If you don’t read Fangraphs (and if you’re a serious baseball fan, you should), you missed an article recently that was astonishing in both the ambition of its task and the complexity of its argument. Mitchel Lichtman, known to many as MGL, wrote a lengthy post analyzing the Yankees’ sacrifice bunts in the eighth inning of the deciding sixth game of this year’s American League Championship Series and asking the question, “Were they good calls?” His answer was long, involved, complicated, and highly mathematical, and as such would probably be dismissed by many as arcane and pointless, especially since the Yankees (predictably) won regardless. Such a dismissal would be a mistake.
It would be a mistake because MGL answers that question not simply by calculating probabilities but by using game theory. I won’t pretend to understand his article completely at the detail level, but I think I have the essential insight right: predictability is the greatest tactical and strategic sin. Therefore, to maximize one’s chances of success, one must be unpredictable, which means not always going with the probabilities.
Look at it this way. One may calculate out all the probabilities as to whether a given move—such as, say, a sacrifice bunt attempt—is likely to help one’s team win the game or not, but if you calculate them all out, put them in a table, and then rigidly follow that table, what’s going to happen? The other team is going to know what’s coming and respond accordingly, and then all your probabilities are knocked into a cocked hat. For the optimum move to remain the optimum move, one must sometimes do something else; failing that, others will adjust, and their adjustments will turn what had been the best move into a failing move.
Read the post if you want a fuller explanation than that and think you can follow it. For my purposes here, I have to admit that I don’t really care if Joe Girardi made the right call on those bunts or not; I’m more interested in the underlying reality that sometimes the “best move” isn’t the best move, and that sometimes you have to do something that would seem in isolation to be counterproductive in order to best advance your goals.
I’m particularly interested in this with regard to our understanding of God and the workings of his providence. Oftentimes we ask God to do a good thing—heal someone we care about, for instance, or deliver us from a sin that is just killing us—and we lay out all sorts of reasons why he ought to do it, and ask him in faith . . . and he doesn’t. Why that is, I don’t know, though I’m sure part of it is that there are literally billions of variables in each case that we don’t know about. But I wonder—and I suppose this shows exactly the sort of geek I am that this was the first thought that occurred to me as I was reading MGL’s piece (well, that and the fact that I read the whole thing)—whether some of the reason why God doesn’t do things we ask him to do is because that would be counterproductive in the end.
After all, if God always gave us what we ask for—at least on those occasions when we ask for things that we have good reason to believe are his will—how many repetitions would it take for us to grow complacent? Worse, how many times would it take before we began to believe that we had made God act, and that he was somehow required to give us what we want? (Not many, I suspect, given that some people essentially believe that now.) How long would it be before the vile, poisonous weed of spiritual pride took firm root in our souls?
In the end, of course, any essay into the question of why God does or does not do any given thing must be purely speculative, and I certainly don’t claim to be doing anything else; but I thought it was an interesting idea to kick around, anyway.
Photo © 2010 David Lapetina. License: Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported.
