Perfection

There was another perfect game in baseball last night.  It was the 23rd perfect game in Major League Baseball history, a pretty incredible feat considering baseball's illustrious history.  As a matter of fact, the first perfect game was pitched in 1880, meaning that, on average, there is one about every six seasons.  Of course it's not all mathematically accurate, but the point is that it's not something that comes along every day. In fact, there was a gap of 33 seasons between perfect games hurled between 1922 and 1956.  All that is to say that throwing a perfect game is quite a difficult task to accomplish...at least it used to be.  Felix Hernandez's perfecto last night was the third of the season, an unprecedented number of perfect games in one year.  Just two years ago, in 2010, there were two more perfect games (and Armando Galarraga's "perfect" game, which is not counted in the record books but remembered in my heart and immortalized on my t-shirt).  There was another one in 2009, which makes for six official perfect games in four seasons!  For some reason there has been a run on perfect games, which caused me to raise that age-old question: "Why?"

My first inclination as to the reason for the recent increase in pitching perfection is the crackdown on performance enhancing drugs.  In the period from the mid-1990's to the mid-2000's, home runs were being hit at a prodigious rate, batting records were being tossed asunder, and scoring was up throughout the major leagues.  Steroid use was running rampant among ballplayers and the game was in danger of making a mockery of itself if steroids were not abolished and drug testing introduced.  After drug reform measures were passed, baseball started a slow return to its pre-bulked-up days.  That is not to say that all cheating has been eliminated.  A lesser known story from yesterday was that Melky Cabrera, this year's All-Star Game MVP and current MLB hits leader, was suspended for 50 games for an elevated level of testosterone, forming a perfectly juxtaposed image of the current state of baseball affairs.  But anyway, why has there been such a proliferation of perfect games?  Batters are no longer using performance enhancers, thereby returning the advantage to pitchers.  This, on the surface, would seem to be a return to the natural order of things, but perhaps the line has gone too far to the other side.

There has not been such a run of pitching dominance since the 1960's, also known as the Golden Age for pitchers.  In the original year of the pitcher (1968), pitching got so insanely good that the mound had to be lowered to return some semblance of equality between pitcher and batter.  This was a change that seemed to work out, as offense and pitching seemed to be in concert with each other until the 'roid days began.  When hitting and pitching once again got out of sync, drugs were rightly banned from the sport and testing implemented.  This much we can, hopefully, agree upon, especially since I've spent a while trying to make the same claim over and over again.  But the point is that I think it's gone too far.  Pitching is dominant.  While the powers that be were trying to once again equalize the sport, they went too far to the other side.  Doesn't this seem to be a common theme when it comes to America?

I want to keep this within the realm of sports, but this may be akin to America's hypersensitivity and proclivity to political correctness.  With Title IX, for example, the U.S. Government was addressing a dearth of female athletics participants and trying to equalize the number of men and women in collegiate sports.  Forty years later, the program, while it was definitely necessary at the time, seems to have gone too far.  Men's sports are being cut at a rapid rate, to the point that there are only five men's Track & Field programs in the MAC, a once prestigious running conference, while there are 12 women's teams.  It looks like the inequality that was originally present has led to a different sort of inequality.  The same can be said for affirmative action in college admissions.  What started off as a noble and necessary exercise for more opportunities for underprivileged and underrepresented students has perhaps tilted a bit too much to the other side, ostracizing well-performing students in favor of those who score lower but come from disadvantaged backgrounds.  I'm not trying to be glib or undermine and devalue the importance of Title IX and affirmative action policies.  In fact, I totally understand that's it's a complete stretch to tie them together in the same conversation as perfection in baseball games.  And I also don't want to open a can of worms here, starting into a deep political debate.  These are topics that I would like to give full attention to at another time, but for the sake of my baseball argument, I believe that they fit.  I hope I'm not off on that.

Anyway, it seems to happen that trying to fix things to create more equality, in sports and anything else, oftentimes has unintended consequences.  It is so hard to actually create that level playing field, especially because there are so many unaccounted for factors that permeate every part of the decision-making process.  This is not a blog to decry the people who make decisions, to chastise them for not thinking about how their actions might, indirectly, create more levels of unfairness.  Rather, it is to address the concept of true perfection.  Baseball wanted their sport to be perfect, so they lowered the pitcher's mound and banned performance-enhancing drugs and made the divisions equal in number and brought the fences in and a whole slew of things.  What has resulted is more of the same.  Perfection is a hard act to live up to.  There's a reason there have only been 23 instances of true perfection, in the thousands of baseball games that have been played through the centuries.

You know what?  So it goes with life.  Just as humans find it increasingly difficult (nay impossible) to create a set of rules or regulations that are perfect, so too do we find it hard to make our lives perfect.  So what do we do?  I might touch on this more sometime in the future, but it's something that I wanted to at least  address right now.  It's one of those cheesy motivational quotes you see superimposed over an image of a picturesque mountaintop covered in snow and bathed sunshine: "Perfection is the goal.  Excellence will be tolerated."  It's all about trying, and never giving up.  Sure, it might not work how we wanted it to, but that's the time to try again.  Work toward that perfection.  Baseball is not done tweaking its rules in the hopes of finally perfecting America's pastime.  The government will, I trust, continue working toward making more effective laws and perfecting the ones on the books.  And as for us?  We can only keep working on ourselves, in the hopes that we can be perfect.  And if not?  Excellent is all right with me.  But we'd be remiss if we didn't strive for that lofty standard, every day.