There are two televisions at the end of the bar and on Tuesday night they were arguing.
On the left, the Yankees and the Rays. Carlos Rodón went eight innings, gave up three hits, walked nobody, struck out eight, and handed the ninth to David Bednar the way you hand somebody your drink while you go find your jacket. One man. Eight innings. Zero walks. If you had fallen asleep in 1974 and woken up in front of that television you would have understood everything you were looking at.
On the right, the Dodgers and the Padres. Nine innings. No runs. Eight pitchers.
Brock Stewart, one inning. Justin Wrobleski, one inning, and he gets the win, which is its own small joke. Blake Treinen, one. Roki Sasaki, one — his first relief appearance of the entire year after twenty-three starts, which is a sentence that should make somebody uncomfortable. Edwin Díaz, one. Kyle Hurt, two, the greedy one. Alex Vesia, one. Jack Dreyer, one.
Same result. Same zero. Completely different religion.
We tried to explain the second one to a man at the bar who had only been watching the first one. It did not go well.
“So nobody’s the starter.”
Somebody is the starter. He just doesn’t start for very long.
“Then who’s the pitcher?”
All of them. Sequentially.
“That’s not a pitching staff, that’s a shift rotation.”
Yes.
“That’s a call centre.”
We are going to need a minute.
The thing nobody at the bar wanted to say out loud is that both of those approaches produced exactly the same number, and that number is the only one the standings read. Eight innings from one arm and one inning from eight arms are, as far as the league table is concerned, the identical event. The scoreboard is not a moral document. It does not have a preference. It cannot tell the difference between craftsmanship and a spreadsheet, and it was never asked to.
This is the part of baseball that makes people angry, and it is also the part that makes it worth watching. Every generation invents a way to prevent runs, and the previous generation says it isn’t really baseball, and then somebody wins with it, and then it’s baseball. The complete game didn’t die. It got replaced by a committee, and the committee has a better ERA, and everybody hates that.
Rodón’s night was beautiful. The Dodgers’ night was efficient. Only one of those words is a compliment and we are no longer certain which.
Down at the other end, one of the uncles was still counting the Los Angeles pitchers on one hand. He ran out at six, looked at the hand for a moment like it had personally let him down, and started again from the beginning.
Eight men. One each. That’s the whole night.
Somewhere else there’s a version of us in a room with too many screens, drinking something that went cold two hours ago, building a model to explain why the eight-man version was optimal all along. He’s probably right. He’s also alone.