Regular Season Baseball . . . Just Perfect!

JW,

I love regular season baseball. Mind you, I don't watch it particularly often, but the idea of it pleases me a great deal. There's something comforting about the summer-long battle of attrition that is the 162-game stretch. I like knowing that pitchers are winding up and batters swinging all around me, even if I have no interest in them. In a sense, regular season baseball is like really good elevator music. It's made to be ignored, but every so often a good riff catches your attention.

Such was the case yesterday, when Mark Buehrle pitched only the sixteenth perfect game of the modern era (distinguished from the pre-modern era by the fact that today's players don't work in the fields between games). I heard about the game the same way everyone else did--an ESPN ticker told me about it after the fact--and I spent the evening looking for highlights. Having found them, I'm ready to make a pronouncement about perfect games, and I hope you'll agree with it.

Perfect games, JW, are largely a matter of luck, and that's one of the reasons why we care about them. I've said it before, but most people care very little about effort. What we're interested in is that strange combination of skill and luck that makes great plays. Yes, DeWayne Wise's catch was ridiculous, but Wise would have been helpless if Gabe Kapler's potential home run had sailed three more inches. Three inches, and we'd already have forgotten the game, just like everyone but Expos fans and Nelson de la Rosa forgot within a week that Pedro Martinez pitched a perfect nine in '95 before Bip Roberts popped him for a double in the tenth. Free baseball? I think not.

So what are we to make of a sporting accomplishment so fickle, so dependant on the bounce of the ball and the competence of teammates? If only they depended also on pitchers' accomplishments in previous seasons, we could rename them the NBA MVP award.

-GM

GM,

There was a time I actually watched regular-season baseball. Well, two times. The first came when I was a small child and my parents wouldn't spring for cable. As a 7-year-old, I would check the TV schedule every week to see which network would be willing to show a Saturday or Sunday ballgame because I loved watching the pros so much--probably because my coach-pitch games were riddled with embarrassing strikeouts and errors. Granted, I didn't have much else to do at that age, but I actually planned around televised regular-season baseball games. Then we got cable, and then the strike came, and then I got some semblance of a life, and then we were only watching games to see if Mark McGwire would break the record. The height of this generation's baseball controversy, steroids, plagued the headlines and leads for the next few years, and SportsCenter became a pretty good way to keep up with the "juicy" stories without having to endure a 16-9 Yankees/Rangers slugout.

Then I started working in sports, and I thought it was my duty to try to learn as much about baseball as baseball geeks know. After five years of pretty solid effort, I realized I wasn't up to the task. Too much free agency. Too many names I struggled to pronounce. Too many games. I actually met Gabe Kapler, though. The Red Sox offered him a one-year deal in 2007, and he turned it down to be the manager of their Single-A team, the Greenville Drive in South Carolina. I had a brief conversation with him and thought: "What's this guy doing?! He traded a major league salary, team jet rides, and baseball groupies for a minor league manager's salary, long bus trips, and, ummm, slightly less attractive baseball groupies?!" And if Kapler is married and happens to be one of the few guys in professional sports who practices fidelity, forget the last part, although it's still nice to know they're interested, right?

I will agree that the perfect game does involve quite a bit of luck. Roger Clemens never had one. Nolan Ryan, despite seven no-hitters, never had one. It's a good list to be on, but let's just say David Wells probably won't be in the Hall of Fame unless several more big-time steroids stories leave Cooperstown in need of filling spots. Now, the cycle, that's fluky. I once hit for the cycle in an intramural softball game, and Willie Mays hasn't even done that!

-JW