You know what happened. If you don’t, and don’t care about the great American pastime, please fuck off. If you do care, but don’t know, watch this:
http://mlb.mlb.com/video/play.jsp?content_id=8616789Look, I don’t want to make a bad thing worse by harping on it, but this seems like madness. Armando Galarraga isn’t a great pitcher – he isn’t even a good pitcher on some nights – but he had his one moment of glory last night. And it was taken away from him by an awful call.
Does this mean Bud Selig better employ instant replay in the very next game? I don’t know. On the one hand, this seems like the perfect argument for such things. A decisive, easy-to-correct call that was tremendously important for the teams involved. But on the other hand… that won’t really help this situation, will it? I don’t see the powers-that-be granting Galarraga the perfect game after the fact. So who would this proposed instant-replay amendment help? The next guy to pitch a perfect game that gets robbed? Yeah, maybe. Whenever that happens again (actually, the way pitchers are hurling perfectos this year, it might be sooner than I think).
It just doesn’t feel like enough. Like slavery reparations given to people who were never treated like cattle.* In one way it feels like an insult to the people who actually did the suffering; in another, it feels like an empty, token gesture. Like not enough.
What it comes down to is how we grieve, I guess. Do you really grab hold of those bad feelings, almost relishing them, weeping and flailing in your Old Testament sackcloth and ashes? A real gnashing-the-teeth kind of sadness? Or do you go all 9/11 and indignant? Writing country-western songs about putting a boot in someone’s ass and turning a desert into a glass parking lot?**
For me, I can see both sides of this coin. The former seems wiser to me, the kind of grief that knows that even a call reversal wouldn’t help much. The moment is gone. And rules changes that make replay more prevalent might not ever help a situation like this.
But I also know how it feels to be wronged and want revenge. I’m the king of plotting the demise of people who’ve cut me off on the highway or stolen my beautiful, 52” television. My tweet/Facebook status immediately after the call: FUCK JIM JOYCE. I joined an FB group of a similar name, even, which I am now regretting as I write this.
In the end, though, it was great theater. It’s just too bad it had to come at the expense of a pitcher who will probably never come close to that again.
*Note: No, you can’t compare the two. Except that you kind of can. I’m not making light. I’m just noting a feeling of similarity I have in my gut.
**Note: Dear Lord, am I bombastic and full of hyperbole or what? It’s certainly ridiculous to compare the tragedy of 9/11 with a blown call in a goddamn baseball game. I’d never make that straight comparison. But the reactions to the latter seem, to me, like a microcosm (a smaller, infinitely less significant microcosm) of the former.
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Could the "solution" here be neither instant replay nor grief counseling, but reality checking? We live in a world of human error, and our customs - including our games - must acknowledge it, much like the physical laws of Nature. Sure, dropping your favorite glass and watching gravity cause its demise may be momentarily sad, but are we to deny its fundamental necessity (which maybe goes for the sadness as well as the gravity)? There is great relief in accepting - indeed, marveling at - the process of human evolution....a concept which even (especially?) those Joyce devotees may do well to revisit.
ReplyDeleteA Fan:
ReplyDeleteYes, absolutely. We would all do well to check our emotions and, as you suggest, acknowledge the fallibility of the humans who play this game (and all games). I think what I was dealing with when I wrote this, though, was the immediacy of the event coupled with my inability to change anything. In short: I was mid grieving process.
I think your words here are wise. But I'm hesitant to suggest the kind of disconnect from emotion that underlies your ideas here. Why? For the same reason we don't tell victims of violent crimes to just "shrug it off, people get mugged all the time." It takes a while to see that truth.
And, if I could add one more point: your idea that human error surrounds us (as it does) is much of the reason that the perfect game is so rare. And so tragic when it's snatched away.