BASEBALL---NATURE OF THE BEAST

sports-notebook.blogspot.com . . . FOR MORE ANALYSIS, GO TO "MILE HIGH SPORTS RADIO," AM1510 or FM93.7, and to Denver’s best sports blogging team---milehighsports.com. SPORTS NOTEBOOK posts its columns Tuesday and Friday of each week. Ed., Publ., Marvin Leibstone; Copy & Mng. Ed., Gail Kleiner. . . //. . BASEBALL---“NATURE OF THE BEAST”---// .. “WHAT goes around, comes around!” WHO hasn’t heard that from a parent or grandparent? And, it applies everywhere within most endeavors, especially in sports. The Colorado Rockies defeated the Philadelphia Phillies 12-1 in the first game of a three-game series this month, but later the Phillies ended the series 10-9 over the Rockies. Soon, however, the 10-10 Rockies defeated the National League West’s number two team, the 11-8 S.F. Giants, 8-2, with five of the eight being home runs, two smacked by lead-off hitter/RF, Charlie Blackmon. Presently, the Rockies are 11-10 and so above .500 and in third place behind the Giants within the NL West by one win and back of first place team, the L.A. Dodgers, by two wins. Moreover, the Rockies can boast now about having achieved the most runs to date within the NL, 114, also of having the most RBI’s accrued by infielders within the NL, 63 as of Sunday close-of-business. Moreover, the Rockies Blackmon is tied at the top of the NL with the Phillies Chase Utley for highest NL batting average, .406, and Rockies SS Troy Tulowitzki now owns the NL’s highest On Base Percentage, .493. Surely at the top of the Rockies agenda today is “avoidance of inconsistency,” that is, holding to whatever Rockies players, therefore the franchise, has been doing correctly. Elsewhere are the American League East’s Boston Red Sox, the franchise that won the 2013 World Series after starting the 2013 season way low in the rankings. Today, the Red Sox are 9-11 and in last place of the AL East. Obvious here, then, is that the quest for all MLB clubs is to rise to the top and to stay there, but most of the 30 MLB franchises are Ferris Wheel, they are Yo-Yo, they are up, down, back up again, down once more, fluctuating between top and bottom from inability to keep to a chosen goal for long periods of time, say, across nine or 10 games won in a row, which rarely occurs. “Inconsistency of performance” threads through professional baseball as if the game’s very spine, with some franchises up or down at a high end, that is, from first to second position within a division and back up, while others will dance up and down between second and fourth positions. Also, there are those teams that obsess staying just above .500, submerging again and again, back up slightly until at .486 or .512 as a season closes. There’s no escaping that even the best and steadiest of teams lose plenty of games. Last season, the AL’s Red Sox and National league’s St. Louis Cardinals won the most games, 97 each, which means that each team lost 85 (That’s more losses than the total number of games played by a basketball franchise during the annual NBA regular season, October through mid-April.). No MLB team can send inconsistency out with the garbage. Fact: You won’t find any sport team’s eventual fallbacks at any landfill. Inconsistency is an athlete’s enemy to contend with, no matter how good that athlete is. It’s what the good athlete battles seriously day after day; it’s his and her loyal devotion to the concept of victory, of being the best that he or she can be. Pro- baseball players understand that they are part of a whole, each an individual participant affected by the possibility of obstacles preventing their best shot at contributing to the success of their team during a single game or a series of games, for instance, an injury, or there’s a pitcher that a batter has never faced before and knows nothing about, or a slump that a hitter can’t figure out, too the impact of weather and altitude, or a starting hurler who has the beginning of a cold, or there’s a family distraction. The variables that can take from an athlete’s best are many, and so it becomes what happens to a team, it can bring on those losses. So, no team is a perfect machine because the parts that make up the whole are impacted daily by obstacles that can deny perfection, and there are no exceptions to this, which is why the smartest and most strategic of managers and team owners still embrace a percentage of hope sometimes bordering on fantasy that their players will seek to be the best that they could be during every game, knowing full well that the .406 hitter in April will even with great skill, grace and “luck” drop to anywhere between .280 and .310 by mid-season. Baseball’s inconsistency hang-up is what causes team managers to be in the business of “loss management,” keeping it to a minimum even before mid-season. Yet, for different reasons each, the MLB clubs that fill the bottom positions of the six MLB divisions seem to have a monopoly on the opposite of all this, on “least inconsistency,” as if they’ve been practicing “bottom-dwelling inertia (Hey, we are comfortable down here!),” e.g., the Houston Astros, the Chicago Cubs accruing the most losses year following year. BUT, with all of this being said, should the inconsistency that is inherent within the game of baseball be that which players, teams and fans ought to fret over? Well, maybe yes if you own the Astros or the Cubs and you are getting more and more empty seats and the TV ads are less by the week. Otherwise, inconsistency is a large part of “the joy of the game.” Who would want to watch robots afield, no mistakes ever made, in effect, a scoreless game, the cure for insomnia? We’d have to program in the means for error, so that a game could end. Inconsistency is a factor for sports competition, without which a baseball league would be no more exciting than a knitting club at an old folks’ home. END/ml