The index of self destru.., p.7
The Index of Self-Destructive Acts, page 7
“How did it go?” Margo asked when he got back to the seats.
“The usual bullshit,” Frank said.
“I hope you didn’t tell them that in the booth.”
“Things went fine in the booth.”
She looked at him skeptically.
“What?” he asked.
“I wouldn’t have let you go up there if I’d seen the condition you’re in.”
“What condition? I’ve done this a few times before.”
Many people would advise him later to blame it on the drink. In his view, beers at a ball game hardly counted as drinking. He hadn’t been downing Blue Label. If he was not at his best, it wasn’t the beer but the nerves and the empty stomach. And anyway, he didn’t think he owed some grand explanation for his behavior. He’d made a bad joke—he could admit that—but it hadn’t even really been directed at Obama. It had been directed at Joe Buck, his stupid question and his pious smile. Finally, Frank refused to blame it on the drink because he knew that if he did he would have to stop drinking. There had been a time when you could just say: I’m sorry I did that thing when I was drunk. Now you had to say: I have a problem and, after long consultation with my family and my religious confessor, I have committed to seeking help. Better to leave alcohol out of the conversation entirely. He liked drinking—he especially liked drinking while watching a ball game—and he had no interest in giving it up.
He’d been back in his seat for about an inning when Margo looked down at this fancy new phone she could never put down and said, “What did you do up there, Dad?”
“What do you mean?”
“I just got a text from a friend. It’s all over Teeser that you made some racist remark on national television.”
“It wasn’t a racist remark. This is why I’m always telling you not to waste time on this internet garbage.”
“What did you say?”
Frank tried to remember exactly what he’d said. As he went back over it in his mind, he could see how it might look when taken out of context.
“Buck was being a real prick, and I was already in a lousy mood.”
“What did you say?”
By now she’d found a clip of it on her phone and before he could answer she’d started playing it. He could hear his slurring, snarling voice, and he knew that it sounded bad. When she got to the end of the clip, Margo looked from her phone up to him.
“I can’t believe you.”
“It was a joke.”
“It was offensive.”
“The man’s father is from Kenya. There’s nothing wrong with that. It’s offensive that people would assume it was an insult.”
“Obama’s from Hawaii, and if he were from Kenya, that wouldn’t make him a tree-climbing monkey.”
“I never said anything about monkeys.” Frank was fairly certain this was true. “Do human beings not climb trees?”
She wasn’t listening. She’d found another clip, recorded just a few minutes before but already floating around in the electronic ether along with the first. It was from the half-inning after he’d left the booth. McCarver was apologizing to viewers for what they’d just heard.
“Frank Doyle is an old friend of mine,” he said, “but what he just said is inexcusable. Whatever your politics are, there’s no place in the twenty-first century for that kind of talk. Baseball is a game that has brought people of every race together ever since Jackie Robinson broke the color line in this very city. Frank Doyle does not represent this network or this game.”
“Well put, partner,” Buck added.
It was ridiculous. Frank had probably written a hundred pages about Robinson over the years. He’d known the man personally. They’d eaten meals together. He was on the verge of telling this to Margo, but the look on her face stopped him. What had upset her so much? If he was being honest, what he’d said was stupid. But he’d said plenty of stupid things over the years. Provocation was part of his job. When you made it your business to test boundaries, those boundaries inevitably got crossed once in a while.
“I want to go,” Margo said.
“Are you serious? It’s a tie game at the end of six. The whole season is on the line.”
“If you had any idea what you’d just done you’d be ready to go, too.”
He considered staying to watch the rest of the game alone, but her look convinced him that this was a bad idea. So he wasn’t there when the Mets gave up two runs in the next inning, when they lost the game and the entire season. He wasn’t there for the somber post-game ceremony that closed the old stadium. He never saw the place again before it was demolished.
His belief that something more than one team’s season was bound up in that game seemed to prove itself correct: UniBank went bust a few weeks later. McCain made a mess of the ensuing crisis, calling on Obama to suspend campaigning. He looked old and tired and scared, and he lost the election handily, just as Waxworth had predicted. Obama’s first act in office, it seemed, was to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory in Iraq, withdrawing the troops that had successfully stabilized the place. Frank was relieved that Eddie was safe now, but he was home because the war had been lost. What might have been seen as a long and difficult but noble struggle looked now like a failure and a mistake. And Frank himself was a disgrace. He never got to write his column about how one moment can change the meaning of a lifetime’s hard work. He had lived it instead.
He kept waiting for Waxworth to ask about it all, but the kid seemed too absorbed in the game to do his job. He wasn’t much of a reporter, Frank thought again.
“How exactly did you wind up with this job?”
“Writing for the Interviewer?”
“I know about the election and all that. I mean, how did you get into the prophecy business?”
Waxworth took a moment, as though considering how seriously to answer.
“When I was in college, the guys on my hall had these endless bullshit sessions. Who was the greatest left-handed pitcher of all time? How many shutdown closers is one reliable starter worth? Who was a better hitter—Bonds or Ruth? These conversations went on forever, almost by design. There was so much imprecision that any case could be made. But the nice thing about baseball is that you don’t have to speculate, because they keep playing more games. If a method of evaluation is any good, it ought to apply to next season just as well as to last.”
Frank had heard this argument before.
“So you made predictions.”
“We calculated win totals for all thirty teams. There were maybe a dozen of us. Before pitchers and catchers reported for spring training, we each put fifty bucks into an envelope, which was kept in the care of an independent observer. Whoever had the smallest total deviation would win the whole pot.”
“Let me guess.” Frank knew more about these things than the statheads probably appreciated. “You took the previous year’s run differential, and you plugged in some numbers to account for off-season moves.”
“That’s a good start,” the kid said, in a mildly impressed tone that bothered Frank less than it should have. “But not enough for my purposes. Bill James demonstrated the relationship between wins and run differential almost thirty years ago. Most of my friends already knew about it, or could discover it with a little research. To get a real edge, I needed to drill deeper than that. In the same way that wins can be derived from the differential between runs scored and allowed, run production and prevention can be derived from various individual statistics. But now we have the same problem over again: the stats that track best with run production—on-base and slugging percentage—aren’t themselves the most predictable, because there’s so much luck involved once a ball is put into play.”
“So you tracked home runs, strikeouts, and walks.”
Waxworth gave an approving nod.
“That’s right. Then I assumed a regression to the mean on batting average for balls in play. Once I’d figured all that out, it was pretty easy to write a program that gathered these numbers and combined them to predict future value. Of course, I’m simplifying matters a little bit. I also had to project the career arcs of different player types, and a few other variables, but basically that was it. I called it the Yearly Over/Under Number Theorem.”
“YOUNT,” Frank said after a moment.
“A silly reverse acronym. He was my favorite player growing up. If I’d known it was going to follow me around for years, I might have given it another name, but it did its job.”
“You won a few hundred bucks, and the rest is history.”
“Actually, I came in second place.”
“Someone had a better system?”
“Not exactly. The winner was a kid named Craig who lived on my hall. Not a particularly bright guy. That summer he’d worked on campus, checking fire extinguishers for the public safety office, and he’d given himself scurvy by eating nothing but ramen and ketchup packets.”
“Sounds like tough competition.”
“He had no system. He just guessed. I’d done all that work trying to remove luck from my calculations, but I hadn’t removed it from the contest itself. Of course, his results wouldn’t hold up for another season, but some other equally unsophisticated method would get lucky instead. My system would keep me in the top two or three year after year, but that wasn’t enough. You could predict win totals for years before it produces a sample large enough to assure that the better system wins out.”
Frank listened to him explain the more expansive wager he’d proposed next: predicting every significant statistical category for every single major league baseball player—somewhere around twenty thousand outputs.
“A number that big makes guessing impossible. You need an algorithm just to populate all those fields, even if it only assumes that each player will replicate his previous season. It would take a bit of work, which was why I suggested raising the stakes to two hundred and fifty dollars. By the time the season rolled around, there were two dozen paying participants. Most of them weren’t even really baseball fans. They just liked the challenge of it. We had to open a group savings account, because there was too much money to keep in an envelope. The school paper wrote an article about us. I posted my YOUNT projections on a website I’d built during an early computer science class, and I updated it weekly with a running tally of each player’s actual production. I kept a blog that analyzed YOUNT’s performance compared to my competitors. It was pretty clear right away that I was going to win. The question was how accurate I would be. People who had nothing to do with the bet—people who didn’t even go to school with us—were following along. By the end of the summer I was getting thousands of unique visitors each week. This website, the Pop-Up, started reporting the results, which drove so much traffic to my page that the university shut it down. The Pop-Up offered to host it for the rest of the season, and the next year they bought the system. In my world, that site is a huge deal.”
“I’m familiar with it,” Frank said. “They used to have something called the ‘Frank Doyle Idiot Watch.’”
Waxworth laughed.
“Well, I didn’t write that. And they kind of screwed me over in the end, so I’m not a huge fan of the place, either.”
Now Frank laughed. Despite himself, he was enjoying all this. There was nothing better than watching baseball with someone who really knew it. Eddie had never loved baseball the way Frank did. He’d liked sitting in his room with his buddies, getting stoned. Margo had come to countless games with him over the years, and she actually knew quite a bit about the sport, but things were just different for a father and daughter. You weren’t supposed to say that these days, but it was true. With Margo he shared poetry, but he’d always wanted to share baseball with his boy.
In the third, an odd commotion brought their attention to a spot behind home plate. A cat had found its way onto the field and was running around the on-deck circle.
“Look at that,” Frank said, delighted. It might have happened just to prove his point. “That’s not something that will wind up in the box score, not something that goes into your algorithm.”
The kid didn’t seem impressed.
“That’s because it won’t have any effect on the outcome.”
“You don’t think it’s a bad omen to have a cat run onto the field during the first game at the park? You know that it was a black cat that doomed the Cubbies in 69?”
“A bad omen? Are you serious?”
“Granted, this one wasn’t black. Maybe it’s a good omen, then.”
“So if they do well, then it will have been a good omen. If they have another collapse like the last two seasons, it will be a bad omen. And what if they just have a mediocre season?”
“Then it won’t have been an omen after all.”
“You don’t really believe this stuff—curses and omens and jinxes and all that?”
“Why not believe in it?”
“Because it’s not true. There’s no evidence for it.”
“Who gets to decide what counts as evidence? The cat came on the field. You and I both saw that. You say it won’t have any effect on the outcome of the game, but there’s no way of knowing if you just pretend it never happened.”
“I don’t want to pretend it didn’t happen. It’s fun. It’s part of the game’s charm. You can tell nice stories about it. I just don’t want to pretend that it means anything. As for whether it goes in the box score—let’s say we did note the cat on the field. That’s easy enough to record. If it had any effect, it would be a measurable effect, at which point we could try to figure out some explanation for it.”
“Of course, everything can get turned into a number. The Feline Quotient. Value over Replacement Pet.”
Waxworth laughed at this, and after a moment Frank laughed along. He flagged down a beer man and offered to buy the next round.
Facing a full count in the bottom of the fifth, David Wright hit a three-run homer to tie it up. The team was showing some life. Then in the top of the sixth a routine out was misplayed into a three-base error. With two outs the pitcher flinched on the mound, and the umpire called a balk. It was the one call in baseball that the average fan couldn’t spot—a kind of procedural error. The pitcher didn’t set himself properly, which meant the runner was allowed to advance a base. The run was let in on a technicality.
“Unbelievable,” Frank said. “We’re going to lose this game on a balk. How many of your computer simulations would you have to run before that happened?”
“Quite a few,” the kid admitted.
“Here’s something that you statheads can’t capture. Some teams are just star-crossed. They can’t get out of their own way. I’m not saying the cat has anything to do with it. But what do you say about a pitcher who consistently beats himself? I mean, no one on the other team had to do a thing. There’s no number that captures that.”
“Actually there is,” Waxworth said after a moment, an odd excitement in his voice. “I haven’t thought about it in a long time, but Bill James developed a stat. It adds up balks, hit batsmen, wild pitches, errors—all the things a pitcher does that are entirely in his control, that don’t require the batter to do anything at all. The Index of Self-Destructive Acts.”
Frank laughed again in spite of himself. The very sound of it improved his mood.
“You guys are finally good for something.”
It was all over quickly after that. No more runs were scored, and the Mets opened the new park with a loss, just as they’d closed the last one. As they filed out, Frank suggested they ride into the city together, but Waxworth said he was taking the bus to Brooklyn.
“Maybe we could meet again?” Frank said. “If you’ve got more questions for the piece.”
“I’d like that,” the kid told him.
On the train back into Manhattan, the mood was surprisingly low. One game in April didn’t amount to much, and anyway baseball was a game of failure. The best teams lost sixty times in a season, the best hitters made outs in two-thirds of their at bats. But the way they’d done it—opening a new park by losing on a three-base error and a balk—had everyone shell-shocked. To someone like Waxworth, Frank thought, this was an outlier, a statistical anomaly to be safely discarded. But to the humble fan, who felt things in his bones he could hardly articulate, let alone justify numerically, it could only portend trouble to come.
5.
In the lobby he found his mother deep in conversation with one of the weekend doormen, an old Irishman named Hugh. They both looked up when Justin emerged from the elevator as though surprised in the middle of a social call. He was actually running ahead of schedule—it was barely eight o’clock—but Netta had probably come straight down after getting dressed, which meant they’d been chatting for more than an hour.
She’d lived in the building for six months now, and she still seemed to spend all her time with the doormen or the nannies and housekeepers who congregated by the service entrance around the corner. Justin had introduced her to some women her own age, including two recent widows. They’d all spoken politely about getting together for tea, but so far as he could tell no actual invitations had been extended. Nor did Netta’s old friends ever visit, apart from the prayer circle that Jonathan brought over every other week. She seemed almost embarrassed by her living conditions.
“Be well,” Hugh told her as he ushered them into the revolving door. Touching the bill of his uniform cap, he added, “Have a good day, Mr. Price.”
The black Range Rover waited in front of a hydrant outside, and Tommy smiled into the rear-view as they climbed in. They headed down Fifth for half a block and turned onto the nearest brownstoned side street. The shops of Madison Avenue gave way to the long leafy sun-drenched alley of Park, and Netta lowered her window for a better look, as she often did on this drive. Justin had grown up on these streets, but his mother affected being still a stranger to them. He found something willful in this pose, given the amount of time she’d spent in the neighborhood over the years. Not to mention the fact that she’d brought him there in the first place.
