Wed October 03, 2018 1:49 am
tree_ wrote:Name one
Fri October 05, 2018 1:43 pm
Sat October 20, 2018 1:15 am
The baseball season, after all, is a marathon, 162 games and six months long. The length of the season makes baseball fundamentally different from other sports. A football team, for instance, plays for three hours once a week, and devoted fans spend the other six days debating what will, or did, happen. Very little of football fandom involves actually watching the game. Baseball is the opposite. There’s barely time for punditry; whether your team won or lost that night, there is usually another game tomorrow. The joy is in the journey, the experience of watching your favorite players every day for half the year, always there in the background of our lives, until the heat of the summer fades and the season winds down and eventually, inevitably, they break your heart.
Most luck in baseball, though, is not the deus ex machina of Joe West running headlong into a play and flipping it to its opposite. Most luck is incredibly unsatisfying to identify, for both the winning team and the losing team, and because of that we usually refer to it by euphemisms: A team caught a bad break, or a pitcher was fortunate to get away with a pitch. We struggle for the word because we struggle with what we're actually talking about, which is something embedded in almost every baseball play. It's this:
Baseball doesn't give partial credit.