Intenste Statistical Analysis < Baseball < Creation < God
Note: This post starts with a wild tangent but eventually gets on track. If you don't like it, eat me.
One of the bye products of having more spare time on my hands than anytime since I was a sixth grader counting down till 4:10 PM when all the other kids got home from elementary school has been the chance to read about and study, in depth, the game of baseball. This comes as no great surprise to you faithful readers, I'm sure. The main sub-topic of this study has been what noted baseball author/historian/number cruncher Bill James termed "sabermetrics". The concise explanation is that Bill and his followers are on a holy quest of sorts for statistical knowledge. They reduce every player's performance to a set of numbers, from counting stats, ratio, percentage, you name it. It's incredibly in depth and fascinating especially if you like math and/or baseball. Since the movement is relatively new and had its genesis outside the network of Major League Baseball, it has had a tough road to acceptance amongst the teams. This is mainly due to the fact that the European system of Aristocracy, Nepotism and Cronyism that America has worked so hard to rid itself of is alive and well in the form of organized baseball. The battle between the "old school" of scouting, gut feel and value on things like the "athletic face" and the "new school" of hard statistical analysis has been termed by some as the holy war for the soul of baseball.
My point is, for the last year of reading and studying sabermetrics and watching the game, I've been a hard core stats guy. I mean, there is alot of evidence out there that for years baseball has been placing a premium value on the wrong things and these Harvard Grads with their "nerd machines" are going to revolutionize the game by focusing more on On Base Percentage and Extra Base Hits than Bicep Size and 40 Yard Dash time. But if I was truely honest with myself, I had to admit that there was something to the human element of baseball. These guys aren't soulless machines. Even though sabermetricians will provide you with evidence that there is no such thing as a "clutch hitter" when I watch the game David Ortiz is routinely dropping bombs in the late innings of games in the same situations when Alex Rodriguez is 'gine slapping balls back to the pitcher and then trying to knock them out of their hands. The realization I came to was that the unbelievably complex and in depth study of sabermetrics can only provide us with part of what makes a successful baseball player. It doesn't register how a player responds when he gets booed, or when he gets out of bed and his back is sore. It doesn't say if he can block out his sick mother in the hospital while Mauriano Riviera brings a 97 mile an hour cutter at his johnson. Suffice to say, the depth and detail that comprise the game of baseball is immense. You can study its history, stats and watch games for your whole life and still not begin to understand everything about the game. That got me thinking; if you could study baseball, by all measures a tiny and insignificant part of modern culture let alone world history, and spend your whole life learning more about it, than there were probably literally tens of thousands of things you could do with your life and find it equally deep, challenging and rewarding. You could study Egyptian History, or Physics, or the Family Structure of the *click click tock tock* tribe of the African Desert. The more you think about it, the more staggering the complexity, depth and sheer volume of "stuff" this universe we live in has in it. With these overwhelming thoughts swirling in my noodle I sat down and tried to figure out if I could really believe in a God that was so powerful that he could create all of this merely by his will. If I can, and he is the God of the Bible He is something so much greater and so much more powerful than anything I could possibly comprehend. As I tried to grasp this for the first time in my life I became excited by the prospect in Heaven. Let me explain.
We live in a world where our fantasies are given to us faster and more intensely than anytime before us. In the past, if you wanted to save a damsel from a dragon, or climb the highest peak of the highest mountain you had to read about it and then transfer that into your imagination. Now, we can see the grandest battles, the most intense action, and the most sexual encounters from the comfort of our computer screen. The irony of all this is that as our fantasies grow more intense and realistic our lives grow further and further apart from these dreams. We live in a time when it feels like it's not even worth trying because everything's been done and everything's been said. The only thing left is wit, sarcasm and parody. I'd like to think in Heaven the plains are so fast, and the mountains so plentiful and steep that we can explore forever. There our fantasies don't have to be seen and read about because we will be writing our own epics and singing our own songs that we create everyday with our spectalcualr deeds of daring do, and our grand conquests and victories.
I'm probably wrong, and heaven is probably nothing like that. But I hope if it isn't its something better that I can't imagine. The point is, if God can cram so much interesting stuff into a minute part of an unimportant game popular for a couple hundred years of the worlds history in the northern half of a continent, than heaven is something that we will never understand, even when we're there. As for that God character, he's just simply too much.
posted by Nate B @ 9:59 PM
5 comments
5 Comments:
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Like I said... eat me.
about those "sexual encounters from a computer screen..." do you by any chance have any links?
I like it....
this is probably my favorite post of all time...bar none.
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