Winning lets you play with the game a little, smiling at your goofs and gaffes: Furcal and Holliday messing up that routine fly ball in left field; David Freese dropping a tiny pop-up next to third, with each error producing a run, are perfectly O.K., aren’t they? Who cares, actually? Losing infects everything. If you love the Rangers, tiny errors by your first baseman Michael Young in the fourth and again in the sixth won’t ever go away, and, beating yourself up now, you become convinced that the manager Ron Washington’s decision to pinch-hit for his best reliever, Scott Feldman, in the top of the eleventh, is the worst mistake in franchise history. Freese, who hit that game-tying two-run triple off the right-field wall in the ninth, is the first Cardinals batter up in the bottom half, and he bops the sixth pitch from Mark Lowe into the green lawn behind center field. Walkoff.
— In direct opposition to Roger Angell’s scorecard in the New Yorker is his accompanying column, in which he describes many of the same plays on his scorecard, in a way that could never be reproduced through data. What’s the difference between a tiny error and a significant error? (besides hindsight) I’d argue, and I don’t think many would agree with me, that its the potential impact it has on the game. And many other times, there’s errors that take place that won’t ever appear on the scorecard, such as the Rangers Ron Washington’s substitution mistakes throughout the game, or his playing of the outfield at the incorrect depth (which, at the risk of tooting my own horn, I called out via Twitter seconds before Lance Berkman’s game tying hit dropped in to where the outfield potentially should have been playing). Currently, this ability to point these instances are what separate the humans watching the game from the computers.
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