The season ended backwards, as usual. First all at once and then little by little, as teams ran out of luck or ran into luckier teams. Or, simpler and maybe more correct, as every team just ran out of games and so fell out into the great silence of the offseason. And so the season ended and just kept on ending, implacably and with the usual rituals of attrition and sudden bursts of ridiculousness and the old prosaic transcendence. It always does, although it is not ordinarily this stubborn about it.
World Series 2014 Game 7: Baseball knows we know nothing
One last chance to learn that we don’t know a damn thing about baseball. “Ipse se nihil scire id unum sciat.” An introduction to World Series Game 7.
There is just this one game left, the absolute last game there can be in a series that does not want to end, and a season that has refused to resolve itself before it absolutely must. This year and this World Series -- sleepy and tense, back and forth, here and back -- does not yet seem to have figured itself out. The end is rushing up, and the game is, admirably, refusing to accommodate it.
It's going to end, of course: the Royals will win this game or the Giants will win it, by a narrow margin or a laughably large one or something in the middle. The manager will do too much or the manager will do too little. The game will end when it ends, and a team will win in the ways and for the reasons that baseball teams do. There is no defying that. But what has made this strange and imperfect series so worth the watching -- and what will make whichever of these flawed and weary teams, each a big delirious jump up from mediocrity and not much more than that, a memorable champion -- is a bigger and more abstracted defiance.
The longer this all goes on, you’d think, the more we’d come to understand about it. Not to the point where we’d ever know what was going to happen next, naturally. We don’t get that, and anyway we wouldn’t want it: the defining wildness of baseball, the truest reason why we watch, is to see the game escape from the frames those selling it and telling you about it try to drop down around it. But it would stand to reason that the more baseball we saw, and the more we watched these two teams playing against each other, the better we might understand what was coming.
That is not how this series or this postseason has worked. The more of it we see, the more we realize how little we know of it. The longer it goes, the less we seem to know. We know what these teams did to get here, but it is still somewhat unclear how they’ve done it. We know how they can look, how invincible and how wincingly its opposite, but we do not know when they’ll play that way. Neither of these potential World Series champions is probably the best team in baseball, but one of them will have outlasted every other, and earned it. Each has spent this whole month vandalizing the clean modern surface of every respectable opinion and expectation. Buff them clean and they just bomb it again.
There is not a pattern or a legible thing in this series, or in the route that either team took to it, or nothing beyond noticing that Lorenzo Cain covers a great deal of ground in the outfield and that Madison Bumgarner is greater than we probably know just yet.
It is strange, maybe, that the only thing we’ve learned more fully by the first pitch of the last game of this long season is how little we know about everything that will come after that pitch. This is a lesson that baseball keeps teaching, and which everything in us fights not to learn. We quantify and compare, we tabulate and speculate and debate and guess, and the game laughs in our face and just goes wherever it was going in the first place.
This sounds mean, and there is a cruelty to how casually the game rolls over our every reasonable and unreasonable expectation. But there’s something liberating about it, too. We have had the fullest possible season to learn that baseball is stronger than anything we’ve devised to tie it down, that its tidal pull of unreason is stronger than our annual attempts at imposing reason on it, or finding reason in it, or getting it to do what we think it should. Baseball laughs at us, and will laugh at us one last time this year, and we might as well laugh with it. The game’s joke is always on us, but it’s a pretty great joke.
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