Baseball, entropy, and being a 2026 Mets fan.
I have often heard it said that baseball is a sport of failure. If a player doesn’t get a hit two-thirds of the time, they are a hall-of-fame caliber hitter with a .333 batting average.
An amazing team that wins 100 games in a season, lost nearly 40% of their games (38.3%).
While baseball players tend to be superstitious perfectionists, they have to get used to things not working out — even when they do everything right.
Good on paper?
Maybe that’s one of the things I like so much about baseball. It’s wildly unpredictable. The better team doesn’t always win.
Many of us learn that the hard way, after our team has a fantastic off-season. They brought back the best players, signed some amazing free agents, and promoted some minor league players. They have a great mix of pitching, fielding, speed, and hitting. You look at the stats and think, “This is going to be a GREAT year!”
Then they start playing games. Some players get hurt. Others get into inexplicable slumps. A pitcher no one could figure out last year, is somehow very hittable this year.
And you look up on Labor Day and your team is ten games under .500, at the bottom of the division, and tied for the worst record in baseball — not that I’m speaking from experience or anything. How?, you mutter to yourself. How could this happen?
We fans try to find a reason—a bad trade, a curse, anything to make sense of it—but the explanation might be simpler.
Entropy
The other day, I looked up the difference between entropy and chaos, as one does.
Chaos assumes there is order to the world. Things are chaotic because we haven’t figured out the order yet.
Entropy, on the other hand, acknowledges that some things are naturally disordered. Sometimes stuff just doesn’t make sense.
You’ve been there, right?
At ’em balls
Watching the Mets the last week or so, it’s been remarkable to see how well second baseman Marcus Semien has been swinging. He had a ton of hard hit balls, but almost all of them were “at ’em” balls — the ones where the announcer says, “Line drive to the shortstop, who barely had to move make the catch.” Arguably, Semien was doing everything right, squaring up the ball on the barrel and consistently hitting line drives… all while his batting average was going down.
Maybe the ‘perfectly hit out’ isn’t a failure of the player. Maybe it’s just the most honest moment in the game. It’s the moment where effort meets the reality that we don’t control the results.
It’s just that way sometimes, isn’t it? Sometimes we can do everything right, and things still don’t work out. For a Mets fan in 2026, accepting that is the only way to keep watching the next inning.