The Bottom of the Ninth: In baseball and in life, there is a cost to our pursuit of an error-free existence (Elizabeth D. Samet | March 26, 2026, American Scholar)
The 1985 Fall Classic, pitting cross-state rivals against each other, was billed as the I–70 or the Show-Me Series, and it really mattered in Missouri. In the wake of The Call, Denkinger received hundreds of ominous messages and letters. Someone even phoned his house in neighboring Iowa threatening to burn it down. Whether his mistake ultimately affected the outcome of the series became a matter of debate for the participants, too: “If that doesn’t happen,” McRae told reporters, “we probably don’t win.” Jamie Quirk, the Royals’ backup catcher, had a different reaction: “Other things happened, too. … Does a bad call mean you have to lose 11–0 in the next game?” Quirk’s rhetorical question implied that he didn’t want to be remembered as an accidental winner. Although they may readily acknowledge an instance of good fortune, most winners like to believe that they had something to do with their victory. If Orta is out, do the Cardinals win? Who can say? The correct call would have removed only the most egregious mistake from an equation full of mostly hidden variables. Quirk preferred to believe in his own agency rather than imagine himself dependent on what Leo Tolstoy called the unseen “laws of space, time, and cause.” Tolstoy proposed that for winners and losers, belief in autonomy is equally illusory. War and Peace advances a theory of historical causation in which even emperors are powerless: “Napoleon, who seems to us to have been the leader of all these movements … acted like a child who, holding a couple of strings inside a carriage, thinks he is driving it” (tr. by Louise and Aylmer Maude).
…than that no one is in control of events. Free will forces personal accountability.