October 29, 2017 will live in most people's memories as the Sunday right before Halloween (Tuesday this year), or Week 8 of the 2017 NFL season, or the weekend Robert Mueller announced there would be indictments coming out on Monday for the Trump administration's Russia investigation, but for baseball enthusiasts and Los Angeles/ Houston residents it will be forever remembered as one of the best baseball games ever played, Game 5 of the 2017 World Series. For MJ and I, it will be remembered as the first time MJ and I watched a baseball game together almost from start to finish (and it was 5.5 hours long!) and even listened in a brief pause to the radio broadcast of the game! It took a really special game to do that, and this game was definitely it.
For most of us, the unknown is an exciting prospect, it's in fact a huge motivation for the will to live. We want to know what happens next, how that exotic food tastes, what we got on our test, what monsters await in the haunted house, etc., etc. Whole economies are driven by it, like the video game industry luring gamers into new worlds packed with thrilling surprises and unbeatable bosses (Playstation's ad recently capitalizes on that, blatantly telling gamers that they're catering to the common person's sense of wandering into the unknown.) It's in our blood, our DNA, our ancestors did it and explored, there's a sense of excitement about getting to uncover a secret, getting to know something that we didn't know before. It's why I (on a whim) took MJ to the Palos Verdos South Coast Botanical Garden today, we were going to go to the beach but I just could not hold back from stopping by the new place and find out what's there. Answer: nothing too exciting, and more a park than a garden, but now I have the satisfaction of knowing. I've conquered the unknown.
Sports operate mostly the same way. It would be boring if people just told us what the score was, we want to know by watching the game and seeing how it plays out, thus providing ourselves the experience of conquering the unknown. Most baseball games, unfortunately, get boring because the results are known (or are assumed to be known) after a certain score is achieved or a team goes ahead by enough runs. But on the night of October 29, 2017, nothing was known about the game until the final score: 13-12, in 10 innings. If there's anything that can be gathered about the game, it's that score: baseball games never go 12-12. Even if one team scores 12 runs (very unlikely), the other team almost never scores exactly 12 too.....it's usually a blowout, like 12-1, 12-2. What was also unique about this game was how many ties there were: one team jumped out to a lead, and the other tried to come-from-behind, the most exciting type of game. In any sports game, one team takes the lead, and unless you're a diehard fan of the other team, your competitiveness and thirst for a good game wants the losing team to come from behind and catch up to make it exciting, because in a tie game or something close to it, there's a thrill of not knowing who's going to win, especially in the game of anticipation, baseball.
And now, even though the Dodgers are down 3-2, the World Series heads back to Los Angeles for a game (maybe 2!), and the unknown of what might happen on Tuesday (Halloween night!) will drive fans crazy wanting to known. Enjoy!
Fantasize on,
Robert Yan.
No comments:
Post a Comment