The Ridiculous Sport of Baseball . . . Statistics

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!

Craig and Mikey and the Missing Personality

by Thomas M. Pender

I’ve been exposed to many a personality in my years: angels, clowns, jerks, sphincters . . . the list goes on and on.  It is, however, a rare and puzzling thing when I encounter a human being who is completely devoid of any sort of character traits.  Someone who is more a piece of furniture, or perhaps an alien who just hatched from his pod, than he is human being.

Recently out of college, I got a job in the mailroom of a Troy, Michigan insurance company at the dawn of the 1990s.  A great portion of my day was spent running interoffice mail from office to office, but in the mornings, I would bring bins of mail from the post office to be sorted and distributed by myself and my allies.  One running joke among us lackeys was the question we received practically each and every time we would deliver a bigger-than-an-envelope package to a desk.  As if rehearsed, the recipient of such a package would sit back a bit, startled as though a snake had slithered out from behind their stapler, and ask, “What’s this?”

My sarcasm-laden brain would consistently respond with such inaudible gems as “I didn’t think I was allowed to use my x-ray vision on the job” and “Well, when I illegally opened it in the mailroom, it looked like Chinese porn.”  Alas, I was left to simply shrug and leave or simply roll my eyes (also internally) and leave.  They were apparently never going to understand the foolishness of their question.

Craig was a vice president of the company, and a peculiarly dry piece of human toast.  Normally, I didn’t attempt to pass the time with or amuse Craig, even though he seemed to be only a few years older than me.  I tend to gauge individuals, regardless of rank, in terms of openness, friendliness, and sense of humor.  I have been known to tease company presidents (and, in fact, had done so at this company).  When circumstances allow, and a janitor or a chairman of the board is willing to trade ribbings, I’m right there with them.

Not Craig so much.  Over my many months of working at the firm, I had seen him smile and even chuckle, but it was always with one or both of the other two men in his department, or with a client, or with the president.  He never laughed, though.  He apparently only allowed himself to chuckle at low decibels, and only for two seconds max.

Then one day, I was in a particularly cheery mood when I put a package of respectable size on Craig’s desk.  I was fully prepared for his reaction when he sat back a smidge and asked, “What’s this?”

“Some cereal,” I answered.  “Supposed to be good for ya.”

Now, folks born in the mid-‘80s or later may not get this response, but if you were alive and had a television in your house in the late ‘70s, you knew this line.  It was from an incredibly overused commercial for Life Cereal, featuring three freckly brothers.  It opens with the two older brothers discussing this new product their mother has forced on them at breakfast.  The middle brother asks the oldest “What’s this stuff?” and the oldest replies with the exact wording and tone I had used in response to “What’s this?”  After a few lines, they shove the product in front of youngest brother Mikey, who then proceeds to devour it.

I would have understood if such a reference was not exactly hilarious to our boy Craig.  Perhaps an upward jerk of his moustache would have been enough to prove I had brought some modicum of human humor to his otherwise automaton day.  Honest to God, the man blinked at me like I was speaking in Mandarin Chinese.  He had no conception – or at least, he did not allow himself to reveal that he had any conception – of something as lowly as a television commercial.

I left the office a bit stunned.  I was ready to tip the scale far into the “alien” category for the conundrum which was Craig, but first I had to check something out.  I scooted back to the mailroom, where my two co-workers were co-working, and said, “Okay, please tell me this makes sense to you,” and relayed what had been said upstairs in Craig’s domain.  Both judges laughed in earnest when I got to the punch line, so I could therefore conclude that it did, in fact, make sense.  If these two gentlemen, who were three to five years younger than I, could understand the response, surely an elder of a few years could.

Unless, of course, he had been born in another part of the galaxy. . . .