The Stoicism of Following Ole Miss Athletics

Or, Skill and Chance in Baseball

By design, a curious round ball with seams and a rounded-off bat yields a hefty element of chance. The way that balls comes off the bat then hops based on the terrain means that one could be the most talented and well-seasoned shortstop in the game and yet still duff the occasional ground ball. Baseball is such that, if you took two identical teams and played them head to head fifty times, thus accounting for skill, the results would vary based on the element of chance, and to my mind baseball is much more of a game than a sport. If sport is the staging of various contests to determine the best, then surely baseball is a game in which, if we account for skill, it is lady luck who determines a winner.

In the college world series, my guess is we could play it again with the same 8 teams and we’d get different results. As this version stands, Oklahoma is in the final and today Arkansas will play Ole Miss to determine Oklahoma’s opponent.

In this scenario, I would rather be Arkansas than Ole Miss, at least from a psychological perspective. My guess is, Arkansas can play loose with not much to lose because they are coming from behind whereas Ole Miss has seemed somewhat charmed to this point and it seemed to me obvious that during yesterday’s matchup Ole Miss played it quite conservatively hoping to peel one off without tapping its pitching staff too deeply. I could be wrong about that. Nevertheless, the Rebels’ bats went ice cold. Check swings proliferated. They seemed quite tentative knowing they had another game to play whereas Arkansas knew it was win or go home.

That mental attitude ought to carry over to today’s game. Arkansas is probably thinking, if we win to day, it is just gravy whereas Ole Miss was reading headlines that they were betting favorites in Vegas to win it all (as the charmed team) and now this is where being an Ole Miss fan comes into full focus: It is almost certain that Ole Miss will lose to Arkansas today because this is almost always how it goes for the Rebels, and fans know it. We get teased with these sorts of moments. I heard several people say, are we actually getting hot at the right time? Is this the time in which we peel one off? Tentatively, we allow ourselves to hope. In our souls we know something will crush it.

Yesterday, trailing 3-1 in the bottom of the ninth, Ole Miss gets a lead-off single, and the Arkansas pitcher is immediately replaced with freshman who proceeds to bean the next two batters. He beans the next two batters! Bases loaded. No outs. So, you’re sitting there as an Ole Miss fan thinking, is this the year that the fates smile on us? A double ties the game. A home run wins it. Hell, a couple of singles wins it. No outs? Is this the year. And then, just to throw some salt in the wound, the second baseman from Arkansas, Battles, which the announcers cannot shut up about for whatever reason because the dude seems pretty mediocre based on his play to me, inexplicably tries to catch the same pop-fly that the outfielder has called, and they miss a glove collision by mere centimeters. The outfielder catches the ball, but only by mere centimeters, a break Ole Miss didn’t get, but instead the day goes to Arkansas. They get out of the inning giving up only one run to end the game 3-2.

So, what you have is Arkansas dodging a bullet, getting the break, and I mean in a big way. In an obvious way. It goes to the hogs. If it had gone to the Rebels, I’d be writing this article in a very different way. A championship team always gets a major lucky break like that, and based on that theory, I’d bet everything on Arkansas winning it all now and Ole Miss exiting the series this afternoon.

But what do I know? I’ve been following Ole Miss as long as I can remember, and this just fits the script. We’ve all been thoroughly teased. Now it’s time for lady luck to turn her back on us. All this, with the caveat that it is baseball, and there’s always a chance that chance with turn in another direction, that what happened yesterday often has little bearing on what happens today.

And so Ole Miss athletics provides a great chance to test one’s stoicism, to observe what is outside of one’s control and accept the will of the Gods as it is, in fact to want what the Gods decide. In this case, it has already been decided. Today, we get to observe what the Gods have decided, and that’s all we ever get to do, be it a baseball game or the stock market or anything else. All I am doing here is using my weak human powers of pattern recognition and knowledge of past events to think about how the Gods have structured things in the past, thinking, slightly, that those past patterns give us some purpose when discussing the future. I will say this to any Ole Miss fan out there: Get busy wanting the will of the Gods to prevail no matter which direction it goes and you will be far more content because I swear to those same Gods that the Gods seem to enjoy sending the Rebels home early. :)