Baseball is better when the stories matter
Even if and when they are just stories.
People used to say you get more conservative as you age. People say that less now with the state of right-of-center politics and policy but it’s still a bit of an adage.
And while I keep going the opposite direction with each passing year, there’s one spot where I feel more conservative. Spiritually boomer, even.
I love the narratives in baseball. I love the numbers too but I gotta have both. Because it’d be bad if the stories—the people, the scenarios, the arcs, the characters and their character—don’t nudge the numbers instead of the other way around.
I want to take you back to one of my most formative online back-and-forths.
On an older but not the oldest version of Lookout Landing, then helmed by Jeff Sullivan and Matthew Carruth, I got into a bit of an argument in the comments with the latter—a dude much smarter than me on baseball matters. Probably most matters.
It was a tough time to be a Mariners fan. It was a weird time to be a Mariners fan.
Anyway, and I’m not going to look up when exactly this was or the exact results of what happened, but there was a time when Ichiro was benched. “Benched” might be a little strong.
It was late in his first Mariners tenure and he was scuffling and taken out of the lineup for a day even though he didn’t want to be taken out of the lineup.
The next day he got a bunch of hits. Pretty sure it was at least three.
I don’t know why I wandered into the comments—because I never commented at first—to semi-innocuously say something like “It looks like Ichiro responded to the benching….” and so on.
I don’t recall the exact response but Matthew didn’t agree because that’s not how baseball works, in addition to it just being a weird time to talk about Ichiro at all.
The way baseball’s online communities were coming to understand how baseball worked revolved completely around what was predictive.
You can’t say this caused that unless this consistently happened enough to be able to count on it happening in the future. If something was results-based, it was nigh-immoral.
I am almost certainly mischaracterizing that.
But I vividly remember being like “Okay but what if Ichiro said the benching motivated him and that’s why he got those hits?”
Still, no dice.
Because how would Ichiro know better than anyone else? He doesn’t know.
And that’s probably a smarter way to look at baseball if you’re going to be looking at it. Because you can’t go around advocating for the tactical benching of star players in slumps or you’re going to sound like a loon whose Twitter avi is a car selfie with sunglasses from 2003.
While I can say with certainty I’m not growing more politically conservative as I age, I am loony enough to think sometimes guys respond to adversity. And sometimes guys don’t.
And it’s enjoyable to notice it, to believe.
This is just a sunny Saturday afternoon riff but I feel like even a few years into whatever this project is, it’s good to still occasionally express the core values that shape the rest.
I was thinking about that last night as J.P. Crawford had as good of a game in a Mariners uniform as anyone has had all year.
Something’s different with him and this whole club since Colt Emerson came up. It isn’t necessarily that he’s directly sparked everyone or anything close to it, but when you flip from Leo Rivas (bless his heart) to genuinely competing at one spot—with a guy the org views as a cornerstone—things become a lot more real for almost everyone.
Simply, you don’t want to be scuffling whenever Brendan Donovan is back to health.
That surely isn’t what J.P. Crawford was thinking about as he stood and stared at the rail gun bolt headed toward the No Fly Zone, his second homer of the night. Nor when his diving stop kept the Snakes off the board in the 10th.
But I still want to believe that stuff is a factor. Because how can it not be? Those are the conditions and the context.
Crawford is staring at the next phase of his Major League career as he authors the conclusion to this one. He can still pick it a little and he can definitely lean on one.
I was also thinking during the game last night, so perversely, about the range of money Randy Arozarena was playing for—like the total money gap in his next contract between a bad to good to great walk year here in 2026.
Is it nine figures? I think it’s nine figures.
And basically all this year, even before, I thought Randy made sense as a guy to have a great contract year. Why? Well, look at those old Postseason and WBC performances. He rises to meet the moment. Or something.
But that isn’t what I was thinking about as I stood next to my wife at the game last night.
“Man, they’re going to intentionally walk someone to get to Randy? The disrespect,” I said out loud.
Five pitches later, on a 2-2 slider way down, away and out of the zone, Randy hung in there when he needed to hang in there. He went down and got it. Bat to barrel.
Looping liner to the gap in right-center.
Fire the W.
That’s the good stuff.
Go M’s.