What do basic human blunders mean to the greater narratives of our lives? Elizabeth D. Samet’s gratifying, nimble essay opens with “The Call,” an umpire’s erroneous read on a split-second play in Game 6 of the 1985 World Series. From there, she explores our relationship to error and risk, the “theatrically intimidating power” of artificial intelligence and its uncritical adopters, and what freedoms are ceded in the unending pursuit of perfection.
Our casino life involves certain fundamental human fantasies: that we can beat the house, that we can avenge ourselves on a world filled with the unfair and the unpredictable, that we can abdicate the arduous and time-consuming exercise of judgment and personal responsibility by outsourcing it to a machine. Along the way, of course, we end up writing ourselves out of the equation. That’s a problem that transcends the baseball diamond but finds few better provinces for working itself out.
More surprising baseball stories
When Baseball Threw Physics a Curve
“Sports, science, and collective delusion.”
They Stole Yogi Berra’s World Series Rings. Then They Did Something Really Crazy.
The childhood friends behind the most audacious string of sports-memorabilia heists in American history.
The Long, Strange History of the Baseball Cap
“How did it become both the quintessential piece of a ballplayer’s uniform, as well as the go-to wardrobe accessory for stars, artists, and the common person?”
