Silent K

Silent K

By Tommy McAree

Binghamton, NY, 5/1/29, 1:30pm EST

“I don’t know, man. Sure seems like it could be a thing to me.”

Koontz shrugs. Chavez sighs. Avila nods, eyes wide. Veem spits sunflower shells. He isn’t buying it.

“No. Fucking. Way, bro. My uncle plays a shitload of online chess, and he says something like even if you took a million years, and all the supercomputers in the world going full tilt, you couldn’t come up with a complete solution to the game. There are just too many possible moves. And that’s with just like a few pieces on an 8 by 8 board, and with limited places they can go.”

“But that’s the crazy thing about it, dude. You ever heard of quantum computing?” Skip sits alone at one end of the bench, grimacing like a water buffalo while the starting pitchers continue their chatter at the other end, oblivious as a group of oxpeckers perched on his back. As he half-listens, Skip recalls the fact that no one knows with any degree of certainty how the space in a ballpark set aside for relief pitchers came to be known as a “bullpen”.

Foul tip. 0-1.

“Heeweego-now-Deetzy, gettapiece now KIIIID! So the thing is,” Koontz explains, “old school computers have transistors like light switches ––– like when you hear about 1s and 0s, and figuring stuff out with a series of 1s and 0s ya-know?–– everything is defined by either ‘this’ or ‘that’ and it’s like electron Plinko – like bop-bop-bop-yup-yup-nope-yup – and where it lands is the solution, okay?”

Skip’s granddad once told him that the term bullpen dates as far back as the Civil War, citing letters describing the mud and disease at the Andersonville POW camp, where Confederate prisoners were held in large wooden livestock pens. Noting baseball’s proximity to the war and the frequency with which games were organized in army camps, proponents of this theory surmise that to Union veterans, the pitchers standing together in a group during ballgames resembled the Southern prisoners they’d watch huddled “out there in the bullpen”.

Backdoor slider. 0-2.

“Aahh that ain’t your pitch, Niner!” Veem shouts.

“But quantum computing, dude, it’s like instead of each little transistor having a yup or nope, they use like superposition and entanglement and other lowkey superslick quantum shit to create these things called qubits. And these things called qubits can have not two but like a bunch of possible states the electrons can be in. Like it doesn’t need to be just this or that.”

A second theory highlights the prominence of billboards for Bull Durham Tobacco around ballparks of the early 1900s. Because the ads, which featured the image of a giant bull, often hung above the pitchers’ warm-up area beyond the outfield, it didn’t take long for the image to be associated with the relief pitchers, and hung around even after the billboards were removed.

Curveball in the dirt. 1-2.

“Eh wayda lay off there, Deetz! So what’s your point?”

“His point is wherev–– Giiivittarip-now BAB-Y! –– wherever your uncle got that line about chess, it needs updating. Computational complexity daddy-o. They got slicker shit now.”

A third theory belongs to legendary Yankee manager Casey Stengel, who once asserted that the bullpen was so named because managers needed somewhere to put idle pitchers, who contributed nothing more to the game than a massive heap of bull.

“Eh, that ain’t even the half of it neither, güey. I was talk-ing to that guy Terry who does the Sabes for Toledo—guys like that Stephen Hawking fool without the wheelchair, right?—and he was saying about quant-um a-nnealing, going on and on like ‘man, quant-um a-nnealing’s gonna be cra-zy.’ Man he said it like if a computer is this guy searching to find the best shovel to dig a hole, quant-um a-nnealing is like having a guy searching for the best guy at searching for the best shovel. I was like, ‘YOOO Terry, that’s some meta shit right there, bro!’ ”

Skip is pretty sure it’s the third one.

Two seamer up and in. Strike 3, called. ʞ . Deetz goes down looking for the third time tonight. He spikes his bat into the ground and begins screaming at the ump. “Hey shake it off there, Deetzy! The Silent K is Nigh!” chides Koontz.

Skip glares down at him from the dugout steps before trooping out onto the field. As a matter of propriety, Skip usually does not allow any discussion in the dugout that isn’t strictly baseball-related. Now baseball seems tangled up in so many other topics that are beyond his understanding, he honestly can’t tell when his players are or aren’t talking about something baseball-related. But one thing he would not tolerate was the promotion of crackpot theories on his bench, even if those theories fit squarely within the realm of “baseball talk”.

Afternoon clouds unbraid the setting sun. Warren Howard gets a hold of Deetz and begins the process of corralling him. The loudspeakers are conspicuously silent. Skip can hear his own cleats cookie-cutter the dirt as he strides toward home plate.

The first time the players began whispering about “The Theory of the Silent K” was just a few seasons after the SABR revolution. Teams had learned over the years that waiting beneath all the old numbers – home runs, RBIs – were more numbers that underpinned the old ones. Instead of just tallying a pitcher’s strikeouts in the minors, for example, you could analyze the spin rate of the balls they threw, and because spin rate predicted how much movement a pitch would have, you’d get a clearer idea of that pitcher’s true value in the future.

These underneath stats found their way into all aspects of the game, and before long scouts were measuring exit velocities and calculating Z-Swing%, while analysts created pitcher texture heatmaps and in-game simulators. The numbers became cascades of shape and color, and the shapes took on the forms of Nature.

But it didn’t stop there. With the help of a StatUS video program called VDA, which stood for Visual Data Analytics but which sounded to Skip like a venereal disease, ballclubs could go a level deeper, and take measurements of the qualities in a pitcher that could predict his potential to increase his spin rate (a stat called 4xFp, which drew on visual data from leg, torso and arm movements and complied them into four metrics called Flick, Fulcrum, Force and, oddly, Fingering). After clubs began going yet another level beneath, some reporter coined the term Metamoneyball, and it wasn’t long before teams that did not have the financial and computational resources necessary to pull at least a metaquad–– analyzing numbers predicting what would predict their prediction’s predictions –– were virtually incapable of winning a championship. There were rumors that the Red Sox were beginning to scout players as young as 10, setting the army of AI networks they called “StatUS” loose on some complex and gnarled cocktail of tween data which included things like parental genome, household income, psychological predisposition, and God knows what else to determine whether or not a given kid had what it took. Analysts on analysts on analysts. Urkels all the way down.

The Theory of the Silent K held that there existed a point at which a team might one day possess so much computing power, and be capable of collecting so much raw data, that it could run a 1-to-1 simulation of the entire season before it started, predicting with mathematical certainty its outcome, down to not only the final record of each team, but every last player’s full cache of stats, every manager’s strategic decisions, every trade a GM would make, and every single dollar spent, all before anyone set foot on the field. They called it the Silent K because, rendering the actual playing of the season completely pointless, the result would mean baseball would be punched out. Silenced. Extinguished. Forever.

The umpire who called the third strike is Jim Schnell. Jim and Skip are nearly the same age. Before Skip can get within spitting distance, Jim begins lifting up his hands. Skip is unsure if this gesture is meant to say “back off” or “have mercy”, but it makes no difference. It doesn’t matter that Jim looks tired, or that he is now reaching two fingers up toward his right ear to remove the wireless earBud nestled inside it, holding it out between thumb and forefinger. It doesn’t matter whether or not “The Silent K” is actually nigh, or that everything has changed so rapidly, or that it feels to the old man like all the world has become a massive heap of bull. He may be a lawyer fording the courtroom to cross-examine a witness in a losing case. But he is going to have his damn say.

The young people in the crowd look up from their phones. Most of them have no idea what is going on, and swivel their heads to see if the lights will flicker on and off. Perhaps this is some kind of intermission. A few of them have heard about this sort of thing from parents. Others have seen old Reelz compilations. One of them is reminded of what Hemingway said about bullfights, even though he’s never read any Hemingway. They all crane their necks expectantly.

Skip brings his face close to Jim’s. As he opens his mouth, he notices briefly that the whites of Jim’s eyes have yellowed. He begins with an Ad Hominem attack.

“SCHNELL YOU COCKSUCKER!” Follows it up with some pathos. “You gotta give us a GODDAMN SHOT HERE for CHRISESAKE!” Jim is still holding up the earbud. He waves it in front of Skip’s face: Exhibit A.

“Art! ART! We’ve been over this, Art! Now I don’t make the calls now no more, Art, I just announce ‘em.”

Jim is one of the few who still know the dance. The violence of his pointer finger on Skip’s chest feels like a hand extended in invitation. Skip’s next flurry of curse words might as well be a string of ballroom steps.

“GET! THAT! LOUSY! EARWIG OUTTAMYGODDAMNFACE YOU SONNUVABITCH!” He gesticulates wildly. No one in the crowd says a word. Jim’s head hen- pecks back with each new line of rhetoric, his neck a telegraph ticking.

“It’s the BallStrike, Art! That’s what dictates that!” You know them computers don’t make no errors!”

“Yeaah-them GOD. DAMN. Computers can’t do NO WRONG, RIGHT?” Their beer bellies bounce gently against each other. “Infallible as the Almighty, RIGHT?” Spittle flies from one mouth to the other. ‘Well I’ll tell ya one thing them GOD. DAMN. COMPUTERS, are good for, Jim! Ya know what that is?”

“Yeah what’s that?” Skip inhales.

“TURNIN’ A MAN INTO NOTHIN’ BUT A BRAINLESS PARROT WITH A GODDAMN SHEEP’S HERD WORTHA WOOL OVER HIS EYES!”

The punchline echoes through the stadium, and the onlookers begin to see it. The two men are twirling now, their scissoring arms the choreography of swordplay, their legs kicking up dirt and chalk with all the pomp and flourish of matadors. Jim’s jugular pulses. Skip’s red as Dionysus. Their voices seem to rise up beyond the stadium lights and into the starry night air. Then, the full force of his body behind it, Jim tears his upheld finger through space to signal Skip’s ejection from the game, and the crowd erupts in outraged reverie. For a split second, New York State Electric and Gas Stadium is transformed into the Globe.

But what they have just witnessed is nothing more than a farce, a dramatic re-enactment. Skip can no longer, in good faith, make a case for the faultiness of Jim’s frail, human eyes, nor incite the crowd to decry his mortal biases. Jim no longer requires the tools he has sharpened over years to fend off attacks on his ability to perceive the truth. The younger umpires have never needed to learn. The visual data from the entire at-bat were captured from 32 different angles on HD cameras, beamed out of Earth’s atmosphere, come caroming off a satellite and hurtled back down to a laptop in the press box, fed through an augmented reality program which determined within a nanometer of precision that the fourth pitch they all saw with their own eyes was in fact one-eighth of an inch within the bounds of the floating cube which constitutes the strike zone of Nathan Deetz, at which point an audio alert mosquitoed this verdict from a wireless receiver through the grey hairs in Jim Schnell’s right ear with all the certainty of death itself.

Skip watches the remainder of the game on a screen in the clubhouse. A phone rings. Probably the front offices. 

The rings echo. Before he picks up, Skip is faintly cognizant of the fact that there is not an actual bell in the room. Only the simulated sound of one.

Tommy McAree is a lifelong baseball fan and an MFA student at Simmons University, where he writes picture books and is working on a YA novel about adolescence and (what else?) baseball.

Elliot Lin is a college student who spends their free time musing about sports and how they shape or reflect identity. You can find their other baseball-related illustrations here, on Twitter, Tumblr, and Instagram.

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