2007 Baseball Blog: August 5, 2007

August 5, 2007
Game Time Temperature: 64o
Attendance: 39,778
Winner of the Dunkin' Donuts Race: Dashing Donut
Final Score: Chicago 3 Detroit 1

In junior high, my friend Elaine and I laughed at a very short-lived colour commentator for the Oilers who declared: "at the end of a hockey game, there's a winner and a loser." And, though we've laughed at that for many years, I'm starting to think he might have been onto something. At the end of every baseball game there is a winner and a loser: there's no such thing as a tie in baseball. Baseball abhors ambiguity: a ball's foul or fair, a pitch is a strike or a ball, you're safe or you're out. Baseball is not a sport of maybes, sort ofs or almosts. You win or you lose. You make the playoffs or you don't.
Almost every day Dale tells me what team has won or lost and how those wins or losses affect the Tigers playoff hopes. It's getting to that point in the season where every game starts to matter. Soon, it will be at that point in the season where every pitch and every at-bat will seem to matter.
Now that wins and losses are really mattering, the mood around the park is changing. At the beginning of the season, people were abuzz with last year's spectacular season and the Tigers certainly gave the impression they could do it all again this year. Making it through to October seemed to be a given for the first few months of the season. Lately, however, doubt is creeping into people's minds again. Was last year a fluke? Are we even going to make it to the playoffs this year? Or, can they pull it all around just like they did last year.
I believe I've written before about how the year I really started to really love the Tigers was the year of their "losingest**" season. Perhaps I felt a certain kinship with them since I too was having my own version of a losingest season. Or perhaps it was because learning to love a team at their worst requires a degree of committment and creativity. When a team's winning, it's easy to find things to love about them. When your team is losing, it takes more effort to find the beauty of it all. As I watched the Tigers attempt a rally yet lose tonight, I started to wonder if there is an aesthetics of loss. Is there perhaps something lovely in a hard-earned loss that we overlook in our hunger for wins? Or, does this kind of thinking mean that I too am losing hope for October? Then again, as the Tim Robbins character said in Bull Durham, "A good friend of mine used to say, 'This is a very simple game. You throw the ball, you catch the ball, you hit the ball. Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose, sometimes it rains.' Think about that for a while." Think about that for a while: I certainly will.

*He also said, rather memorably, "if you don't put the puck in the net, you're not going to score goals." There you go.
**I have to admit, I do like how sports makes up words like "losingest" and how, when you think about it, you'd be hard pressed to find a better word than "losingest." Except maybe embiggens and cromulent.