Your Faith Is Being Tested
In more ways than one
There have been 236,949 games of major league baseball played since MLB’s inception in 1876. That’s nearly 1,500 season’s worth of games. And since two teams played in each of those games, that is a total of ~3,0001 individual team seasons played. The 2023 Padres are the worst team in those 3,000 baseball seasons hitting with RISP. That’s as if a team had played a season every year starting a thousand years before Julius Caesar, and this year was the worst of them all. This is so profound it cannot be overlooked or discounted. The Padres are the worst hitting team with RISP since the bronze age.
Somehow they managed to actually worsen their BA with RISP on Wednesday after going 1-12.
This is a level of futility not seen since the Moroccan Siege of Ceuta.
Wednesday saw a nadir of even greater abyssal depths. Without a doubt the worst play call in the 3,000 years of baseball seasons.
In the 5th inning the Giants were up 1-0 with runners on first and second with two outs. Joc Pederson hit a single to right field which Fernando Tatis fielded and fired a strike to home plate where Gary Sanchez received the throw and tagged Blake Sabol out to end the inning:
But inexplicably the Giants challenged the play. After a few minutes umpire Manny Gonzalez, wearing a thousand yard stare like the victim in a hostage video, was forced to overturn his own correct call when the New York crew ordered him to. Bob Melvin was apoplectic, yet could not confront anyone who’d taken part in the decision 3,000 miles away, instead having to berate the dejected Gonzalez who could only plead “It’s a replay, it’s a replay”, before finally having to throw Melvin out of the game.
A bad called strike is a part of baseball. Getting it wrong on a bang-bang play at first, part of baseball. But deciding that this runner scored is not part of baseball. This is not baseball.
One cannot credibly view this replay and determine that the runner should score. Neither by the eye test, nor a granular interpretation of the blocking rule should this run score.
Something strange happened in the review room in New York. Perhaps groupthink set in. Maybe MLB ordered review crews to emphasize homeplate collision avoidance, biasing the decision. We can’t know for certain why this decision was made. But we can know for certain that this was not a serious decision. This was the type of decision that shakes faith in institutions.
One could argue that the bad calls made by Jim Joyce to unfairly end a perfect game, or Don Denkinger’s blown call in game 6 of the 1985 World Series (that might have cost the Cardinals a title) were worse than this call. But those calls were split second judgements made without the benefit of replay, who’s outsized place in our memories is due to the leverage of the moment. Jim Joyce would have overturned his call if he’d had a chance to review. Denkinger as well. Wednesday’s call was made with every benefit of modern technology and a well articulated rule with specific language to reconcile the exact circumstances of the play. This is what makes it the most egregious call in MLB history.
The bad call flipped an inning ending 3rd out into a run scored for the Giants. The Giants would add two more runs in the now extended inning. It was only inning in which they scored. It would prove to be the difference in the game as the Padres lost 4-2.
We once tried to define what a curse is in non-mystical terms: it is sustained improbable bad luck. Outcomes so rare that it defies belief that bad luck could be the only explanation. What we’ve witnessed this season feels like a curse. It defies belief that the lineup with Fernando Tatis Jr., Juan Soto, Manny Machado, and Xander Bogaerts could be the worst offense in history with RISP. It defies belief that we could fall victim to the worst call in major league history in perhaps the most crucial moment of the season. It feels too unlikely a coincidence that this call came against the team who’s catcher’s misfortune was the provenance of the rule that sealed our fate. It feels supernatural. It feels as though an omniscient presence is intervening to test our faith…
Faith can mean believing in something you cannot know, or placing trust in something you cannot control. It can be invoked to mean having confidence in our institutions. The fate that befell the Padres on Wednesday was a challenge to every definition. Our faith is being tested.
Here’s where it gets hard. Little has actually changed. We are still only 3 days out from beating the best team in baseball in back-to-back playoff intensity games. But it feels like something is slipping away. It feels hard to keep the faith. This will never be a place for proselytizing; Anyone who finds in this moment that it’s impossible to keep the faith should be forgiven. This is a dark moment. But as hard as it is to accept, this is still a team that has half of the World Series formula down. We do not struggle to prevent runs. We are elite in this regard. And there is precedent for overcoming similar struggles.
We seem to be at a crossroads, having to choose between keeping the faith or accepting that we may be cursed. As fans this is a fairly consequence free choice, but for the management of this team the choice will have implications. If AJ feels that the RISP struggles are variance with positive regression coming, he would be right to try to bolster the lineup (#BringTheGoldschmidt) and surge to the playoffs with a strong performance over the remaining 88 games… But that 88 game window is starting to feel very narrow. We can’t afford to turn down opportunities to take a win the way we did Monday. We cannot keep Padresing. But we are not dead yet.
We won’t mention names, but teams have come back from worse.
Keep the faith if you can. If you need to take break, we understand.
The actual math is (236,949 games played x 2 teams per game) / 162 games per season = 2,925 total team seasons of major league baseball played