The Padres appealed for the umpires to rule the play—something, a foul, anything except an out, but it was a desperate effort. The umps had gone over the park’s ground rules before the game. There are quirks in every Major League park that require special accommodations: in Fenway Park, for example, there is an ancient metal ladder to nowhere on the left field wall, and balls sometimes hit it and ricochet in strange directions. Baseball is the only sport in which the playing field varies wildly; a home run in one park would be an out in another. It’s part of the game’s charm.

If the Padres lose the best in five series, especially if they lose by a single game, three games to two, fans will bemoan this unfair intervention by the Baseball Gods for as long as their team exists. That is certain, but it will be foolish nonetheless. One of the many lessons a lifetime of being enthralled by baseball has taught me is that “ya never know,” Chaos Theory reigns, “Don’t get cocky kid!,” anything can and will happen, and “the best-laid schemes o’ mice an’ men
gang aft agley.”

As I mentioned once before in this post eight years ago, for many years beginning in high school I kept a newspaper clipping about a man, minding his own business and walking home from work, who was killed by “a flying mailbox”–a truck had slammed into one and it was hurled hundreds of feet in the air, eventually landing on this poor guy, who not only didn’t know what hit him, he wouldn’t have believed it if he had been told. The context then was the perpetual leftist bleat that it is the government’s duty to “keep us safe, ” and every new peril, no matter how rare and unlikely, must trigger an extensive (and usually expensive) imaginary solution. You’re never going to be “safe,” and if you think so, someone has lied to you, or you are deluded. Nor will the vicissitudes of life spare you random surprises that some will label “unjust” or “unfair.”

When Nancy Kerrigan’s leg was injured because her ice-skating rival’s goon boyfriend attacked her, she cried, “Why me?” In movie after movie, a distraught parent or lover screams, “Why did he/she have to die?” Hillary Clinton would have been so much better off (and better regarded) if she just accepted that she lost the Presidency by a freak twitch of the Electoral College, just like Samuel Tilden, Grover Cleveland and Al Gore, and being bitter and furious about it for the rest of her life was neither ethical, constructive or wise. (Her party should learn the same lesson.) Let it go; regret is a killer.

As the great pitcher Satchel Paige said, “Don’t look back. Something may be gaining on you.”