On Baseball and the Essential Truth of Each Moment

Grant Brisbee is my all time favorite baseball writer. But recently he wrote something that led me to a (slightly tongue-in-cheek) rumination on the nature of life and of baseball. Grant wrote, "Baseball isn’t meant to be decided over a best-of-seven series, but some jerk thought it made sense for some reason." I get where Grant is coming from.  In the world of baseball fans who believe that the data analytics are the actual substance of the game and not say, the actual catching, throwing, hitting, running and so forth of the game this has become somewhat axiomatic – there’s no way you can tell over a 7 game series which is the better team. Post-season baseball is a facade, a sham, a veil that hides the truth of baseball which is best discovered in decimals that become accurate only after thousands upon thousands of iterations.

But frankly, this is not true of baseball nor is it true of life. Philosophers have been wrestling with the limits of experience in the face of the overwhelming variety of possibility for millennia – the age old quandary of ‘the one and the many’ has long vexed us. But in baseball, as in life, there come rare moments that carry more weight than others. I have lived over 17,000 days. I can remember barely a hint of any of them. But there are some that matter. The day my first child was born. The day my first crush broke my heart. The day I came down with an incurable illness that for all practical purposes ended my life. Perhaps these things shouldn’t matter in the vast expanse of days – both those days I’ve lived and the billions of days other people have lived. But they do matter.

And so does a 7 game series. The idea that a 7 game series isn’t the way baseball should be played is as ignorant of the existential nature of life as is the idea that the death of a dearly beloved beloved friend doesn’t really matter because, hell, there’s 7 billion more people out there. The actual truth is that baseball has had 7 game series in the fall decide the champion for more than 100 years and more often than not the experience of it has been utterly thrilling and, in its own way, indicative of the truth that in moments of intensity everything that rises must converge. 7 games carry the imprint of eternity every bit as much as 162 games. Were the Giants in 2012 the better team than the Tigers? The question is absurd. The truth is when the moment arrived Romo threw a fastball straight down the middle and the best hitter and baseball just watched it like he were a statue. And much joy ensued in Giants land while tears were shed in Detroit. And every fall there’s another iteration of the 7 game microcosm and every fall it is glorious. Just the way it was meant to be.