The moral of the story is, is we’re here on Earth to fart around. And, of course, the computers will do us out of that. And, what the computer people don’t realize, or they don’t care, is we’re dancing animals. You know, we love to move around. And, we’re not supposed to dance at all anymore. – Kurt Vonnegut
One of the joys of being a fan of a major sport and sports teams is that you can endlessly complain about it.
If you will indulge me, I want to take a moment to tell you that the new Automated Ball-Strike challenge system in Major League Baseball is an affront to all that is good and holy in the world, should be immediately dismantled, and we as fans should storm the parks, take the equipment down, set it on fire, and dance around the ashes.
Why? Because the last thing we should ever have in a sport as wonderful as baseball is a definitive answer. Especially an answer derived from a soulless computer program that is using a collection of ones and zeroes to determine if the ball passed inside or outside of the strike zone.
The strike zone was handed down to us by our forefathers, and there are only a few people ordained by the baseball gods who are allowed to determine whether a pitch is a ball or a strike.
They are, in no particular order, a Major League umpire with astigmatism, a very drunk uncle at the family barbecue, a mom making weekend money while also keeping an eye on the kiddos dontchaknow, and your dad who keeps making you cry because he won’t let you go inside and watch tv until you, for the love of pete, get that curveball right.
In this instance, let me just grant those of you who are supporters of this system that the technology is perfect. That ABS always gives the correct answer, and the system never fails. Sure, my Internet occasionally just blips out for no reason, and AI tells people that paste is an important part of a tasty crab rangoon, and Siri has never wronged a single soul, but this technological marvel always works.
But even if it is perfect, even if, like the Almighty, it is never wrong, we still shouldn’t use it.
Why? Because, like Vonnegut says, we are dancing animals, and baseball is about much more than balls and strikes, and we shouldn’t hand over any part of that dancing to the machines.
You take your kid to a ballgame. And the crowd is passionate and loud and into the game. And in baseball, sometimes these things can come down to one play, one moment, one second in time. They play nine innings, and there’s no time limit, and still, the whole thing can be decided on that one moment.
Bucky (expletive) Dent. Bill Buckner misses a routine ground ball. Benny ‘The Jet’ Rodriguez steals home.
So you and your kid watch a game, and it’s decided on a bad call on the last strike in the ninth inning. The crowd sees the replay, realizes the Ump got it wrong, and the game ends.
And after that, it’s still over, cause we don’t overturn bad calls on balls and strikes, and you go home. And the kid is upset, in his kid way, and he wonders how the game could have turned out this way. He’s upset because he’s never really experienced this kind of disappointment before. He’s upset because it’s just so unfair.
And you turn to him, and you hug him, and you explain one of the biggest, most important lessons he’s ever going to learn.
“Life is unfair,” you say.
“Sometimes the ump screws up. Sometimes your boss is mean for no reason. Sometimes the teacher just doesn’t like you. Sometimes people we love get cancer. Sometimes our children are born with problems they will carry their whole lives.”
And what we do here, when these things happen, determines who we are as individuals or who we are as a community or even this whole human experiment.
Sometimes whole countries take a wrong turn because they never learned to lose the right way. Sometimes generations of people suffer and struggle and overcome because the game is rigged against them.
You can’t be a winner until you have learned how to be a loser.
But when you navigate through life, when you dance with other people, sometimes you step on some toes.
So you tell the kid that people make mistakes. Sometimes, the teacher is wrong. Sometimes your friend betrays you. Sometimes a guy catches a foul ball and doesn’t realize he prevented his own team from making an out.
When these things happen, when the winds of fate blow hard in the wrong direction, there are only a few things you can do about it.
Your coach can go belly to belly with the ump, and kick dirt on his shoes and get thrown out of the game. This is an acceptable response to a bad call. More than acceptable, I would say, because it might fire the whole team up and get them back in the game and get your guys over the top.
But what if it’s not just one bad call? What if the team has a new owner, and she wants to move your team out of town, and so she gets a bunch of losers, and has-beens, and never-was kind of guys to play one year, sink the attendance records, and move the beloved Cleveland franchise to Miami?
What do you do then?
Well, in the words of baseball great Jake Taylor, the only thing you can do is go out and “win the whole (expletive) thing.”
You go through chemo and you yell (expletive) cancer. You stare him down in court and you testify about what happened. You tell the universe, “You think I lost? I only lost for a little while. Tomorrow I’m going to win.”
You can fight back. And then you can live life with grace and humility and an eye towards the next game, the next series and the next season.
Or you can be a guy or a girl who is constantly nursing old wounds, old grudges, and old defeats.
Or you can hang up your dancing shoes.
But what you must never do is point to a mindless collection of ones and zeroes and say, “See, I was right. I was right, I tells ya.”
Because then you would be a louse, a fink, a no-goodnik. You would be the guy who goes up to strangers and loudly tells them who you voted for and why. Or the one who announces to everyone in the restaurant that the service is bad and the food is worse. You’d be the person with a bumper sticker that says, “My kid beat up your honor student.”
Here, try this instead.
You beat us? Ahh, it could be worse, I could have to live in your craphole town. I’ve got (I’m going with Chicago for this one but feel free to pick your own MLB town) Wrigley Field and walkable neighborhoods, and deep dish pizza. What do you got over there in nowheresville?
Because baseball is not just about balls and strikes, it’s also about character and hometowns and whether our way of life is better than their way of life. And that can’t be determined by stats, or instant replay, or win percentage.
You just feel it in your bones and know it in your heart. These are my people, and this is my team.
And what do you do when your team loses? What do you do when you lose?
You can remember that there is still good in the world, Mr. Frodo, and that on the night the Red Sox finally beat the Yankees to go on to the World Series, everyone in Boston suddenly and simultaneously walked out into the street. Suddenly, magically, The Curse of the Bambino was broken.
They were stunned, and then they were overjoyed, and then they were all together dancing the night away.