Why I Love Baseball, Part 9

Unpredictability.

The Warriors and Thunder play tomorrow.  I'll predict a score of Thunder 108, Warriors 102, with Durant scoring 30 and Curry and Westbrook both scoring 24.  That's probably not going to happen, but there's a good chance that the game will be fairly close to that.  And there's a good chance that there will be nothing at all that's surprising about the game.

In the Super Bowl, it was entirely possible to predict Ravens 34, 49ers 31.  I had Ravens 27, 49ers 24, so I was only off by a touchdown for each team.  You also could have predicted Joe Flacco would throw three touchdown passes.    I already covered in another post how you know who the hero is going to be in basketball (the star player) or football (the quarterback most of the time), but the hero could be anybody in baseball.

You can't predict baseball like that.  You might be able to predict who wins, but you can't predict what's going to happen during the game.  I went to Opening Day in Los Angeles and something happened that hadn't happened in 60 years.  Clayton Kershaw pitched a complete game shutout and hit a home run.  Bob Lemon did that in 1953 and it hadn't happened since.

Or you could see something that hasn't happened in 130 years.  Lots of baseball fans lived their entire lives and never even could have witnessed a game with a triple play that started with the catcher and had a putout at third base, second base, and first base, but it happened last year for the first time since 1882.

Or you could go to a game and see something that has never happened before.  In the history of Major League Baseball, there have been only six games that didn't have a single.  This game had nine hits without a single.  The previous record was four.  That's amazing.

Let's go back to basketball.  In the playoffs, teams will play each other in best of seven series.  A series could go seven games with all the games being pretty similar to each other.  If you replayed that Dodgers-Braves game 100 times, they would never have another game with no singles.  If you could replay the Opening Day game 100 times, Clayton Kershaw might throw a few shutouts and he might hit a home run, but it's extremely unlikely that he would do both in the same game.

Kershaw, the triple play, and no singles.  That's three incredibly unusual things that have happened with just one team in less than a year.  And you can find similar weird things with other teams.  I can't even begin to explain what happened with Chris Davis last year (seriously, you need to read that if you weren't aware of it, it's amazing).

Those are all very very random things.  But there are much more ordinary things that you can't predict.  For example, the Dodgers averaged 3.93 runs per game last year.  They had three games where they scored 11 runs.  That means they scored 279.9% of their average runs in those games.  That would be like the Knicks scoring 280 points in a game (they average 100 points per game this year so they were easy to use).  The Dodgers gave up an average of 3.69 runs per game.  So if you were predicting a score, Dodgers winning 4-3 would be a reasonable prediction, but there's a decent chance that something completely different was going to happen.  Going back where I started, Thunder-Warriors might not be 108-102 tonight, but you know it's not going to be 255-36.  Of course, that's a good thing if you like basketball (and I do), but I love the randomness and unpredictability of baseball.