This blog has been dormant so long it missed an entire baseball season. There are no doubt plenty of thorough accounts of that season; but a very short post-World Series blog post in the New Yorker by Roger Angell captures a lot of what’s great and weird about every baseball season.
Thrilling but, in a thrilling way, not surprising. Sandy Alderson, a predecessor of Billy Beane’s as general manager of the Oakland Athletics (and now the Mets’ G.M.), talking to me in 1986 about the way baseball works, said, “In this game, whether you’re a player or a manager or a coach or in the front office, there’s just so many things you can control. After that, it’s just fortuity. You may have an injury or a whole bunch of injuries. You may have a bad hop, a terrible call by the umpire, a ball that just goes through—whatever. Or a whole bunch of them. All this constitutes thirty or thirty-five or maybe even forty per cent of the game.” (He didn’t say a two-out, two-run triple off the wall, but I can spot it there, inside “whatever.”)
O.K., fortuity. Call it luck, but thanks, anyway, David Freese and Nelson Cruz and the rest of you, and hang in there, Nolan Ryan. See you next year.
Incidentally, the title of this blog post comes from my favorite contemporary blues song this year, Jon Shain’s “Luck don’t come easy“. But when you’ve got it, you can mess with Texas.
Wayne Norman
This Sporting Life 
saideman
October 31, 2011
With this title, I thought you would be combining this blog with ethics for adversaries and address “Suck for Luck” NFL dynamic.
Wayne Norman
October 31, 2011
Yes, “Suck for Luck” is an interesting perversion of the competition for the Super Bowl … in some future year. (I take it that it refers to the quest to finish last in the NFL so that you “win” the chance to draft first and take top QB prospect Andrew Luck.) It is perverse enough that some leagues (e.g. the NHL, I think) make a handful of the worst teams enter a lottery for the chance to draft first. Any league’s brass surely get indigestion at the thought of truly embarrassing deliberate attempts to lose games late in the season. For any given team, of course, “sucking for Luck” can be a perfectly rational strategy to maximize their chance of long-term success. But “the game” exists and thrives only if it makes sense and provides entertainment and meaning on all sorts of levels. And part of this drama relies on our believing that these teams and players have integrity, pride, and are professionals (and not simply because they get paid, but in the sense that they are committed to the “point” of their profession, and not merely to the opportunity it gives them to “win”). Some of this may be illusion on the part of fans, but players and teams have to realize that their livelihood — in the long run — relies on our being able to maintain such illusions. Herm Edwards, then coach of the then-lowly Jets, understood this when he emphasized, to a roomful of cynical sports reporters, that “WE. PLAY. TO WIN. THE GAME.” Granted, he lost his job soon after that….