I wrote a piece for today’s edition of Here's the Pitch: the IBWAA Newsletter , with the focus being the poor collection of dudes who have a career ERA of infinity. As always, many thanks to the folks at the IBWAA for allowing me to contribute, and I repeat my recommendation that you should subscribe to their newsletter. Here’s the link to today’s edition:
That statistics like these exist speaks to some of baseball's uniquely magical underpinnings, and I really appreciate how you can use records and data to highlight parts of the game least concerned with reality. Pitchers with infinite ERAs, hitters who somehow never hit (as you point out, easier to understand). It's kind of fantastical.
And then there's the playing area which is essentially open on two sides, infinitely in play, like the time in 2004 when Adam Dunn hit a home run so hard that it left Great American Ballpark and bounced across the street and into the Ohio River, technically into Kentucky. I like to think that ball somehow made it to the Mississippi and out the Gulf of Mexico, remaining in "fair" territory all the while. Outside of the pitch clock, even time doesn't really work the same. Instead there's innings of measured chances and tries successful and failed. A triple play can end a "sure-thing" inning in a heartbreaking instant, almost from nowhere, while an inning with no outs just goes on, theoretically forever, as long as people keep winding up on base. It's a special game that can hold both infinite failure and endless possibility without any evident discomfort.
That statistics like these exist speaks to some of baseball's uniquely magical underpinnings, and I really appreciate how you can use records and data to highlight parts of the game least concerned with reality. Pitchers with infinite ERAs, hitters who somehow never hit (as you point out, easier to understand). It's kind of fantastical.
And then there's the playing area which is essentially open on two sides, infinitely in play, like the time in 2004 when Adam Dunn hit a home run so hard that it left Great American Ballpark and bounced across the street and into the Ohio River, technically into Kentucky. I like to think that ball somehow made it to the Mississippi and out the Gulf of Mexico, remaining in "fair" territory all the while. Outside of the pitch clock, even time doesn't really work the same. Instead there's innings of measured chances and tries successful and failed. A triple play can end a "sure-thing" inning in a heartbreaking instant, almost from nowhere, while an inning with no outs just goes on, theoretically forever, as long as people keep winding up on base. It's a special game that can hold both infinite failure and endless possibility without any evident discomfort.