Sense, Nonsense, and Not-Sense

[This is part of a series exploring the Baseball Tarot.]

Baseball is mean. It is a game designed to crush streaks, humble braggarts, punish mistakes, suppress the unskilled, provide ample opportunities for failure, create tension, pressure, and stress, and generate chaos despite the very best attempts of anyone to impose any sort of order or general rules and abstractions on it.

Baseball is a nice game. It rewards persistence, has opportunities for big plays all the time, promotes teamwork and communication, fosters camaraderie, provides multiple layers of enjoyment, and is really good at keeping people who are introduced to the game as players continuing on in the game as coaches and umpires, even if their dreams of playing stop. It has mentorship, physical, and mental challenges, and promotes fun.

As with life, the constant of baseball is that it changes. While there is a moment of stilness before the action begins, after that, the game is in constant motion, even with the changes between half-innings, until it is finished and all the celebrations are done. If things are going well, that's great, but understand it's not forever. If things suck, well, that won't last perpetually either. Them's The Breaks, kid.

The Breaks is the Baseball Tarot equivalent of the Wheel of Fortune. Not the glorified game of hangman with a randomized element, but the songs and lyrics of Carmina Burana that talk about people who are on top of the world and those getting thrown out of pubs, despite being the abbot of the nearby monastery. The Wheel is always in constant motion, with all of us attached to it as it raises us to our highest points and also grinds us into the mud. This reality is fundamentally counterintuitive to human beliefs. Humans see patterns and ascribe motivations to them, so that things can be explained as "hot", "cold", "lucky", "unfavorable", or other things that are not explainable with the models of simulation and calculation that we have. There are ways of trying to prolong the good and shorten the bad, many of which are superstitious, many of which involve prayer to a supernatural entity of your choice. There are other ways as well, things involving charms and rituals and attempts at preparation for the bad things, which sometimes are adequate and sometimes are so far beyond the scope of what could be considered that no preparation would be sufficient for them. The reality that the universe is still so very far out of our explanation and control is frightening and scary and persists, even in baseball. Someone may not have the skills to progress beyond minor league baseball. A batter may hit a ball back at a pitcher sufficiently hard to end his career through head injury. Sliding into second may cause a ligament tear that requires a lot of physical therapy, recovery, and retraining before someone is able to return to the place where they were. These are all possible outcomes, even with all the strength, exercise, and experience that someone may have in baseball. Ultimately, retirement claims us all, and some earlier than others. Those, too, are The Breaks.

Of course, it works in reverse, too. A man who could not run the bases at full speed hits a home run to win a game, allowing him to take all the time he needs to circle the bases. A hitter staring down an 0-for-5 night ends up going 1-for-5, with the winning run batted in on a bloop single. A team bats around (goes through the entire batting order at least once in a half-inning). A pitcher that has had no control or power the entire game fans (strikes out) the side in the bottom of the last inning. A fielder times their jump correctly to pull in a home run from leaving the field, preserving a lead and cutting short a rally. A suicide squeeze succeeds. An otherwise unremarkable pitcher has the best night of their career and tosses a perfect game, with a little help from the fielders.

A team makes it to the World Series and loses in four games. A team makes it to the World Series and wins in seven games. The good and the bad are so tightly interwoven that every action in the game is both good and bad for someone. The good is to be celebrated, the bad endured. The wheel keeps turning. Them's the Breaks, kid.

...which actually makes this card really hard to interpret without the context around it. Sometimes The Breaks are an indication that your fortune is changing. Sometimes it's a reminder that good (or bad) circumstances are the reason why you're in the situation you're in, and that shoring up your position against a bad break is advised. Sometimes it represents the complexity of everything, and can either be a recommendation to not stress out too much about the details of it all, or a warning against trying to control too many things (or people), because the unpredictable is precisely the thing that will happen and crush your plans.

Sometimes it's just a reminder of the impermanence of everything, in the sense of "this, too, shall pass" and/or "getting attached to mutable things generates karma."

The Last Question is unlikely to be answered in our lifetime. We can make progress on it, but until it's done, there will always be something that is out of reach, something that feels like fate or destiny. Those, too, are The Breaks.