Even Little League teams have a mercy rule. No team in baseball history, as far as I’m aware, has ever come back from a 23-4 deficit in the bottom of the ninth.
It was probably one of the worst games any of the players on the Rockies’ roster has ever been involved in. Three separate players on the Giants had at least six runs batted in, and to add insult to injury, the Rockies had to endure a two-plus minute replay review at Gabe Kapler’s request when they were already down 18-2. They used six pitchers, none of whom managed to avoid allowing an earned run the pitcher who performed the best was, in fact, not a pitcher at all, but a catcher. Last night, the Rockies experienced one of the most lopsided games in the history of their franchise - which, given that so much of the history of their franchise took place in a pre-humidor Coors Field, is really saying something. Yet every day, I watch people who have much more to lose than I do somehow rebound from their inevitable failures to play again, and again, and again. My small, sad everyday failures are just as small and sad and arbitrary as a ball falling from a glove onto a grass field - but because my life is composed entirely of the everyday and the insignificant, even these failures can seem insurmountable. And though the stakes of the average person’s everyday activities, taken in the context of the world at large, aren’t very high, they are, in another sense, everything.
Life, to paraphrase a very unwise man, is literally all we have. That reliable continuity in the face of constant failure can be very reassuring for a normal, non-famous-athlete person. But even the most horrible loss is reliably followed by another game - because they are, in the end, games. If these physical stakes were not so small, to fail when so much is riding on one’s ability to succeed would be, I imagine, unbearably devastating. And yet, the only thing physically at stake is how, exactly, a small leather ball will travel through space: whether it will leave the stadium, or land in the catcher’s glove whether it will be caught, or hit the grass whether it will stay firm in the grip of a player’s hand, or slide through it, errant, to go off in some unintended direction. At stake in any given baseball game is millions of dollars of investment, millions of hours of training, the hopes and dreams of millions of fans, the dedication of entire lifetimes.
#Base loaded bottom ninth 3 2 count run probability professional#
It is incredible how the stakes of professional sports manage to be world-shakingly massive and completely meaningless at the very same time.
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