The power of prediction

 

Vin Scully once said, “Statistics are to baseball what lampposts are to a drunk: they provide support, but not always illumination.”

I’m not a statistician. I’m not a scientist.

G.H. Ruth was no scientist either. But for one legendary moment he wielded one of the greatest powers of science. Therefore, of humankind.

Go back to 1932, and the World Series. Game Three in the Series between the old man’s Yankees and the Chicago Cubs. In Chicago, in the fifth inning. The count to Ruth was 0-and-1. And the Cubs players and fans have been riding him all game – all Series.

Babe Ruth takes one step backwards out of the batter’s box and points with his bat across the outfield, over the fence. He steps in and that next pitch he spanks the ball out and alongside the centerfield flagpole – around 440 feet – total distance 500 feet.

One pitch. One called shot. The Called Shot.

Consider the power of foresight necessary to calling that shot:

Of all the pitches thrown to him, the ratio of balls to strikes is, say, 3:4. Of the pitches in the strike zone, he makes contact with about 50 percent. When he makes contact, he puts the ball in play (not fouled off) 60 percent of the time. And earns a hit on a third of his balls put in play. Only 20 percent of his hits can be home runs. And only 25 percent of his home runs go to centerfield.

You do the math. Actually, I did the math. It’s a dog’s chance in hell that his very next pitch will be a home run to centerfield. Even for ol’ George Herman.

I’ve seen a lot of guys call their shots in the past 40-plus years. Hundreds, maybe thousands. That’s one thing human males do. I don’t know if there’s a female equivalent.

In the old neighborhood Puggy called his shot once out on the front lawns, from the Adelsman’s yard (the infield) to ours (the outfield). With Randy pitching submarine-style like Kent Tekulve, and me catching like Pudge Fisk. Puggy was such a terrible pull hitter (a left-handed pull hitter) that his coaches (he was five and six years older than us and had started playing at the junior and high school level) had opened him way up, so he had to step to the bag with his lead leg, which forced him back into the field of play.

So, he points with the bat way up high, and I get a line on him from my kneeling position, and he was pointing way up to our garage roof. And I said, “Hey! Don’t break our living room window!” The front of the Adelsman’s house – including their living room window – was the first base line (the front door was right behind first; you tagged up on the stoop). The right field line was our house, with our bay window in front. That’s where Dwight Evans and Reggie and Dave Parker played.

So, Randy pitches, and hey, it was just a tennis ball, and Puggy swings – I don’t know if it was wood or aluminum or just hard plastic – and high and over the driveway, and toward our house and we’re screwed, but it hits our roof and bounces down and one of the little kids that we’re using for ball kids – my brother or Renée or Mikey – goes and gets it. And we all start jumping up and down cheering and invoking Ruth in holy mad joy.

Back in the city leagues after all the jocks and popular kids finished high school, my buddies and I were on a team – the infamous

“Schlitz” team – and playing opposite us there was this big, lumbering jack-a-lope cleanup heater on the earth-shaking good team – Hardee’s was their sponsor. And every time this jack-a-lope come up to bat he put the bad out with his lead arm and pointed out to right center and kept pointing until the pitcher (ours was Jim or Nate) has done his wind up and let loose the ball and then he finally goes into his stance. And he had a wagonload of home runs in that league.

I just thought to myself, “Whatever. Your 300 pounds. It’s beer softball. I’d like to get you on the rink for a not-so-polite little game of full contact broomball in the village leagues and whack you behind the knees with my broomstick.”

I got off the topic of the power of science. Its power of prediction.

With his 1915 Theory of General Relativity, Albert Einstein asserted that the path of a beam or ray of light could be diverted, or bent, by a body of sufficient mass (the sun, a star, a supernova or a black hole). And asserted that, following his theory, science – and scientists – could document and describe such an event – the bending of light – under the correct conditions.

Those conditions came about in 1919, when a predicted eclipse (the moon blocking out the sun) occurred across the southern hemisphere from Brazil to Africa.

And in fact, as the sun was blocked out by the moon, and as British scientists took photographs of the whole, exposing the moon, our sun, and then the stars beyond them both shifting their position when compared to earlier photographs from the exact same position, Einstein was vindicated.

That is prediction. Against common sense and empiricism, invoking unseen forces.

No prophecy has ever done as much. Science is not soothsaying.