by Thomas M. Pender
I’m not a big baseball fan. I can’t really sit and watch an entire game on television. It’s pretty dang boring. While I do enjoy watching baseball highlights (because they splice all the actually interesting events together) and a live baseball game is fun (mostly for the things going on in the ballpark between plays), watching baseball on television strikes me as a pretty uninteresting practice.
However, within the sport itself is an ongoing ritual that is sort of an offshoot of interesting. It’s downright bizarre!
Each time a new player comes up to the bat, and each time the batter is waiting for a pitch, you will undoubtedly hear the most incredible (and head-scratchingly confounded!) statistics spill out of the TV commentators’ mouths. These faceless experts are loaded to the rafters with figures and columns and histories no one could possibly imagine being important enough to record. You learn such “fascinating” facts (at least, we assume no one would go out of their way to make up such stuff!) as the percentage of pitches by a left-handed pitcher the batter has hit during the month of August in an outdoor game on the day after it has rained when he is wearing his hat tilted to the left.
Yes, I made that one up. No, I’m probably not the first person. The first person probably made it up, then investigated!
The basic stats, while no fascination to me, at least seem to exist for a reason. The fans can keep track of how many runs, errors and wins a player is responsible for, and this can give the fans a good idea of how well the player plays. But come on! Is there a need to know how many Dodgers have deceased mothers who were Aquariuses and went to private schools, then married Navy men and gave birth to triplets?
(I hope I’m the first one to make that stat up. Still, I wonder. . . .)
Every televised sport can give you stats on a team and on individual players. It’s part of the home-viewing experience. Baseball, for some reason or no reason, has turned the science of statistics into a ludicrous cult of numbers, based on twisted imaginations. Somewhere out there in e-space, I’m sure, there is a constantly updated database on the number of times each major league player has adjusted himself in each and every game. Fanny pats can’t be far behind (pardon the pun), either. The topics get so far out of the realm of relevance, they hardly qualify as baseball stats. They are numbers more in tune with Ripley than Cooperstown. They may have even given Ripley a headache.
On the other hand, in your more inexplicable moments, when you wonder which baseball team has the most players who were raised in Alaska, went to high school in Florida, and have six toes on their left foot, relax. There is someone keeping track of that . . . and you’ll probably hear about it next spring while innocently watching a game, too!
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