People assign narrative after random events all the time and it takes hold. It’s the human need to find pattern matching and explain it to make sense of chaos in the world because it’s hard to deal with chaos. The Diamondbacks are fundamentally not a better baseball team than the dodgers. That’s been proven definitively over the course of 6 months. But over 4 days they kicked their ass. It happened. You can respond to that by saying the Dodgers are choking ****sticks (I hate the dodgers so I’m fine with this narrative) or you can say it’s baseball- there was probably a 1 in 3 chance the Dodgers were going to lose this series and 1 in 3 chances happen all the time. You can play blackjack and have 16 showing. 8/13 cards bust you. Nobody wants 16. You lose with that hand something like 76% of the time regardless of what you do. But, that means you win 1 out of 4 times. Happens all the time. But, there’s a reason you feel like you dodged a bullet when you get that win. You can prepare and plan and employ the right process in life and it will work out better on the whole than not doing the right things, but it’s no guarantee of success. If Javier hangs one pitch after walking the bases loaded in game 3 or the twins don’t get doubled off by a great play by Peña in Game 4, and instead Yordan gets a single in the first inning instead of the 4th before Abreu’s HR we are headed back to MMP with puckered Ass holes facing Lopez for game 5. Then, the talk isn’t Maldy the game calling savant it’s, rather, why did we send a guy up to the plate every time that had 14 PA and is responsible for 12 outs? Is the process good? That should be the question asked at all times when randomness is so prevalent in this particular endeavor.
But the Astros won the game and series with Maldy catching. Can’t take that away. Astros have won 8 of their last 10 games. Do it again and we’re WS CHAMPS!
Twins and Orioles were the only teams I was ok losing to in the post season. Both are gone. Now what? Losing to South Oklahoma is not an option. And another world series loss would be heartbreaking. Then I guess there is only one thing left to do...
