Surgical Strikes

I recently had dinner with a friend studying to become a rabbi and I asked him what he believed in. I’ve just finished Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything, and among other thoughts, I came to the conclusion that if the Earth is 4.5 billion years old and the universe is many billions of years older, isn’t it kind of narcissistic to think some God chartacter would care about such a tiny speck of dust in the vast infinity of existence? And that he’d wait until a few thousand years ago to worry about a bunch of creatures who’ve been around for so little time relative to the age of the planet?

Of course, my rabbi friend didn’t feel the same way. He believes there’s a meaning to life, and a purpose, and that finding God is important. He told me about a woman he knew who had terrible medical problems but believed there must be a reason, that God wouldn’t let her suffer for nothing. I approve of religion when it gives people comfort, especially about the larger questions, just as long as you don’t push it on me, or let it dictate public policy. After all, it’s alot easier to rationalize your suffering if you feel there’s a purpose behind it. (Even if that sounds even more narcissistic.)

Tonight I watched a special on NESN called What If… in which they showed the first 7+ innings of Game 7 of the 2003 ALCS, then cobbled together footage of what was statistically likely to have gone down had Grady pulled Pedro in the 8th. I knew it was a terrible idea, and yet I couldn’t look away. And of course I could only indulge in such shameful navel-gazing because we won the World Series a year later.

I’ll confess, the last time I wondered about a higher power was after Game 3 of the 2004 World Series. Not only had the playoffs proceeded in larger than life fashion, but Pedro was always a better pitcher in warm weather, and suddenly St. Louis was unseasonably toasty for his Game 3 start. Up 3-0, we would be looking at a full moon for the clincher. It would be 86 years since our last World Series win, the worst near-miss coming in ‘86. And it had been 18 years since our last World Series appearance, our last win coming in ‘18. There almost seemed almost to be larger forces at work. Also, I was smoking a lot of pot back then.

Oh, and a week later Bush won and all my religion went right away.

Of course a large part of what had made the Sox’ playoff run magical was the history. Not just a century of rivarly with the Yankees, but the the 2003 ALCS. A tense series culminating in a crushing — CRUSHING — loss that seemed so preventable, the Red Sox once again clumsily snagging defeat from the jaws of victory. It led to the summer madness of each team trying to land A-Rod (I never wanted him) and raised the stakes on the 2004 season so that every game — EVERY GAME — was life or death in way I hadn’t though possible. And it set the stage for the greatest comeback in sports history.

1986… well, that just sucked. But 2004 was what it was in part because it came on the heels of Game 7 in 2003. We found out we’d suffered for a reason. After all, when you live through a brutal Boston winter, that first day of spring is the best of your life. You don’t appreciate it in LA because you don’t have to earn it the same way. And you’ll note where I currently reside.

Believe me, I hated 2003. I’m a little surprised I was able to sit through this tonight (especially when they showed the real 8th inning afterward) and the memories of the game have been bothering me ever since. But you just can’t play the what if game. What if I had gone abroad junior year of college? What if the Supreme Court hadn’t intervened in 2000? What if we had a back door that thieves couldn’t compromise? Whether or not these things happened for a reason, the fact is they happened and you can’t change that. You can only hope to learn from the experience and use it going forward.

(NESN likely didn’t realize they were raising the issues of whether there’s such a thing as fate or a grand plan for the universe. They just wanted to show Embree getting the last two outs of the 8th and Timlin getting Jeter to ground to third to nail down the 5-3 victory. See, now you don’t have to watch it.)

Game 7 in 2003 sucked, but it happened, and you have respect that. You can try to guess how 9/11 and its aftermath would play out if Gore had been president, but a) you’ll get too sad, and b) it’s never that simple. I can say I should have behaved differently with my girlfriend when I was 15, but to follow that chain of events, I never would have moved to LA and my life would be completely different today. Pull Pedro and maybe today Schilling’s a Yankee and Ortiz is seen as just another pretty good player. Maybe cold fusion would be a reality and bacon wouldn’t taste good any more.

All I know is that there’s value in history, but not much in revisionist history. And when you look at it all in a much larger perspective and see that we’re just tiny blips inside a tiny blip… well, maybe it doesn’t even matter whether Pedro stayed in for the 8th inning or not. After all, the Marlins still would have beaten us in 6.

Posted Friday, July 21st, 2006 at 12:05 am, filed under The sporting life. Follow responses through the RSS 2.0 feed. Leave a response, or trackback from your site.