The nation’s baseball team, the Washington Nationals, begin a best-of-five series against the San Francisco Giants Friday for a spot in the National League Championship Series. The St. Louis Baseball Team will play the Los Angeles Dodgers for the other slot.
Scarred by the ubiquity of a select few franchises in Octobers past and future and two crushing playoff defeats two years removed — the San Francisco Giants beating the Cincinnati Reds after trailing two games to zero and the St. Louis Baseball Team shocking the Nats after trailing 1,692 – 0 in an elimination game — the author, a baseball defeatist, a natural Randy Quaid from Major League 2, spills his guts.
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Really looking forward to this Cardinals-Giants retread NLCS in 10 days.
I mean, it’s going to happen. Forget that the Nats are probably the best team in baseball, with the deepest starting pitching, a great lineup, and good health at the right time of year. All of this amounts to the Nats being 8.3 percent better than the Giants this season over 162 games, 96 wins to 88.
So the Nats beat the Giants five games to two in their season series. La-dee-da. All this means is that the Nats won 70 percent of their games against a marginally inferior team with a limited sample size.
Let’s use the Leonard Mlodinow example. Mlodinow is the author of “The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives.” In this book, Mlodinow presents the example of a favorite that should beat the underdog 55 percent of the time in a one-game scenario. To ensure that this favorite would prevail in a series at least 95 percent of the time — what is called “statistical significance,” or in a baseball fan’s world, a just outcome — it would require the teams to play the best of 269 games. Not the best of five, like the Nats and Giants will play, or the best of seven, like the eventual World Series opponents will play.
269!
I don’t know if the Nats are 55/45 favorites against the Giants on any given day, but I do know they aren’t much better than that. And I sure as heck know the two teams aren’t going to play a best-of 269-game series that could stretch well into September of next year.
Major League Baseball’s playoffs are random, any team is capable of winning them, and it is meaningless that the Nats beat the Giants five out of seven games in the regular season.
Now — now that we’ve established that baseball’s champions are determined on largely arbitrary but neatly mowed grounds — for the real stuff. The Giants, like the St. Louis Baseball Team (I’m petitioning the FCC to ban at least their nickname if it won’t ban the team outright), have an annoyingly karmic quality about them. They have Buster Posey, who makes big plays. They have Madison Bumgarner, who looks like the lovechild of Adam Wainwright and Eddie Vedder. (The Nats have pitchers equally as talented, but c’mon.) They have Bruce Bochy, a manager who some seem convinced can marshal victory like Phil Jackson.
They have players who are tailor-made for ESPN headlines, the ones that update on the homepage of ESPN.com throughout a game.
Their second baseman’s name is Joe Panik. If he hits a game-tying two-run single in the top of the ninth of an elimination game? It’s “Don’t Panik,” or “No Need to Panik.” If first baseman Brandon Belt is at the plate — a guy who has no power, by the way — it’s a two-run homer.
And the headline is “Brandon Belts It.”
Michael Morse, an outfielder, is a former Nat, and a beloved one. He has familiarity with Washington starters Stephen Strasburg and Jordan Zimmerman, as well as several of its bullpen arms. If he tags one of them for a big hit, with prior knowledge of their stuff? How about the headline “Morse Code.” How. Uh. Bout it.
We can keep going. I wouldn’t be surprised if Hunter Pence turns in the first six-hit game in playoff history, just so we could be stuck with the desperate headline “Six Pence All the Richer.” I’d pay triple for every player on the Giants roster to have the name “Joe Smith.”
Because baseball outcomes are as accidental as chance meetings between love interests in rom coms — sure, it was happenstance, but we really know how this ends — these are the likely determinants that will send the San Francisco Giants to the National League Championship Series.
Their opponents will be the St. Louis Baseball Team, because our civilization has entered its twilight.
The author, a Cincinnati Reds fan, is, again, a baseball defeatist.
