D. Salazar’s Best Changeup from Thursday, Per Divine Sign

On Thursday night against the Chicago Americans, right-handed Clevelander Danny Salazar recorded 10 strikeouts against just 18 batters; produced a single-game xFIP of 0.51; and yet somehow conceded five runs, all earned, over 3.2 innings (box). A cosmic miscarriage of justice, one feels compelled to describe it as.

What else one feels compelled to do is recognize the similarities between Salazar’s own predicament and that which afflicted very noted philosopher Socrates at the end of his own life — which life was ended, in fact, by means of a sentence passed (unjustly) by an Athenian jury.

While graveling and/or some other manner of unpleasant submission would be in order for the dumb majority of us, this wasn’t Socrates’ preferred modus operandi. Quoths he at the end of Plato’s record of those events in Apologia:

Gentlemen of the jury — for you deserve to be so called — I have had a remarkable experience. In the past the prophetic voice to which I have become accustomed has always been my constant companion, opposing me even in quite trivial things if I was going to take the wrong course. Now something has happened to me, as you can see, which might be thought and is commonly considered to be a supreme calamity; yet neither when I left home this morning, nor when I was taking my place here in the court, nor at any point in any part of my speech did the divine sign oppose me. In other discussions it has often checked me in the middle of a sentence, but this time it has never opposed me in any part of this business in anything that I have said or done. What do I suppose to be the explanation? I will tell you. I suspect that this thing that has happened to me is a blessing, and we are quite mistaken in supposing death to be an evil. I have good grounds for thinking this, because my accustomed sign could not have failed to oppose me if what I was doing had not been sure to bring some good result.

The divine sign, argues Socrates, ought to be that force which guides us hither and, when called for, thither. The divine sign, moreover, has been the force which has guided the present author to select the pitch featured above as the most stirring of Danny Salazar’s many stirring changeups from Thursday.