stand in the matter. 

Is that any crazier than the fans screaming their heads off at the TV, their hats turned backwards (in the "rally cap" position) believing that they bring about a positive outcome?

~

It's tricky not to at least concede the possibility that for some team it's just their year, that they are being smiled upon by the forces of fortune.  No matter how bad the situation seems in the middle, how hopeless victory appears, somehow they rally back and win.  Just this decade alone two obvious examples come to mind. 

Back in 2004, when the Red Sox won that curse-breaking title, they had to first win the American League pennant by coming back against the Yankees.  In the best-of-seven championship series they lost the first three games—a hole out of which no team had ever climbed—and then they pulled off the unthinkable, winning the last four games in a row. 

Two years before that, the Angels had finally made it to the first World Series appearance in team history.  However, going in to game 6 they were down three games to two against the Giants, and by the middle innings of that game they were behind and it looked to be over.  But then they rallied not only to win that game but to dominate game 7 and earn their rings.

And there's plenty more examples out there.

It's hard to look at the odds they overcame and think mere random chance brought about these results.  Not that it's impossible, but certainly our proclivities leave us inclined to think there's a distinct possibility some kind of divinity for the great American pastime had a hand in the outcome.

If nothing else, attributing it to "it was their year" allows the losing team's fans to feel less bad.  Their team wasn't fated to win, and thus it wasn't that their team didn't play well enough or that they as fans didn't root hard enough; it was out of their control, and hence isn't something over which they should beat themselves up.

And when it continues to not be your team's year over and over, such as with the Chicago Cubs (who haven't won a World Series since 1908), it's comforting to blame it on a curse (although in this case it involves a goat, not a trade of Babe Ruth). 

Whether it's genuine up to some higher sports power or merely dumb luck where a delusion attributes it to non-existent forces, one thing is non-debatable:  That's part of the game.

And the beauty of baseball: There's always next season, when one can hope that the story the baseball gods wish to tell has one's team celebrating in October (and possibly in to November). Not that I'll be hoping, but you know what I mean.