The Yankees Have Somehow Purchased Humanity and Magic

What with the new fangled science these days, it is widely believed that a team’s won-loss record can be predicted from the difference between its runs scored and its runs allowed. Underlying this idea is the assumption that runs are distributed randomly. A team doesn’t score 5 because the other team scores 4 or 6, the theory goes, but only due to its own offensive performance. So, over a large sample size, the ratio between the total number of runs accumulated randomly and the total number of runs allowed–conceded equally randomly–is stable, and so it tracks actual wins and losses.

For many, a team’s “expected record”–the record derived from the run differential–becomes the record the team should have, a Platonic ideal that becomes more real than the actual record, which is due merely to luck or to those somewhat non-existent forces existing in between the margins of error.

But baseball fans know it’s not luck, that there’s a peculiar gust of metaphysical breeze that only swirls on the baseball diamond.

This year, the New York Yankees sail on that wind. Whereas the Boston Red Sox are rudderless, anchored, mired.

The Yankees have not scored their runs randomly. They have scored when it’s been demoralizing, or when it fits the narrative. The Yankees won 103 regular season games, though their (run differential generated) expected record gave them 97 scientific wins. The Sox won 95 regular season games. Their expected record in the laboratory? 95 wins. The Sox in 2009 are entirely a function of the numbers, completely lacking in magic. The Yankees went 22-16 in one run games, 7-3 in extra innings. When Mark Teixeira blasted a 2-1 fastball into the left field seats for a 4-3 Yankee win in Game 2 of the ALDS to take a 2-0 series lead, after the game-tying 2 run blast from Alex Rodriguez off a Joe Nathan fastball in the bottom of the 9^th, it was the Yankees’ 16^th walk off win of the year, most in the big leagues.

Baseball is a domain of numbers, rules, and data, but it is also a safe place for religious emotions, for faith, hope, redemption, and salvation. These poles coalesce between the lines. The Yankees, so often corporate robots–and despite an unprecedented half-billion dollar free agent spending spree last winter–have played the role of human beings this year. They have been spontaneous and spirited, each word connoting freedom from law. They have been jocular and playful,  splattering each other with pies, as if they were actually people. As a Red Sox fan, I must say I find this disturbing.

It’s not all due to the Yankees, of course. The moments find the Yankees, and as a result, they give up fewer runs than would be expected based on their opponent’s performance; magic is harnessed, not generated. With two outs in the top of the 4^th, with the game still tied at zero, Yankee starter A.J. Burnett hit Delmon Young and Chris Gomez back to back. Matt Tolbert delivered a clutch single to right, appearing to drive in Young with the game’s first run. But as Gomez rounded second, gravity took over, sending him sprawling into the dirt. Swisher’s throw from right field came in to Jeter standing on second, who tagged out Gomez before the go-ahead run could score, ending the inning and keeping the game scoreless. But as the TBS post-game crew of Cal Ripken, Dennis Eckersely and David Wells pointed out,  Jeter was out of position; he should have been lined up with third base to take a potential cutoff throw. (Of course, Jeter was equally out of position on his famous “flip” play in 2001). But that’s magic–you don’t follow the rules  or laws of nature, and shit just works out. (And that’s why baseball scientists love to claim that Jeter doesn’t exist, or at least that what he seems to do doesn’t. One can claim in rebuttal, of course, that Jeter’s magic hasn’t helped the Yankees stay off the golf course the last 8 Octobers. But that only proves the point; if magic were reliable, it wouldn’t be magic. It would be a scientific regularity, a predictable consequence of a natural phenomenon.)

The Yankees benefited from blown calls and Minnesota buffoonery. Not that the Yankees are not good; their performance is grounded in pure physical and scientifically discernible talent. But baseball would be the stock market if it wasn’t more than numbers. And though the Yankee payroll does its level-best to conflate the two, the Yankees players have actually managed to exhibit, as above, at least the appearance of humanity this season, a “causal Friday” answer  to the Red Sox’ “cowboy ups” and “idiots” of years past.

The current Red Sox, by contrast, have been mechanical, complete with breakdowns and pit stops, freeze-ups and crashes. They are determined by the numbers, bereft of humanity. They provide no drama, no conflict, no strife. Compared to other playoff teams, the 2009 Sox have been woeful against the league’s top starters, and the Sox in the playoffs are doing their best to conform to the evidence.

Sox teams have come down from 0-2 ALDS deficits before (in ’99 and ’03), and of course from ALCS deficits of 3-0 and 3-1 in 2004 and 2007. And the physical metaphor of ‘momentum’ has always been incongruous, as it shifts without a proximate cause. But a Sox team that has scored 1 run in 18 playoff innings, contrasted with a Yankees team that scores whenever it hurts, is in trouble.

There’s probably no magic in the physical world, no avoiding the rigorous determinism of the quantitative laws of nature. In baseball, though, there is that “it”, the mystical quality a team has that allows it to generate wins when it is dramatic, not because it is a function of their aggregations, and not as a random distribution over an endless succession of sample innings. Units of 9 are gestalts, and October is unique. And, I’ll concede, even the Yankees having the magic is better than a universe in which it doesn’t exist.

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photo here