Hey, there, baseball fans, welcome to the MLB playoffs, starring the New York Yankees, the New York Mets and other teams whose names I forgot.
First up to bat is what’s-his-name. This is his first at-bat since his last at-bat. And probably his last until his next. We checked with our production booth.
What’s-his-name now leads the league in trash talk. Every third word that comes out of his mouth is a curse. His agent plans to get his tongue bronzed for Cooperstown.
Next at the plate is you-know-who. He’s reached base in 34 straight games ever since he colored his hair orange. Coincidence? Turns out his slugging percentage soars 67% every time his mother and father watch him from the stands.
Now comes whatchamacallit. No one accuses him of being surly anymore. He just signed an eight-year, $200 million dollar contract featuring bonus incentives for cracking at least one smile in any on-camera interview.
What’s-his-name grounds out to short for the 147th time in his career. You-know-who pops up to short center field, the ball attaining a maximum altitude of 119 feet. And whatchamacallit goes down on three strikes, all curve balls spinning at an average of 1,800 revolutions per minute along a north-by-northeast latitude-longitude coordinate.
You’re thinking, Listen, enough with the stats! Right? Well, our latest MLB survey asked how season ticket-holders perceive the amount of data delivered on-air. It found that 59% believe it’s “just enough,” while 22% say it’s “too little” and only 19% responded it’s “far too much by any civilized standard, so please shut your face already.”
We’re thrilled fans want us to keep doing the math, so much so that we’ve cited 18% more stats this year than last year. We’re even setting a trend across all major American sports. Play-by-play announcers in baseball now sling 32% more stats than those in the NFL and 45% more than the NBA.
And we’re only going to get more drunk on our own Gatorade. Today, owing to growing demand from fans and effective next season, MLB will unveil exciting new stats: It will track which teams have the highest percentage of players married to former models and beauty queens. It will also tabulate which players generate more RBIs on Tuesdays in the third week in June.
And that’s just for starters. Our new dashboard will even tally which players are most prone to bitch on TikTok that ESPN’s Sportscenter Top 10 left out a spectacular diving catch of theirs. It will also cite which players glower the longest at a pitcher after taking a third called strike as if to say, “Hey buddy you better watch out because I’m going to get you next time and then I’ll be coming for your family.”
Still, let’s acknowledge the elephant in the stadium. Given our never-ending quest to quantify, enumerate, calculate, categorize and catalog every event both on and off the diamond — no matter how infinitesimally insignificant it might be — some diehard purists persistently claim that we’ve gone overboard blurting out metrics with every syllable.
Granted, last year alone, four general managers were found literally drowned to death in data, a phenomenon known clinically as suffocation from spreadsheets. Equally troubling, 14 fans innocently watching baseball highlight footage on YouTube suffered concussions from almost fatal overdoses of all the gratuitous statistics downloaded and lapsed into comas.
Finally, a word about so-and-so. He’s the announcer I replaced this year after he cited more stats per minute than any broadcaster in history during a doubleheader and had to be hospitalized for Post-Traumatic Baseball Statistics Syndrome (PTBSS). So severe is this increasingly common injury to the cerebral cortex that even the most optimistic neurologists doubt he’ll ever recover enough to spout another numeral.
So possibly some reform is in order here. Hence, our new pledge. Never again will we run the risk of unduly overcomplicating our divinely pastoral national pastime. We promise never to do anything to prevent fans from admiring the elegant beauty of this inherently simple game played on grass and dirt under the open sky on spring and summer days. No longer will we deprive fans of the amply deserved opportunity to escape from themselves and everything else for a few hours to behold the most sublimely diverting game ever invented.
Brody, a consultant and essayist living in Italy, is the author of the memoir “Playing Catch with Strangers: A Family Guy (Reluctantly) Comes of Age.”