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David Roth's Weak In Review: Beginning And Ending In October

This year's October baseball has been pretty great, but also impressively and inspiringly strange. Something is clearly changing, here, and that is fun to watch.
Illustration by Henry Kaye

Every few weeks, right on time, Daniel Murphy does something that no baseball player has ever done before. It only feels like these are truly avant-garde—I am certain that I have seen him field a ground ball and then carefully bury it with his hands behind second base, or calmly pull an iPhone out of his pocket, tell the shortstop "I have to take this," and then wander off into center field after sliding into second with a double. But I also know that I did not actually see this. It only feels that way.

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So, in retrospect, Murphy's Game 5 performance in Thursday night's 3-2 Mets win over the Dodgers was a giveaway. Murphy is the game's most convincing and most absurd Trojan Horse: he looks like a square-jawed evangelical baseball bro from northern Florida—and he is all of those things—but he is also a secret situationist, prone to forgetting outs or attempting to steal bases that do not strictly speaking exist or otherwise forgetting every single thing about how baseball works and should be played. He is profoundly and prototypically a Met, then, and one of the most truly strange players in baseball. Not in some poetic/aesthetic Free Darko way, either. He's just fucking weird, and him winning important October games with his savvy baserunning is an unmistakable sign that something equally weird is happening in baseball right now.

Read More: Staying Human In October

Among the friends I have who care about this stupid, stupid baseball team, "to Murph" is a verb that is, in as loving a way as possible, synonymous with "to absolutely fuck it all up." This is all worth mentioning because Daniel Murphy homered off Clayton Kershaw (twice!) and Zack Greinke, and was the most valuable player of the Mets' NLDS win. Ordinarily, this would be a sign that baseball was undergoing some sort of transcendent psychotic break. After this week, it makes sense. Baseball is just Murphing so hard right now, absolutely Murphing to beat the band.

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To a certain extent, this happens every year around this time; the postseason is flukey and contingent and unrepresentative, which is why it is so harsh and so great. Still, beyond and beneath the usual October stuff—the emotional overage and cruel chance and sanctimony and sanctimonious counter-sanctimony—there is something else that is less familiar. In all the noise and conflict of this week in baseball, it's possible to sense something in the game changing, or preparing to change, or at least seeing its own reflection for the first time in so long as to be startled by the strange new face staring back. Baseball has, maybe more than in any other sport, a constituency that is resistant to any and all types of change. But it's possible to see, in the tumult and Murph-ery of the last week, baseball figuring out what it is going to be.

Feels good, man. — Photo by Nick Turchiaro-USA TODAY Sports

Baseball being baseball, and people being people and change being change, it is not necessarily going smoothly. The seventh inning of the Game 5 between the Texas Rangers and Toronto Blue Jays alone had more baseball in it than is advisable or frankly fair. The bottom half of the inning, in which the Blue Jays evened the score due to a spectacular procession of abject defensive cock-ups by the Texas Rangers infield and then took the lead on a monstrous Jose Bautista homer, somehow had more baseball in it than the last four or so seasons played by the Colorado Rockies. This is all very good, and heartbreaking and dazzling in something like the perfect balance. The conversation, naturally, moved on very quickly.

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This was because of all the non-baseball things that happened in that inning, which also included a lengthy video review—the second-most controversial lengthy video review of the playoffs, if only because this one, unlike the one that followed Chase Utley's demolition of Ruben Tejada's leg in Game 2 of the Mets/Dodgers series, arrived at the correct ruling—and a bat-flip and the pursuant salty Respect The Game warning and a near-brawl and dozens of beers raining onto the field from the stands. Fans ran through the outfield, according to Harold Reynolds. The brother-in-law of the unbearable conservative pundit David Frum was escorted from the stands by security on live television. That all also happened, and so everyone talked—well, carped and bitched and counter-carped and counter-bitched, mostly—about that.

Baseball tends to fight a lot of these proxy wars, which is not any more charming than it sounds. There is a faction of baseball fans that gets upset about things, and another faction that gets upset about how upset the first faction is, and while both sides presumably agree that baseball is good and fun and cool, they tend mostly to argue about arguments. Some of this is just because it can be difficult to talk about things you love after a while—there is not a new way to describe an unhittable curveball, really, and also caring this much invariably makes us stupid. But these cyclical arguments about how baseball is supposed to be played and talked about and understood are fueled by the same fraught thing that powers the more stupid circular screaming contests in our broader public life. Change is scary.

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When you're Murphing as few have ever Murphed before. — Photo by Richard Mackson-USA TODAY Sports

And baseball, the game that thinks it's America, is changing in the same ways that America is changing. There is, in this smaller and safer space and scaled-down way, the same queasy-thrilling and totally exhausting realization in baseball, as in society in general, that things can and should and at any rate will be different, and are in fact already very different and becoming progressively more so, if only because it is impossible for anything truly to stay the same. There is a future rushing up for baseball that is diverse on a global scale and more youthful and expressive and fun than the simultaneously starchy and scuzzy thing that the game was when it was a bunch of Hagar The Horrible-looking white dudes pounding amphetamized coffee in the 1970's, or puffy-muscled bloatwursts hitting dongs in the 1990's. There is another future after that, too, because there always is, but we can't see that one yet.

It's the next one, the one that's already on us—the future we see in polyglot teams like the Astros and Cubs, which are young and somehow getting younger, and in the furiously brash Blue Jays and the more humbly revolutionary Royals, and even the giddy and Murphed-up Mets—that we are finally figuring out enough to start fighting about. Some people want it all now and some people want it not-ever never no sir, but everyone wants all of it for themselves. The same things that angry up the blood of the body politic motivate both the reactionary clucking that increasingly follows on-field expressions of emotion like Jose Bautista's imperiously discarded bat and the furious counter-reaction to them. The people presently borrowing authority—they are, in baseball as elsewhere, mostly smallish-minded white people demanding that everyone else do things their way—can feel their grip on it loosening, and do not like this much. Nor do they trust or much understand the people who seem prepared to seize it. No one is actually this angry about flipped bats either way or really ever has been, is what I'm saying.

The broader concern, which is extremely human and much less objectionable than being hacked off about some middle reliever's offended sensibilities one way or the other, is that there will not be room for us in the thing that's coming. The biggest and most meaningful changes are oceanic and fundamentally out of our hands. There is the sense, in the game and everywhere else, that we are in a period of mass realization—a realization that our status quo is not the only way things can be, that it is in fact dying and that we actually won't miss it much, and that there are other ways that things might be. And that some sort of becoming is already in process.

This is an exciting but uneasy thing, if only because we never really notice this sufficiently until we are in the middle of it. At which point we are already moving in a direction we don't yet know, due to forces we don't totally understand and mostly don't control. Of course, we were already moving, even before we noticed enough to start arguing about who gets to drive. We always are. Baseball is going to change because that is what living things do. The most reasonable response to that, I'd say, is celebration. Consider the alternative.