Toward a Better Understanding

To hear the old guard tell it, our devotion to the numbers is slavish, stultifying, boundless and without bound, injurious to the Republic. You know whom I’m talking about. I’m talking about stout-hearts like blogger Murray Chass, who enjoys using his blog to blog about how bloggers are large and unrelenting meanies and are also unlike him. And there’s Dan Shaughnessy, the valet to human misery who hates each thing in the world more than anyone else hates any one thing in the world. I speak of them and their ilk.

But I come not to condemn. No, it is with some regret that I must say this: I am here to validate their suspicions and antipathies. Yes, I am here to confirm that what follows, as they have long suspected, is precisely what plays out in the mind of a devoted stathead when he or she takes in a game of base and ball:

It is in the interest of peace — a Glasnost of the press box, if you will — that I disclose this dark secret. It is our affliction, and we must own it.

And, I should add, the scene you see above, contrary to appearances, does not take place on a proscenium stage …

No, in the gnarled penumbras of our minds, all things come together in primordial affray to form one large mother’s basement — a mother’s basement buttressed by argument and brag, forged and soldered by our magma-hot Cheetos breath.

It is there that this lederhosen’d numbers dance, which we think is baseball, unfurls before us.

Are we to be pitied? Forgiven? Banished?