The grace period
Finding peace in losing, plus Links of the Week: bones from the past, a couple of sports legends, and bluegrass Lou Reed
Baseball is the cruelest sport when it comes to the playoffs.
In the NFL, if you lose one game in the playoffs you’re out. But NFL teams play just 17 games to begin with. So one loss equals 1/17 of the regular season, or about 6 percent.
In the NBA, which plays 82 regular-season games, you have to lose four times in a seven-game playoff series. That’s 4/82, or about 5 percent.
In baseball, which plays a 162-game season, you can now lose just two games in the wild-card series and be gone for good. That’s 2/162, or a little more than 1 percent. One way to interpret that is, baseball plays the longest regular season that counts for the least.
I am marshaling all these stats to make myself feel better now that my Atlanta Braves have been knocked out of the playoffs.
To be honest, though, I’m more disappointed than pissed. That’s because the Braves won the World Series last year and erased many years of suffering for millions of Braves fans, including me.
I believe the sportswriter Bill Simmons came up with the idea of the sports grace period—the idea that once your team wins a championship, you can’t get mad at them about anything for a while. This feels right to me. Last year was the greatest sports year of my life—the two teams of my childhood, the Braves and Georgia Bulldogs, both won titles. I promised myself that I’d be sanguine about this sports year, no matter what happened.
Both teams turned out to be really good again. Georgia is undefeated and no. 1 in the country as I write this. The Braves won 101 games—only four teams in the majors won 100 games this year. (Three of those teams are now out of the playoffs. As I said, baseball is cruel.)
I’m wondering what our lives would be like if we extended sports grace into the real world. Maybe if some co-worker did something nice for us, we could forgive them their trespasses for a week or two. Or if one of your in-laws said something kind on your birthday, you could give them a pass for loudly expressing their political views at Thanksgiving.
It’s hard to live with grace in a world filled with so much anger and defeat. One thing you learn from sports is that the season might end, but seasons never do. It’ll be spring soon enough, and the Braves will play again. I hope with grace still extended.
10 things I wanted to share this week:
My weekly for WFAE was also about sports—specifically, whether the Panthers’ new coach will get a fair chance.
My friend Bronwen Dickey worked for more than a year on a story about a few small bones of two young girls, and how they fit into the 40-year-old tragedy of the MOVE bombings in Philadelphia. Her incredible story is out now in the New York Times Magazine. I can’t recommend it highly enough. Please take some time and give it a read.
If you’ve ever been in a longleaf pine forest, you’ll never forget it. I didn’t know the fraught history of the longleaf pine until I read this piece in Orion by Lacy M. Johnson.
This piece by Jeremy Collins starts as a tribute of sorts to baseball star (and former Brave) Freddie Freeman, but goes off in several beautiful directions.
DOG NEWS: While I work on my book, I’m devoting this slot to dog stories. This week: the strange and wonderful (OK, mostly strange) tale of Owney the postal dog.
New on the bookshelf: THE LAST FOLK HERO by Jeff Pearlman. It’s a biography of Bo Jackson, maybe the greatest athlete of our lifetimes. I make a brief cameo in the book, talking about a titanic home run I saw Bo hit in college. There are TONS of amazing stories in this book.
RIP Charley Trippi, the former Georgia and NFL star who lived to be 100.
I know there’s a lot of sports in the newsletter this week, but indulge me one last thing: T-ball is America’s greatest sport, and Jasper is my new favorite player.
Really enjoyed this video by singer/songwriter Mary Spender on work and the creative spirit:
Let’s take it home with a bluegrass all-star team, led by Chuck Prophet, covering Lou Reed’s “Sweet Jane.”
See y’all next week, everybody.
I just finished the story about the MOVE bombings and it was incredible. I remember when it happened and it was as ugly a tragedy now as it was then. I pray the remaining family of the two young girls in the story finally have the closure they needed.
I'm right there with you with my Braves, Bulldogs and Colorado Avalanche all winning championships this year. I'm not sure what I did to deserve such luck, but my grace period will certainly last a while as I bask in that afterglow.