David Roth's Weak In Review: October, And The Upside Of Anarchy

Say this much for the NFL under Roger Goodell's thumbheaded stewardship—it is a cynical and amoral and mostly pretty stupid thing, but it sure does heighten the contradictions. The NBA kind of halfheartedly tries to mitigate the league's essential and wonderful overstatedness, but mostly turns it loose. Major League Baseball tries, and fails loudly, to make sure that everything is simultaneously exactly as it has always been and peerlessly modern; the result is a contradictory and ill-tempered comments-section of a culture, where harumphing about those overexuberant, ah, ethnic sluggers and flubbily deployed video replay share space—disagreeably—and everyone is always a little pissy about everything.

But things are changing in baseball, changing very much and much more quickly than we might think, and that is good. Only the NFL has both the power and the will to bring its idiotic authoritarian vision to life, and freeze the league exactly to where its most powerful and least imaginative people want it to be. The result is extremely lucrative and conveniently beyond good and evil—NFL owners are obviously not alone in the belief that behaving ethically constitutes an unconscionable strain on the proper functioning of the free market, but NFL owners grandly making excuses for signing some horrid creep is easier to understand than the market for mortgage-backed securities.

But the NFL is also, more than anything else, locked in—dedicated to prosecuting and fining every picayune uniform violation or moment of over-expressiveness, committed to its poorly played games on Thursday nights and insistent on sending the poor Jacksonville Jaguars to play in London despite that city's increasingly firm insistence that it isn't strictly necessary for the NFL to keep on with this particular act of re-gifting. The NFL's guiding fantasy is control, which is kind of a bummer given that Extraordinary Strength, Unreal Grace Under Pressure, and Dazzling Athleticism are sitting right there, but which also makes a certain type of sense. For people who fantasize about command—the seething commute-jockeys writing and re-writing their marathon telling-offs of everyone that has ever wronged them—the NFL provides the constipated power dynamic and order-humping they crave.

Still, there's something more than boring about a game without any anarchy in it. NFL games come to life in the moments when they're least controlled, when the wild things inherent in the game itself breaks free of the brand and takes off down the sideline. The NFL wants something repeatable and uniform, the better to be logistic'ed into place, right on time and everywhere. Given the box office that the league earns with this model of zipless efficiency and corporate sentiment, it's hard to argue that it isn't a success, at least in the narrow greenbacked terms that matter to the people running things. But with the MLB Playoffs now deep into their annual October fugue state, we can see even more plainly that anarchy is more fun and inevitable.

Before they became the fulcrum for these leveraged entertainment concerns, games were built for recreation, and what is ungovernable and random in them is both cruelest and what's easiest to love about them. This is true in a basic, Can't Predict Ball way, from one moment to the next, but it also holds in a macro sense. The good news is that there is no way to really legislate this out of existence; as long as games are played and coached by people, instead of the result of elaborate algorithmic simulations, there are still going to be eruptive moments of unexpected and unexplained brilliance and outrageous idiocy. Daniel Murphy will go supernova in October, Seahawks offensive coordinator Darrell Bevell will call a pass at the one-yard line in the Super Bowl, and so on until the sun goes out or we finally get around to turning things over to the robots or the robots get around to taking it themselves.

October baseball is played in a thin-aired state of unrepresentative, breathless, high-tension extremity, and the results more or less reflect this. After a season spent shaking things out as reasonably as possible—still not very reasonable, mostly—over a matter of months, the best teams get to play in games that are in format similar to the 162 they'd just played, but which are otherwise so heedless and headlong and otherwise un-chill as to be another thing entirely. This October, especially, featured a spate of fascinating and totally endearing teams that seemed to be in collective trance states, and which have played totally unreasonable and totally delightful baseball.

The Houston Astros showing up at the party, already thoroughly lit, three years early; the Texas Rangers, so depleted by injury and bad luck that they looked like a last place team, wandered blithely to the doorstep of the ALCS simply because no one told them to stop; the Cubs thumpingly dispatched the thoroughly reasonable Cardinals seemingly because it never occurred to them that they couldn't. The Mets have gone from mediocre to bulletproof over the course of a couple months, for reasons that involve old-time baseball verities about pitching and timely hitting but seem more based in unreason and alchemy and the salutary effect of having Juan Uribe around. The Toronto Blue Jays riveted stars onto an underachieving roster like gratuitous spikes on a Mad Max vehicle and promptly went crazy with self-belief. The Royals play a so-straight-they're-weird brand of baseball with surprising expressiveness.

There are no inevitabilities left, in short; the familiar narrative frames are mostly in ruins. This is inconvenient, at least for people whose job it is to sell baseball as opposed to those whose pleasure it is to enjoy it. The people in charge build this lovely edifice, spotless and shining and meticulous; they plan on charging admission for it, and thank their corporate partners for their assistance. And then the game itself just spray-paints graffiti all over it, throws a big party in the living room and doesn't clean anything up, and lets weirdos like Daniel Murphy rudely launch dingers through the windows. It's a mess. It's perfect.