Image credit: Kamil Krzaczynski-USA TODAY Sports
Translated by Jose M. Hernandez Lagunes
Every year around this time, I like to remind people of the falsity and obsolescence of old baseball clichés about Remembrance Day weekend, known in the United States as Memorial Day. For much of the game’s history, it has been considered the first major milestone of the season, the moment when a team must stop and take stock of its talent and position for the first time. Fans have long been urged not to panic or get excited before Memorial Day, at the risk of overdoing it dramatically. That seems quaint now, because it is, but it was never rooted in any particular wisdom or Weltanschauung. Memorial Day was important for a simple reason: June 15 was the deadline to make transfers. Until the mid-1980s, teams had no choice but to make a firm assessment of their own needs and prospects at the end of May, because they then had little more than 15 days—roughly the same time between the modern pause of the Game of the Stars and the current deadline of July 31—to make the moves that that evaluation suggested.
It’s not just that the urgency of knowing something actionable by the end of May has disappeared. It’s also true that teams know actionable things much sooner, for two different reasons. First of all, Opening Day used to be the second week in April, instead of the last weekend in March. This has changed even more recently than the transfer deadline; the new normal for Opening Day is less than a decade old. For the previous decade and a half, it was celebrated in early April, but in the late 1990s, baseball didn’t start until April 5. The 1992 Minnesota Twins played 42 games before Memorial Day. The 2002 team played 50. This year, barring a rainout this weekend against the Rangers and even a different game being rained out in April, they will be at 52 at the end of Sunday’s action.
Secondly, and more importantly, neither teams nor the public anymore judge clubs by their results in the first weeks. We know, much better than we did two or three decades ago, which indicators matter and how likely they are to hold once they appear in a sample of 50 parties. We know, much better than we did two or three decades ago, how good most teams are, even before Opening Day. We measure baseball better, analyze it better, and synthesize multiple analyzes to better evaluate baseball players and teams. No one needs to make any final decisions before Memorial Day, and no one needs to wait that long to start making preliminary judgments, either.
However, I still think a lot about expectations, judgments and evaluations right now, because this time of year seems to lay bare how the hobby has changed over time. Naturally, as technology and public analysis have made the game more accessible and familiar to fans over the years, fans have begun to adjust their evaluations of teams earlier, and more frequently. That’s inevitable, and it’s not inherently bad.
It could be, though: fans don’t really keep any anchors in the past when it comes to those judgments. Like many baseball fans (well, nerdier ones) my age, I was introduced to the concept of Markov chains in The Book: Playing the Percentages in Baseball. The foundation of Markov chains is the concept that nothing about how you got to a given state matters. In other words, it doesn’t matter if a player hit a double with one out, or if he singled and then was hit. The probability of him scoring (and the number of runs expected for his team over the remainder of the inning) is the same in both cases. As the authors of The Book point out, this truth is what allows us to build models such as career expectancy and added probability of victory, which give weight to the analysis of plays and options during the game.
I have learned, by mixing a mathematical concept with another from behavioral economics, that Markov also describes the reference points of amateurs. When it comes to sports fandom, we don’t hold on for long to how our team made us feel a few weeks ago, much less for a few months or a few years. Sports fans do not get lasting joy from a performance that exceeds their previous expectations. It’s more exciting, in the moment, if a victory comes unexpectedly, but then we look ahead, and don’t give our teams much credit for their advancement.
The Cubs opened this season with a PECOTA projection of about 82 wins and a second-place finish in their division. Now, with the Cardinals looking hapless and the Reds and Brewers depleted by injuries even more than Chicago, PECOTA has the Cubs as favorites, with postseason odds to the right of a coin toss and 86 projected wins. Cubs fans are no happier. In fact, Cubs fans spend most of their time complaining about the very existence of Nick Madrigal, and about the poor performance of Ian Happ. The team is better than most fans convinced themselves they expected it to be, but the fans are angrier. Because? Because they don’t go first and because they don’t win more.
If expectations are premeditated resentments, I am beginning to believe that managed and lowered expectations are premeditated self-deceptions. In a curious way, even though fans insist they don’t believe in a team to protect their hearts a little, a small portion of them think their team is the best in baseball, and are disappointed, then enraged, when they don’t deliver. that standard. Whatever your team, as a fan, you are not as interested in the position as you think. What exasperates you most is that they move forward from that point. Nothing is good enough.
We live in a more jaded time than the one when announcers could tell fans, every Opening Day, “Hope springs eternal.” To our 21st century ears, that not only sounds silly, it is laughable. To live in the post-Moneyball era is to see the world with clear eyes, in all its ugliness. In part, we understand the game so well that the self-deception that is the hobby is now permanently incomplete, although it is also unkillable. In part, too, the executives have worked hard to remake the world this way, because they are on to you, the fans. The fact that fans are dissatisfied with anything less than the best, and give virtually no quarter to teams that simply go from mediocre to good, makes it important to telegraph your defeat, so that everyone can at least embrace the dream of being the best at some point in the future.
We also live in a more connected era, which is leading everyone towards a different type of hobby. Until the 1990s, the average sports fan’s experience was communal, and that community was fairly unified and cordial. Before modernity caused rivalries to take root primarily in frequent, high-stakes games (the Astros and the Yankees; the Braves and the Dodgers), special rivalries only existed between neighboring teams, because they were the only ones that had bases of overlapping fans. Until the Internet era, most Minnesota Twins fans watched or listened to their team’s games, or read about them in the newspaper the next day, and then discussed what had happened almost exclusively with other Twins fans. The fans did not confront each other, but rather supported each other. You commiserated or concelebrated with neighbors and friends, because they were Twins fans too.
Now, we are all constantly in contact with fans of other teams, and that makes being a fan exhausting at times. It fuels that fervent dedication to being the best, because if you’re anything less than that, you’re going to hear about it from the fans of the team ahead of you. The weekend before, the Twins were swept by the Guardians in Cleveland, and the back-and-forth between the two fans on Twitter was merciless, incessant, and hateful. That the Guardians are enjoying a season that far exceeds the reasonable hopes with which any of their fans entered the season didn’t matter much during those few days. That the Twins overcame brutal injury losses to stay above .500 and are coming off a division title win (after which they finally snapped their infamous postseason losing streak) didn’t matter at all. Markov stole the joy from both sides, simply by pushing them together. Since the most dedicated fans (usually, and perhaps unfortunately, the most connected to the Internet) have to face their rivals’ fans on a daily basis as if they were co-workers or classmates, their season is defined as much by the path that They still have to go as far as they have come.
If you haven’t already traveled (ass and all) to Minnesota in late May or early June, you should. Time takes forever to transition from winter to early spring, but once it does, it speeds around the corner and hurtles into the boil of summer. There’s a sweet spot where temperatures gently rise to the low 20s each day, then drop to the humid, fragrant 15 degrees each night, and that’s it. Over the next week, the Twins’ Memorial Day celebration will coincide with the Timberwolves’ effort to reach the NBA Finals for the first time. For those attending games at Target Field or Target Center, or even just strolling through downtown Minneapolis, it will be a wonderful time.
For some, however, the long shadow of Markov, Tversky and Kahneman could take away from the warmth of the matter. There’s always July 4, which is now a better estimate of when teams should make roster decisions, or even mid-June, when the Wolves could be trying to finish off an NBA title. But by then, that sweet moment will already have passed. The trick to savoring this perfect confluence of things in Minnesota is to enjoy the moment for what it is, rather than hoping for something better, and the trick to that is to ignore the irrelevant outside noise. Unfortunately, given the way the world works and the way our brains have rewired themselves to adapt to it, all that might be impossible.
Thank you for reading
This is a free article. If you enjoyed it, consider subscribing to Baseball Prospectus. Subscriptions support ongoing public baseball research and analysis in an increasingly proprietary environment.
Subscribe now
2024-05-24 10:30:28
#Country #Fly #Markov #Remembrance #Day
