Of the 26 baseball games I’ve seen this season, this was my third at Angel Stadium. Along the way I’ve been to Dodger Stadium, seen the Fresno Grizzlies, the Tower Buzzers, the Rancho Cucamonga Quakes and the Lake Elsinore Storm. Major League, minor league—it hasn’t mattered much. I’ve watched a lot of baseball and had a good time doing it. Somewhere along the way, though, I’ve also started appreciating the pace of the game differently. Baseball gives you enough time to watch something happen and then sit there and think about what you just watched. Spend enough time in a ballpark and eventually you start seeing a little bit of life reflected back at you.
My third trip to Angel Stadium turned out to be a pretty good lesson in judgment, and the first call happened before I ever left home. My new favorite ticket app has become SeatGeek. I had been buying most of my tickets through MLB, but lately I’ve started going back and forth between the two, watching prices and waiting until fairly close to game time before buying. There is some risk in that. The seat you want can disappear. The price can go down, but it can also go up. You can wait yourself into a bargain or wait yourself right out of one.
In fact, I was sitting in a Zoom meeting with SeatGeek open, keeping an eye on the tickets. I found a seat I liked, and there was a similar one available for $21 less. I didn’t jump on it right away. By the time I went back, the cheaper seat was gone, so my hesitation had cost me $21. It wasn’t exactly a catastrophe. I still ended up with a great price and the best seat I’ve ever had at Angel Stadium: a field-level aisle seat about six rows back, just to the right-field side of home plate, with a clear view all the way down the first-base line. Even after paying the extra $21, I paid about what an average Dodger ticket might cost me in the upper part of the loge.
SeatGeek also came through on preferred parking. What normally costs around $35 cost me $12. So before the first pitch had even been thrown, I had already seen both sides of waiting. Waiting had gotten me a terrific seat at a terrific price, while waiting just a little longer had cost me another $21. Neither fact cancels out the other. That is often how judgment works. The decision itself may be reasonable, but timing matters, and sometimes the consequence of waiting another minute is simply that the circumstances change.
The weather certainly helped. After all the heat we’ve had, Southern California finally cooled off, and by the end of the game it was probably around 69 degrees. Sitting six rows from the field on a cool September evening watching baseball is about as pleasant as it gets.
My ticket included access to the Diamond Club. The food itself wasn’t included, but I deliberately arrived about an hour early because I wanted to look around, see what the club was like and enjoy the stadium before the game. There was a buffet, although I never really investigated it because I saw somebody eating a hamburger that looked really good. I made another judgment call and ordered one.
I sat at the bar with my hamburger and a draft beer and discovered that the bar itself offers a remarkable view. It snakes around toward the field, and at the end you can sit almost sideways and look directly out over the stadium. I probably could have stayed there for the entire game and been perfectly happy. Instead, I stayed about 45 minutes and watched the pregame activities. The beer was fabulously cold, and the hamburger justified my decision. It was exceptional. The fries did not. They were warm rather than hot and weren’t particularly crisp, apparently having spent some time under a heat lamp while the hamburger was freshly prepared. Overall, I gave the meal an 8.5. Not every part of a decision has to work out perfectly for the decision itself to have been a good one.
The pregame activities included a Masons for Mitts presentation, making this the second one I’ve happened upon this season. I saw the other at Dodger Stadium, and I hadn’t bought either ticket because of Masons for Mitts. I simply happened to be there both times. After dinner, I bought a bag of peanuts, found my seat and settled in for the game.
Two guys sitting behind me appeared to be about my age, and they were serious statistics guys. They quietly discussed the numbers on virtually every player who came to the plate. It was like having two additional broadcasters sitting directly behind me, and I actually enjoyed listening to them. Baseball has always been a game for people who like numbers, history, arguments and judgment, and there was plenty of judgment to go around that night.
The Mariners demonstrated that early with the ABS challenge system. By the end of the third inning, they had used both of their challenges on ball-and-strike calls, and they had lost both. At the time, each challenge presumably seemed worth making. A batter believed the umpire had missed a pitch, and he had a mechanism available to question the call, so he used it. Twice Seattle made that judgment, twice the umpire was proved right, and the challenges were gone.
The interesting thing was that those decisions didn’t appear especially important when they were made. It was early in the game. There was plenty of baseball left. But judgment has a way of rolling forward. What you decide in the third inning can determine what options you have in the eighth, even though you have no idea in the third what the eighth inning is going to look like.
By the eighth, Seattle could have used those challenges.
From where I was sitting, the home-plate umpire suddenly seemed very generous to the Angels pitcher, and I wasn’t alone in thinking so. Pitches that looked clearly outside the strike zone were being called strikes, and people throughout my section were reacting to them. Three times I watched a Mariners batter instinctively reach up and touch his helmet to signal a challenge, only to remember that there were no challenges left. The gesture itself told the story. Hand toward the helmet, hesitation, realization. Something decided five innings earlier had just changed what he could do now.
It also seemed to me—and this is nothing more than the perception of one guy sitting six rows behind the plate—that once Seattle had no challenges remaining, the umpire became a little more comfortable widening the strike zone to his own comfort zone. Maybe the electronic system would have upheld every one of those calls. We’ll never know, because the Mariners had already used their opportunities to ask the question.
That may be one of the most interesting things about the ABS challenge system. Baseball itself is still getting accustomed to the idea that the umpire’s judgment on balls and strikes can be questioned in real time. For generations, the umpire called the pitch and that was essentially the end of it. You could complain, but eventually you had to get back in the batter’s box. Now technology gives a player a limited opportunity to ask whether the umpire got it right.
The obvious lesson would be to use your challenges wisely, but I don’t think that means simply saving them. A challenge that is never used isn’t worth anything either. Maybe those two early pitches really did look wrong to the Mariners hitters. At that moment, with the information they had, challenging the calls may have seemed exactly right. You cannot make a third-inning decision with eighth-inning information.
That is the problem with judgment. You have to use it before you know everything you would like to know.
The consequence comes later. Use a challenge now and you don’t have it later. Pass on an opportunity now and it may not exist when you come back. Make a small correction early and perhaps nothing more comes of it. Fail to make one, and like an airplane traveling a degree or two off course, the farther you go, the greater the distance becomes between where you are and where you intended to be. The original error may have been tiny. Distance compounds it.
That doesn’t mean the lesson is to become afraid of making decisions. Quite the opposite. The Mariners had challenges for a reason, and at some point they had to decide whether to use them. Judgment isn’t about somehow knowing the future. It is about making the best call you can when the call is yours to make, understanding that the decision will become part of the circumstances surrounding the next one.
And once the challenges are gone, touching your helmet doesn’t bring them back. You still have to stand in the batter’s box, deal with the strike zone you’ve been given and play the next pitch. There isn’t much value in spending the eighth inning wishing you had made a different decision in the third.
Judgment continued to shape the game. There was a hot ball down to third that I thought the third baseman should have handled, but the official scorer didn’t give him an error. Later, a ball got out to center field and bounced off the wall when I thought the center fielder should have picked it up. That play helped the Mariners score their one run. Were they errors? I thought so. The official scorer apparently didn’t. They were more judgment calls, the sort of small decisions that fill a baseball game and help shape what happens next.
That is part of the pleasure of watching baseball from a great seat. Television gives you instant replay, multiple camera angles, a strike-zone box and professional commentators explaining what they think happened. Six rows from the field, you get something different. You see the play develop in front of you, hear everybody around you react and make your own judgment about what you just saw. Sometimes the official scorer agrees with you, sometimes he doesn’t, and sometimes an entire section appears to disagree with the home-plate umpire.
From that close, though, you don’t just see baseball differently. You hear it differently. I could hear every pitch slap into the catcher’s mitt. Television microphones pick up that sound, but from six rows away it has a sharpness and immediacy that a television speaker simply doesn’t reproduce. At one point Mike Trout broke his bat, and the crack of the wood was incredible. It wasn’t the familiar sound of bat meeting ball. It was the unmistakable crack of wood breaking under tremendous force, and from where I was sitting it seemed to explode into the stadium.
There is also something about that part of Angel Stadium that seems to collect sound. Sitting near home plate felt almost like being at the bottom of a canyon. The sounds didn’t simply come from one direction and disappear; they seemed to swirl around that part of the ballpark. When the crowd cheered, the sound rolled around you. When thousands of people booed an umpire’s call, you were sitting inside the boo. When something went wrong and the crowd collectively groaned, the sound seemed to come from everywhere at once.
That collective reaction is part of what makes being at a baseball game so different from watching one on television. Thousands of people can see the same pitch or the same ball leave the bat and, within a fraction of a second, reach the same judgment. Nobody organizes it and nobody gives a signal. Thousands of individual reactions become one sound that rolls through the stadium. Television can show you a baseball game, but at the ballpark you are inside one. You hear the mitt, the breaking bat, the cheers, the boos and the groans. You hear the statistics guys behind you and the people around you disputing the strike zone. For three hours, thousands of strangers become a temporary community watching the same patch of grass and dirt and deciding what they think just happened.
The Angels eventually won the game, ending it with a double play. One moment the Mariners still had possibilities, and a few seconds later two outs had been recorded and everybody was getting up to leave. All those little decisions, pitches, swings, calls, challenges and plays had accumulated into a final result.
Then it was my turn to make one more judgment call.
I’ve parked in that preferred lot before, and normally I leave the same general way I came in. I know the route. It takes me toward the freeway, down and around, and eventually back to the 57. This time, however, I saw a stream of cars taking what appeared to be a shortcut. They were getting out faster than I was, and I decided they must know something I didn’t.
So I followed them. It actually did get me out of the parking lot faster, but unfortunately it dumped me onto Orange Grove going away from the 57. Instead of simply leaving the way I knew worked, I had to go completely around the stadium to get myself pointed back toward the freeway. Nobody made me follow those cars, and at the moment I made the decision it looked perfectly reasonable. Other people appeared to know a quicker route. Then reality supplied some additional information.
Driving around Angel Stadium, I realized I had made my own version of an unsuccessful ABS challenge. The Mariners thought two pitches had been called incorrectly and used their challenges. I thought a line of cars knew a better way home and followed them. Earlier, I thought I could wait a little longer to buy my ticket and watched the cheaper seat disappear. None of those decisions was ridiculous when it was made. Each was a judgment based on the information available at that moment. What made them interesting was what happened afterward.
Maybe that is what baseball has been giving me time to think about during these 26 games. Judgment doesn’t happen as a series of isolated choices. It rolls down a line. One decision alters the circumstances of the next. A small mistake may not look like much when it happens, but its effects can compound. Sometimes you don’t even recognize the importance of the first call until several calls later, when you discover that an option you once had is no longer available.
Good judgment, then, cannot mean always making the right decision. Nobody has enough information to do that. It means making the best call you can when the decision is yours, recognizing that the call will have consequences, and paying attention to where those consequences are taking you. If you discover you are a degree off course, correct it while the correction is still small. If the decision cannot be undone, stop trying to relitigate it and make the next decision from where you actually are.
That may be the lesson worth taking out of the ballpark. Use your challenges when you believe they matter because challenges are meant to be used, but understand that every challenge spent changes what you will have available later. If you use one and you’re wrong, learn something from it. If you use them both and they’re gone, quit reaching for a challenge you no longer have. Adjust to the strike zone, stay in the batter’s box and play the next pitch.
That is one of the things I’ve come to enjoy most about baseball this season. The game moves slowly enough to let you notice how many small judgments are constantly being made. Swing or take. Run or hold. Challenge or save it. Charge the ball or play the bounce. Call it a hit or an error. Buy the ticket or wait another few minutes. Follow the crowd out of the parking lot or stick with the route you know. None of those decisions seems particularly profound by itself, but put enough of them together and they determine a baseball game. Put enough small judgments together, and they have a way of determining a life, too.
Maybe that is why baseball gives us so much time between pitches. It gives us a chance not merely to think about the last one, but to notice where all the previous ones have brought us before the next one comes.
As for my third trip to Angel Stadium, I got the best seat I’ve had there, a good hamburger, an exceptionally cold beer, a beautiful September evening and an Angels victory. I heard every pitch hit the mitt, heard Mike Trout break a bat, sat inside the cheers and boos of a baseball crowd, questioned the umpire and the official scorer, watched the Mariners use up their challenges and then wish they had them back, and finally made my own bad call trying to get out of the parking lot.
I even paid an extra $21 for the lesson.
Third time’s the charm.
