Today’s
discussion concerning the number thirteen and the bad luck in the infamous game
got me thinking about the presence of superstition in the game of
baseball. Let’s look at the most
recent phenomenon that has occurred in the game, Phil
Humber’s perfect game. A
perfect game is possibly the most random event in all of baseball. Great pitchers go entire careers
without one and bad pitchers are remembered for nothing other than one. All in all, there have been only
twenty-one perfect games in the history of the game.
So,
let’s have some fun with the perfect game that occurred this Saturday. It was the twenty-first perfect game
ever pitched; it was the twenty-first of the month. Humber’s record was 11 and 10 before the start- add them and
you get twenty-one. While watching
the Yankees-Sox game, they gave updates on the perfect-game-in-motion during
the fifth and seventh innings, finally switching over to the game in the ninth
for the historical moment. Add
those inning numbers up and you get twenty-one. Humber was born on the 21st of a month. And perhaps strangest of all, a good
friend of mine turned 21 on that day.
So,
obviously I managed to do the same thing Delillo does in the novel, possibly
pointing to the conclusion that this superstition applied following an event
means absolutely nothing. But
maybe that is not what we are pointing to. The idea of coincidence versus fate is present throughout
the novel and in a way I feel that it is not just coincidence that leads to
these events. We cannot change the
past, and in a strange way, that means that whatever happens is meant to
be. The story of this universe and
Earth is nothing more than a long narrative in some sense. If we accept the idea that since these
things happened and we cannot change them, that they had to happen, then
perhaps the constructed superstition around them had to happen as well. And perhaps that gives the superstition
actual meaning and validation.
Maybe all these things really do make sense, but since we cannot predict
the future, we cannot see the pattern before it occurs (as that would be
foresight as well). The simple
matter is that these constructed patterns exist in some sense, and if they
exist they are real. An event
exists and the pattern exists, I can't argue with that.
