Love and Baseball

My recent entries haven't exactly been the deepest or most profound, but today, im going to return to voicing my opinion on recent sports news, sports trends, and anything else sports. I guess thats what my original intention was for this blog; to voice my opinion on sports. and the reason for recording it here is that i think just like your opinion on anything else, fans' perspective and opinions on sports changes. recording it here will allow me to see what things changed my mind and shaped me into the sports fan that i become. At the risk of sounding like im over thinking all of this and taking sports too seriously, i guess a big reason i love sports is the meeting of preparation and logic with chance and in effect never being able to predict what will happen.

You can study and learn every fact and number about sports, but you can never predict the outcome of any given game. You can train and prepare, but when it all comes down to it, so much of your performance that is remembered comes down to luck and circumstance. In order to compete, you must be at par with the rest of your competition, but after that point, so much after that has to do with execution and chance. Take for example these Olympics. These world class swimmers are the best in the entire world and when competing, there are only hundreds of a second that seperate the Winner from the losers. Are we to then assume that the winners always trained the hardest of the group or simply were born with greater athletic ability? Of course not. But what made them the winner? What gave them a .01 second advantage over 2nd place?

I think that's why of all sports i like baseball the most, i feel like in baseball its possibly the only sport in which logic and preparation can beat out chance. I guess a lot of this opinion comes from the book, Moneyball by Michael Lewis in which he studies and writes about the Oakland As and Billy Beane's quest to build a contending team while having a tiny budget. in part of the book it talks about how over the course of the regular season at least, since there are so many games, you can evaluate players accurately by their statistical trends. instead of following traditional ideas like believing batting average was an accurate representation of a players production, Billy Beane and his team analyzed statistics and found that that was not an accurate translation to success and runs scored. they took baseball and made it into a science, something that could be studied and that could translate into success on the field.

Unfortunately for the A's the postseason does include chance as a huge deciding factor and despite making the playoffs year after the year the As would fall in the postseason. anyway, to get to my point, my love for baseball comes from the fact that its not just a game, its so much more. Everything from management in the farm system and the constant replenishment of young talent and evaluating players accurately- its all insane to think that any organization in the MLB is running 100% efficiently from top to bottom. when people say that no one is above the game, i really think it applies to baseball the most. in other sports you can have one terrible year and land some crazy phenom in the draft like Lebron and go to the playoffs the next year. in baseball, how often do you see teams make 180 turns like that? in order to have lasting success you have to plan for years and continually prepare for the future. look at the Yankees- for years people said that they could just buy the market and would continue to dominate, but what everyone forgets is that they built that success on the backs of young players that came up through their farm, like Jeter, Pettite, Mariano (who by the way were scouted and found by Brian Sabean). my point is, i think i like baseball so much because it is so hard to succeed and STAY successful. i think i probably went off on a tangent somewhere and strayed from my original intention for this post, but oh well- its my blog. i have much more to say about all this, i just cant think of it all right now.