Obsession

I am not a fan of the sabermetrics push, this seeming willingness to reduce analysis to numbers. It began with baseball but is spreading not only to other sports, but apparently everywhere. And while numbers can be important, as with many other things in life they aren't necessarily the know all be all.

Me Pops liked to talk about Frank Lary, a pitcher on the Detroit Tigers sixty years ago. He was nicknamed the Yankee Killer because he had extraordinary success against that New York team. I'm sure the sabermetricians have an explanation for why but I suspect it was really only simple fate. Sometimes things just happen, they just are what they are. Lary owned the Yanks. That's how it was. Is an explanation even necessary or helpful? 

As I said, it's going beyond baseball. The absurdity is, it seems, to be found in other areas. I stumbled across an article the other day which stared that, after thorough analysis of the structure of various Beatles songs, their hit In My Life,  a truly wonderful song, was with a 98% chance of accuracy written primarily by John Lennon. We should be astounded by that revelation...except that virtually everyone connected to the song, including the Beatles themselves, have long conceded that it was a Lennon song. Why are we even analyzing it then?

I mean, how much more can we know, how much more useful information can additional study bring, when we already know the answer? Especially when there probably isn't a worthwhile final answer, as with that old Yankee Killer Lary. Sometimes it's simply how things happened, nothing more.

Perhaps it helps you to know that a certain right handed batter is more likely to hit a double at 3:12 on a Thursday afternoon in Cleveland with runners on first and third with one out and an easterly wind of 8 MPH off of a lefty pitcher who was drafted from Vanderbilt in the second round and was from Decatur, Illinois, and had blue eyes. Well, there you have it. Place your bets on such hyper trivia. But you'll have more fun just enjoying the game, watching to see what actually happens rather than anticipating bare chance.