Mysteries, Surprises, and Disappointments

You can’t explain or make sense of so much of the shit that happens during the course of a baseball season, the streaks and slumps and befuddling momentum shifts, the steady supply of wholly unexpected developments of both the pleasant and the not-so-pleasant variety.

All those things –the day-to-day intangibles– are what make the sport so maddeningly difficult to predict. I still can’t imagine how anyone makes money gambling on Major League baseball.

That said, there are always things that seem predictable, even if only in hindsight. Past performance is not an indicator or guarantee of future results, as the investment people like to say. Except, of course, when it is. Nick Punto hit .290 last season, but nothing he’d previously done in his Major League career suggested that was his expected level of performance. As a result no serious fan should be surprised that he’s hitting .227 thus far in 2007.

Some players are so consistent –consistently good or consistently bad or simply consistently mediocre– that you do sort of know what to expect. Some players. If you spend a little time browsing through Total Baseball you’ll pretty quickly recognize how difficult consistency of any sort is to maintain at the highest level of the game. Consistently great players are so rare precisely because they are such great players, and consistently lousy players don’t generally get a chance to build long and undistinguished careers unless they’re specialists of some sort.

The most common sort of consistency –in baseball as in life– is mediocrity. Every team has to fill its roster somehow, and mediocrities get opportunity after opportunity to drift from club to club and make ridiculous money on their way to qualifying for a generous pension.

There remain, though, certain things you simply can’t predict or explain.

All of this is nothing more than a long-winded and roundabout way of marveling at the performance of Carlos Silva, who has demonstrated pretty conclusively that there is no more mysterious and unpredictable phenomenon in baseball than a sinker-ball pitcher (with the possible –and I guess likely– exception of a knuckleball pitcher, but those guys are rarities).

Silva was mostly terrible last year (246 hits in 180-and-a-third innings pitched, and a 5.94 ERA), but because he’d been effective in the past (he had a 3.44 ERA in 2005) he was trotted out there again and again –and managed to win 11 games in the process– with the hope that he’d eventually get around to finding his out pitch again.

When the sinker-ball goes, though, it just seems to go, and when and if it reappears it does so just as mysteriously. Silva didn’t have many proponents outside (and probably even inside) the Twins’ organization coming out of a spring training in which he was 0-3 with an 11.02 ERA and surrendered 29 hits in 16-and-a-third innings).

Yet there he was Wednesday night, finishing off the Twins’ first complete game shutout of the season.

Surprising, but, then again, not so surprising.

Friday night’s blow-out loss to the Brewers at the Dome, that was simply disappointing, and sometimes that’s really about all you can find to say about a baseball game.

They can’t all be surprising.