Zito-Hudson Is Pure Baseball Nostalgia, And That's Why It's Great

Professional wrestling will give you all the nostalgia you can buy, provided you're willing to buy it. That sport deals in storytelling and characters, and those incentives are enough to make WWE a champion of meritocracy in which no man shall ever be barred from main eventing a pay-per-view due to age or added probability of a career-ending injury. This dedication to showcasing the weathered facsimiles of former athletic heroes owes less to benevolence than it does the profit motive, but they'll sell it as long as anyone wants to pay for it. In sending Barry Zito and Tim Hudson to the mound on Saturday for one last start, the Oakland Athletics and San Francisco Giants are doing something that looks similar, but feels different.

Things do not normally work this way in Major League Baseball. Josh Hamilton's heartwarming Texas homecoming didn't happen for its own sake; fiscal and baseball sense ruled out any other outcome. Ditto Alex Rodriguez, whose improbable midlife return to demigod status in the Bronx was facilitated by a contract so onerous that the only place left for him was the Yankees' lineup. Should any of it make fans happy, then so much the better. Yet the more sentimental aspects of customer satisfaction will always be secondary to winning.

The Zito-Hudson matchup has been cast as a final farewell to one of the great pitching triumvirates in baseball history, and a celebration of the rare trio of prospects that delivered on their potential in every way. Zito and Hudson are the last two members of Oakland's old Big Three still in the bigs; Mark Mulder, the third horseman, now works for ESPN after a few recent failed comeback attempts. Hudson, 40, helped San Francisco win a World Series last year, and has announced that this will be his final season; Zito, 37, was out of baseball entirely in 2014, and then spent the entirety of this season at Triple-A before being called up by Oakland on September 16, after the end of the minor league season.

In baseball's cold bottom-line calculus, it's a game between two teams plodding toward the offseason. But it's also something rarer and more significant than that: it's a case of nostalgia for nostalgia's sake in professional sports. This doesn't happen much, which makes it something of a pleasant shock to hearOakland manager Bob Melvin gleefully conceded that he is starting a 37-year-old lefty who last started a big league game in 2013 for the sake of "our fans, first and foremost."

"Really and truly he deserves it, based on what he did this year in Triple-A, what he's meant to this organization," Melvin continued. "To get him out one more time in our ballpark against the Giants with our fan base, their fan base and Tim Hudson on the mound, it's going to be a very exciting day."

Similarly, Giants manager Bruce Bochy did not need to start Hudson—who has scuffled somewhat in his 17th big league season—at all, let alone on this certain Saturday. It doesn't matter, really, that this may only amount to a couple of nice standing ovations and a few ghastly innings. The game doesn't matter, or matters less than the sweet jolt of common decency prevailing, and two organizations with nothing substantial to play for shelving any pretense of the on-field results and giving everyone a show.

The A's, for their part, are not capitalizing on this as much as they could. "There's no real [promotions] strategy," says Ken Pries, the team's Vice President of Broadcasting and Communications. Apart from possibly a few video board flourishes, "we're going to treat it like any other game."

Part of this, he says, is not wanting to distract Hudson on what likely amounts to his final big league start before his impending retirement. A tribute to The Big Three is on the books for Sunday, which, among other things, will include the trio jointly tossing out the first pitch and, Pries says, a short ceremony at home plate to honor Hudson's career. That's pretty restrained relative to how these things are done in pro wrestling—which depending on one's perspective makes this either refreshing, or tragically light on souvenirs, or perhaps both.

But nothing about this game really needs to be shouted or spammed or blurted, really. An event like this does not need be pumped up, just as Bochy doesn't have to talk about why he chose Tim Hudson to start in Oakland against Barry Zito. The avalanche of retweets for a simple pitching matchup announcement suggests that people care about it; that it's happening at all is an affirmation that professional sports franchises can acknowledge greater workings than bottom-line calculations. The rest of it suggests that, this once, both teams are okay with that being enough.

On Saturday afternoon, a broken-down lefty will pitch against a right-hander playing out the string, and there will be a winner and loser. The bigger victory comes is in how little it matters who winds up on which side of that line.