Games I Wish To Protest

I think it’s wonderful that the San Francisco Giants have made the first successful protest in the past 28 years of baseball. Too long have we been chained to the pedantic, tiresome facts that pile up over the course of each baseball game. The external world is overrated anyway, what with its unreliable sensory data, its lack of free will, and the suspiciously lifelike behavior of the actors that populate our personal dramas. It’s time to make our own rules.

So as long as sophistry reigns supreme, and we can alter the outcome of games by talking about them very cleverly, I’d like to nominate a few contests of the near and distant past that I officially protest.

June 2, 2010: Cleveland @ Detroit

This seems like a good place to start. Armando Galarraga threw a perfect game. We don’t need The Man’s approval to tell us what’s true and what isn’t.

October 22, 1975: Cincinnati @ Boston (World Series Game 7)

I really couldn’t care less who won a World Series between two championship-rich franchises in a year that predates my birth and the birth of my baseball team of choice. But I do love the image of Fisk waving it fair, because I am a human being capable of feeling emotions, and thus I find it kind of selfish of the Reds to ruin it by winning the next game. Also, it eliminates 25 years of New England self-pity, so bonus!

August 16, 1920: Cleveland @ New York

We may as well save a guy’s life while we’re doing this. Let’s make it rain that day.

August 19, 1987: New York @ Seattle

I was a young boy when I went to the Kingdome with a bunch of people to watch the Yankees demolish the hometown Mariners. Rickey was out with a hamstring pull, naturally. This in itself is of little consequence. In the seventh inning, I headed over to the nearest restroom and was confronted by something I had never seen before: a trough for a urinal. I was a short kid, and I could barely reach over it. Plus, the flushing mechanism was a foot pedal, which seemed really odd. But I had to pee, so pee I did, focusing myopically on the task at hand.

Afterward I turned to find a man twice my size and thrice my weight braced in front of me, his eyes a little wide. “Kid,” he called in a loud, strange voice, “Kid, you just pissed in the sink!” I turned in the direction of his outstretched finger: the urinals were apparently behind another corner that I hadn’t seen. I had, in fact, pissed in the sink. I mumbled an apology, eyes turned downward to avoid the judgmental stares, and ran back to my seat. For two innings I was afraid that he would track me down and tell my parents.

We moved out of town after that, and I never went back to the Kingdome. When they blew it up thirteen years later, I felt like a little part of me had finally been set free.

Game cancelled due to falling tile in the fourth inning.

August 20, 2014: Cleveland @ Minnesota

I just glanced at the box score of this game and it looked super boring. Game never took place, due to, let’s say, locusts.

June 4, 2002: Seattle @ Oakland

I know. There’s no way I could have saved him. Even if I were to go back in time and kidnap M’s third-base coach Dave Myers and stuff him in a locker. Even if I stopped said Myers from throwing up a late stop sign on proto-Herculean Australian prospect Chris Snelling, causing him to blow out his ACL eight games into his rookie season. It wouldn’t matter. Doyle would have broken an ankle the next day, or contracted mad cow disease (it was 2002), or had an anvil drop on him. The timeline would have restored itself. There are some things that are too beautiful to remain. But I would have paid for one more day. Just one.