Don’t Leave Early -- You Might Miss Something

So today we’re all remembering Steve Harvey’s Miss Universe faux pas from a little over a year ago. I suppose that’s where all of this stuff started.

We must have reached a point in our shared cultural history where we were all getting a little too comfortable with the idea that “it’s all been done” or we’ve “seen it all before.” Like lifetime poker players who’ve been one-outed on the river enough times to be numb to it, we were all lulled into thinking we could safely shut the teevee off before the end and not miss anything.

Just off the top of my head here, I’m thinking back to that absurd second-round game in last year’s NCAA playoffs between Texas A&M and Northern Iowa, the one in which the Aggies were down 12 with just 44 seconds left in regulation and somehow managed to tie the sucker -- without even calling a timeout (!) -- and win in double-OT.

You have to think a few folks shut the set off before the conclusion of that one.

Sports provided a couple more similarly preposterous finishes last year, highlighted by the Cleveland Cavaliers overcoming a 3-1 deficit in the NBA finals to defeat the seemingly unbeatable Golden State Warriors. Then came the Chicago Cubs similarly coming back from 3-1 down (and from a 108-year title drought) to beat the Cleveland Indians, although not until after the Indians stunningly scored three runs late to tie things up (with an apocalyptic-seeming rain delay prior to extra innings adding further to the delirium).

Then came election night, another stunner for many that seemed to take a crazy turn mid-evening when all of the projections suddenly swung the other way. And of course that completely loopy 25-point comeback engineered by the New England Patriots against the Atlanta Falcons to win Super Bowl 51 is still fresh in everyone’s minds, a game that absolutely no one other than perhaps the Pats thought could possibly play out the way it did.

Vera and I watched the beginning of the Oscars last night, but didn’t bother to stick it out until the end. We hadn’t seen most of the movies. Indeed, we probably only go to the theater about once every other month or so, if that.

Whenever Vera and I do go to the movies, we have a routine where we always stay through the end credits, which invariably makes us the last two people to exit the place. Not sure why we do that, to be honest, although by doing so we necessarily catch any of those funny little post-credits like Ferris Bueller telling the audience to leave or the rider still waiting in Ted Striker’s cab in Airplane!

We were curious to see how the Oscars started, then, but not engaged enough to stick with it. Vera did, however, ask me to DVR the rest before we gave up. I didn’t ask to add the extension when recording, and while I haven’t checked it yet I’m sure I didn’t get the ending as I understand it ran quite late.

I’ve heard about it though, of course, and watched a clip this morning of the remarkable gaffe that saw the wrong film named as best picture, and multiple acceptance speeches being given before the correction came. Seemed fitting, I guess, after more than a year’s worth of such improbable twist-endings.

Hang around poker tournaments enough and you see examples of players all in and at risk leaving the table before the last card is dealt, sometimes when they are still drawing live. Every once in a while -- I’ve seen it happen maybe three or four times -- the departing player’s unlikely runner-runner actually comes, leading to the player having to be recalled to the table by staff or a friendly opponent.

After all of these head-spinning conclusions, gotta think people are going to stop being in such a hurry to get to the exits. Now everyone is going to start sticking around past the end.

For an explanation of all this that is fun -- or frightening, depending on your point of view -- check out Adam Gopnik’s piece for The New Yorker today, “Did the Oscars Just Prove That We Are Living in a Computer Simulation?”

Image: “ P1080262,” Jon Seidman. CC BY 2.0.

Failing to Play Your Ace

I’ve been fading in and out of baseball this year, occasionally checking in here and there but mostly letting it all go by until these last couple of weeks.

Now the playoffs are here and I’m intrigued again to watch, with that one-game wild card between the Baltimore Orioles and Toronto Blue Jays providing a decent amount of excitement last night thanks to extra innings and a walk-off homer to end it.

Kind of interesting today how the discussion of the game is focusing less on the three-run blast by the Jays’ Edwin Encarnacion to clinch the 5-2 win for Toronto, and more so upon Baltimore manager Buck Showalter’s decision not to bring in their ace closer Zach Britton who was 47 for 47 in save chances this year with a 0.54 ERA.

No Britton at all last night -- not in the ninth, not in the 10th, and not in the 11th. He warmed up three different times, but never entered the game. If he had it wouldn’t have been a save situation. But instead he was the one being saved, and never used.

An article over on ESPN today serves as kind of an extreme exercise in second-guessing, going through no less than 15 different moments during the game when Britton might have been called upon to enter the game. Some are brought up and dismissed, and some are more serious than others, but each of the ones coming near the end legitimately belong to the woulda-shoulda-coulda category.

Last week I was writing about the use of poker analogies when describing the presidential race, and how in fact sometimes the references to cards actually evoke other games. Today the talk is about Showalter having failed to play his “ace,” which again sounds more like a trick-taking game than poker.

Then again, poker -- a game in which the timing of one’s “moves” often matters greatly -- provides plenty of other, similar examples supporting the maxim “he who hesitates is lost.”

Image: “Ace of clubs” (adapted), Ulf Liljankoski. CC BY-ND 2.0.

First They Support You, Then They Attack

There’s a new article appearing on the ESPN site today about Ichiro Suzuki, the Japanese-born baseball star who is closing in on 3,000 career hits in the major leagues.

Suzuki had already had a significantly successful career in Japan before making his Major League Baseball debut in 2001 at the age of 27. He played nine years fro the Orix Blue Wave of the Nippon Professional Baseball league, accumulating 1,278 hits while batting .353 and winning the league’s MVP award three times.

This is his 16th season in the majors, and today he sits with 2,998 hits in the MLB. That means all told he has 4,276 hits across his entire career. A few weeks ago when his overall total surpassed Pete Rose’s MLB record of 4,256 hits in the MLB, there was small bit of back-and-forth over whether or not Suzuki had really broken any record or not.

I’ve written here about Rose before, a hero of my youth who at age 75 is now still a controversial figure thanks to his ignoble, forced exit from baseball. Around the time Suzuki’s cumulative hit total reached and then surpassed Rose’s in mid-June, Rose was quoted in USA Today making kind of a snarky comment about the notion that Suzuki could be considered the hit “king.”

“It sounds like in Japan they’re trying to make me the Hit Queen,” Rose told USA Today. “I’m not trying to take anything away from Ichiro, he’s had a Hall of Fame career, but the next thing you know, they’ll be counting his high-school hits.”

Getting back to today’s ESPN article, Suzuki was asked if anything bothered him about the coverage from when he passed Rose’s total. The question wasn’t specifically about Rose’s comment, but that’s what Suzuki addressed in his response.

“I was actually happy to see the Hit King get defensive,” says Suzuki, unsubtly acknowledging Rose’s crown. “I kind of felt I was accepted.”

He goes to explain how about five years ago he’d heard Rose had said some positive things about him, even saying he wished Suzuki could break his record. “Obviously, this time around it was a different vibe,” adds Suzuki.

That’s when Suzuki adds an interesting comment about American culture that kind of explains his point about feeling as though he had been accepted upon hearing Rose’s comments last month.

“In the 16 years that I have been here, what I’ve noticed is that in America, when people feel like a person is below them, not just in numbers but in general, they will kind of talk you up,” says Suzuki. “But then when you get up to the same level or maybe even higher, they get in attack mode; they are maybe not as supportive. I kind of felt that this time.”

That observation actually made me think of poker, a game which more than a few people have recognized parallels various “American” ideas and characteristics. I’m thinking on a “macro” level about how the game works and continues to sustain itself, not about particular strategy or even game mechanics.

In poker, the good players often try to encourage the bad players to remain in the game -- or at least that’s what the good players who have some clue about how the game actually works are doing. They compliment and even nurture (to an extent) the lesser-skilled in order to keep them playing, which in turn helps keep the “economy” of the game healthy.

Then, once the not-so-good players become good themselves, they aren’t treated quite the same way. To put it in Suzuki’s terms, the good ones don’t “talk them up” as often, and in fact may well go into “attack mode” (so to speak), having recognized their own status being legitimately challenged.

I hadn’t thought all that specifically about this process occurring on a cultural level, and in fact being a distinguishing characteristic of American society. But I think Suzuki is probably onto something with the observation.

He’s 42 now, and says in the article he wants to play until he’s 50. I suppose if he did there exists an outside chance Rose’s crown as MLB hit king could be threatened for real, although the chances are heavily against that happening. In any case, ornery old Rose will certainly let us know if he thinks there’s ever a real threat to his title.

Image: “Ichiro Suzuki at bat in St. Louis, 2016” (adapted), Johnmaxmena2. CC BY-SA 4.0.

The Futures Is Now, Bro

Was listening today to the new episode of Chad Millman’s Behind the Bet$ podcast for ESPN, a show I tend to enjoy despite not being a huge sports bettor.

The focus of the episode is the upcoming Major League Baseball season, and the conversation between Millman and his guests ranged over several topics although mostly had to do with futures bets, including those “over/under” bets on total games won as well as bets on a team winning their division, league, or World Series.

The conversation began with the Chicago Cubs, who Millman pointed out had opened at 10-to-1 to win the World Series (following last year, I assume) and now had moved all of the way to a kind of ridiculous 4-to-1 (I’m not sure which sportsbook he’s using). As the group pointed out, that’s more of a favorite than the most favored team often tends to be going into the playoffs, let alone to start the season.

The Cubs talk was interesting enough, and I imagine might have disturbed my Cubs-hating uncle who wants nothing more than to see them miss the World Series for a 71st-straight year. But I was intrigued by a point made by Paul Bessire of PredictionMachine about how much these World Series bets tend to favor the house -- indeed by a margin much greater than lots of other bets, including other futures bets.

The example of the Cubs who no one is giving more than a 20% chance of winning the World Series right now (what you’d need to break even on a 4-to-1 bet) is obvious enough. Bessire said after crunching all his numbers he personally had the Cubs at about 15% to win, the best of any team but not close enough to the odds being offered to make that a worthwhile bet to make.

Really, though, there are no good World Series futures bets. “If you dig into the numbers,” Bissere explained, and “look at all the confidence that you would need or at least the break-even points for all of the individual teams on the World Series odds and add them altogether you would get almost 200%, meaning that there’s almost 100% juice built into that.”

Like I say, I’m not a big sports bettor, but the point Bissere is making is one I’ve noticed before when perusing these kinds of futures bets. Offering the Cubs at 4-to-1 suggests they are 20% to win the World Series, if the line weren’t overvaluing the Cubs (which it is). The next biggest favorite is the Los Angeles Dodgers at 9-to-1 (or 10%), followed by the Houston Astros at 10-to-1 (about 9%) and so on down the list. What Bissere is saying is that when you add all 30 teams’ odds up, the total is close to 200%, which means collectively the 30 teams are being overvalued by nearly 100%.

I found a list of World Series futures -- not exactly the ones they had on the show, but close (including having Chicago at 4-to-1) -- and just for fun decided to add up the percentages. They actually only totaled about 125%, so unless I’m missing something, which I could be, the futures list I saw (at VegasInsider) wasn’t as punishing as the one the guys were referencing on the show.

Something similar, actually, usually results from these odds on final tables in poker tournaments such as we’ve seen at the World Series of Poker now and then -- namely, the odds are way too short for everyone. I know I’ve written about this at least a couple of times here before, such as in 2012 when I discussed odds being offered at the Rio Race and Sportsbook on the nine players making that year’s WSOP Main Event final table.

That year you could place bet on chip leader Jesse Sylvia to win at 3-to-2 (no shinola), which if taken at face value would suggest he was 40% to win. The odds for eventual winner Greg Merson (third in chips heading into the final table) were 5-to-2 (about 28.5%). Adding up the nine players, the total was close to 175%, illustrating the same point being made on the show about the exorbitant juice in World Series futures.

The majority of those making these kinds of futures bets are more likely to be seeking entertainment than value, of course, although I know there are some sharps who manage to find bets worth risking among the offerings. If I remember correctly, before the season my Carolina Panthers were something like 40-to-1 to win Super Bowl 50, a game they managed to enter as a heavy favorite. Alas, those who made that bet, like the Panthers, were unable to cash in.

For me, listening to the talk about over/unders and futures works as a good preview of what expectations are for the coming year, something that for me can make watching the actual games a little more interesting -- even without having bet on them.

Photo: “race & sports book” (detail), fictures. CC BY 2.0.

Reporting from the “Anybody But the Cubs” Camp

I feel like I’ve said something here on the blog before about my uncle Wally, the baseball fan, although a quick search doesn’t turn up the post I am remembering.

Wally is nearly 80 now. He grew up in Downer’s Grove, still lives in Illinois on a farm in the southern part of the state, and hates hates hates the Chicago Cubs. I believe he was originally a White Sox fan, and at some point became a St. Louis Cardinals supporter (I’m not sure of all the details). But he always disliked the Cubs, a feeling that dates all of the way back to when he was nine years old -- the last time the Cubbies won the National League pennant (in 1945).

That means while most of those following the Major League Baseball playoffs without a specific rooting interest are pulling for the Cubs finally to break through this year and make it to the fall classic, Wally is most definitely not. He’s pulling for the Mets, and as they are up 3-0 and have already taken a big lead early in game 4 tonight, it’s looking pretty good for Wally. (I say he’s pulling for the Mets, but in truth he could care less who is playing against the Cubs -- that’s the team he’d be supporting.)

There is also that whole Back to the Future Part II thing with the Cubs and this particular date (October 21, 2015). That might have been worrisome a few days ago for Wally, but not so much right now.

As a UNC-Chapel Hill grad with a similarly irrational dislike of Duke, I fully understand Wally’s position. Last year’s NCAA playoffs were miserable, not because the Heels lost, but because the Devils won.

I talked with Wally before the NLCS began, and we again laughed over his unflinching anti-Cub position. He made a good point about it, actually -- one I hadn’t necessarily thought about before.

“When your team loses, you can always say ‘we’ll get ‘em next year,’” he explained. “But this thing with the Cubs, if they win... it’s all over!”

He’s right. It’s a little like the difference between losing hands early in a tournament but still having chips with which to continue the fight and losing that one where you’re all in and at risk. There’s no “next time” then.

Like I say, it’s 6-0 Mets right now and looking pretty good for Wally and others like him in the A-B-C camp (Anybody But the Cubs). Chicago has a lot of long-suffering fans, some even older than Wally. But they also have a young team.

They can try again next year.

Winners, Losers, and Playoff Randomness

The Major League Baseball playoffs have begun, and with them the annual conversation has also started about how even though a 162-game season does a good job determining who the best teams are, the much smaller sample size of the playoffs increases the chance element markedly, often making it hard unequivocally to anoint the World Series winner as the season’s greatest team.

We talk about sample sizes a lot in poker, more often than not about how inadequate they are. We talk about variance, too, and how luck necessarily invites a disruption between what is and what ought to be.

The new wild-card playoff -- a one-game, winner-take-all-affair -- with which the MLB playoffs now always begin encourages such discussions even more, with each league producing one team who after 162 games will lose the 163rd and head home for the winter. The Pittsburgh Pirates, losers of the NL wild card earlier this week to the Chicago Cubs, had it happen for a second year in a row.

Just like like year when the Pirates ran into the hottest starting pitcher in baseball, Madison Bumgarner of the San Francisco Giants (then the Giants went on to win the whole sucker), this time they were up against the Cubs’ Jake Arrieta who is on a historic streak of success over the last several months. Both Bumgarner and Arrieta pitched complete game shutouts to oust the Pirates, this year after the team won 98 games (more than every other playoff team except the St. Louis Cardinals who took the Pirates’ division by winning 100).

For the Pirates it has been #JBL, as the poker-related hashtag would go.

In the NFL teams play 16 games, then enter into a series of single-elimination playoff games which obviously heighten the randomness more than a little (especially for a sport in whcih injuries are so significant). Even so, the 16-to-1 regular-season-to-playoff ratio is still not as big as the 162-to-7 ratio (or about 23-to-1) in the MLB. That’s looking ahead to the best-of-seven series coming up later for the league championships and World Series. That’s also assuming teams get to seven games in those series, which often they do not.

The NBA and NHL each play 82-game regular seasons and feature best-of-sevens each round of their playoffs (a little less than 12-to-1). NCAA basketball has it worse, I suppose, with a 35-game season (roughly) then a single-elimination tournament at the end.

Having playoffs is still better than not having them, I think, as college football proved for several decades up until the institution of the Bowl Championship Series from 1998-2013 and the College Football Playoff starting last year. Voting on the best team never worked well, nor does applying the incredibly complicated advanced analytics that are available these days to “let the computer decide.”

No, it’s best to have the teams play it out. It’s a little like a well played poker hand resulting in an all-in on the turn and something that is often close to a coin flip situation thereafter. Skill helped the players get into a position to win, then luck necessarily plays a role thereafter.

All-Star Voting Royally Skewed

Major League Baseball’s All-Star game is scheduled for Tuesday, July 14 this year. That’s also the last day of the summer portion of the World Series of Poker -- that is, the day they’ll play down to a final nine in the Main Event.

It’s been a while since I’ve paid much attention to the MLB All-Star Game. Back in the day as a kid I remember looking forward to it every year -- even mailing in ballots -- and then always rooting for the National League which enjoyed a lengthy streak of victories, as I recall.

I continued to follow the MLB into adulthood, albeit less intensely, though by the late 1990s my interest had begun to fade. As far as the All-Star game goes, I remember staying up to watch 11 innings of the 2002 game only to watch it end in a tie after both teams ran out of players, which for me (and I imagine for many others) made that the last All-Star game I bothered to watch all of the way through.

I could be bothered to watch the game this year, though, at least the first couple of innings. That’s because one team’s fans -- the Kansas City Royals -- has done a great job of stuffing the ballot box thus far. In fact right now Royals players are leading for eight of the nine positions for which fans get to vote.

Below is a shot of the latest update of the AL voting totals:

Only Mike Trout of the Angels has one of the outfield spots at the moment -- the rest are all KC.

Something similar happened in 1957 when Cincinnati fans voted seven different Reds into the NL starting line-up. The MLB took voting away from the fans the next year, not giving it back until 1970.

You can now vote online -- up to 35 times per email address, in fact -- and as this Washington Post article spells out that’s a big reason why Kansas City fans have been successful thus far.

The Royals are leading their division currently, although all of their starters are hardly having seasons worthy of earning the All-Star nod. In fact one of them, Omar Infante, who is leading among second basemen, is batting .204 and is currently ranked dead last in the league in “OPS” (on-base % plus slugging %).

Still, I’m kind of pulling for the Royals all to get voted in, just for the sake of anarchy. Kind of reminds me of the time online voters chose Tom Dwan as a Poker Hall of Fame nominee (back in 2009). Like MLB Commissioner Ford Frick did back in 1957, though, when he took a couple of Reds off the NL team in order to give Willie Mays and Hank Aaron spots, the WSOP took Dwan’s name off the ballot.

Contemplating Commissioners

Was listening today to an interview with the new Major League Baseball commissioner Rob Manfred who was elected to take over the position last August after Bud Selig stepped down.

Can’t say he was especially riveting to listen to as he addressed various “state of the game” questions, but afterwards my mind wandered a little into a couple of interesting memories from years past.

One was very long ago -- had to be 1981, I guess -- when Major League Baseball went on strike for nearly two months right in the middle of the season. I lived and breathed baseball then, playing all summer, collecting cards, watching and listening to games, and poring over box scores in the paper every day, so the strike was hugely disappointing to a young Shamus. (Making it worse, the strike started the day after my birthday.)

I was concerned enough about the situation to write a letter to then MLB commissioner Bowie Kuhn, something I probably wouldn’t remember having done if not for the fact that Kuhn wrote me back. I have long lost both letters, but you can imagine what they both said -- mine expressing a desire they’d resolve the sucker and his registering my concern and stating his similar hope.

I thought of that when hearing Manfred talk about how baseball fans contact him constantly -- some every single day -- with thoughts about the game and how it can be improved. I imagine he probably experiences that sort of thing much more often than Kuhn did back in those letter-writing days.

A bit of trivia: Had history evolved differently, Richard Nixon could have been in the MLB Commissioner’s seat then as he was actually offered the job in 1965, which he turned down. Later on, after both he and Kuhn took their respective offices in 1969, Kuhn presented Nixon a trophy honoring him as “Baseball’s Number 1 Fan” during a reception at the White House (pictured at left).

I also found myself after listening to Manfred being interviewed thinking a bit about the World Series of Poker’s experiment with having a commissioner and Jeffrey Pollack’s tenure in that position which lasted from early 2006 through November 2009. Pollack first came from NASCAR to the WSOP in mid-2005, and somewhere in there -- perhaps just after he changed from being VP of Marketing to Commish -- there were rumors that Pollack was in fact angling one day perhaps to succeed Selig as the next MLB Commissioner.

Some of Manfred’s PR-like talk about baseball made me think of Pollack and the rhetoric he employed -- often effectively -- when talking about poker in general and the WSOP in particular during those years. While many spoke favorably of him early on, later things soured a bit and his departure and subsequent involvement in the failed Epic Poker League helped influence many to conclude his influence on the game’s livelihood was mixed at best.

I was thinking, though, about how we got used to having someone in what seemed an authoritative position -- even if it weren’t, really -- who was constantly addressing questions about the “state of the game” and thus by default carrying a kind of influence, if not on the game at least on how people thought about the game.

There are certain poker players who today perhaps occasionally seem to fill that role. I suppose Alex Dreyfus with his GPI-related ventures perhaps also does, too, as do those leading the EPT, WPT, WSOP, and other major tours and venues.

But there’s no “commissioner” currently acting as the game’s “table captain” -- not that there actually can be, I don’t think.

Which is okay. Until there’s a strike, then to whom will the kids send their letters?

Missing Game 7

I was mentioning yesterday how that other World Series -- of baseball, not poker -- had emerged for me as one of several distractions from ESPN’s coverage of this year’s WSOP Main Event. Tonight the Kansas City Royals and San Francisco Giants play a winner-take-all Game 7, something that comes along rarely enough that even a long-lapsed baseball fan like me will be forced to take a look.

I’ve written here before about how devoted I was to baseball as a youngster. It was easily my favorite sport both to play and watch up through my middle teens, at least, although by the time I was a senior in high school my devotion to the game had begun to waver. In fact, it was that fall I can pinpoint a particular day when baseball suddenly became less important to me.

During the Royals’ playoff run this year many have been pointing back to the last time Kansas City made the playoffs way back in 1985, when, coincidentally, they won the championship in a World Series that also went seven games. Those references reminded me of that Game 7, not because of what happened during the game, but because I didn’t see it at all.

The game was on a Sunday (I remember). It was my senior year, a time when I’d already started looking at colleges. I can’t remember if I’d sent any applications by late October or not, but I probably had. I made decent grades in high school, good enough to put me in the running for some scholarships, including one for the school I wanted to attend, UNC-Chapel Hill.

The specifics escape me, but for this particular scholarship there was some sort of get-together I could not avoid that was scheduled for that Sunday evening. I’d submitted some written materials, including an essay showing whether or not I knew how to put sentences and paragraphs together. Then on this day there was a personal interview with a committee, followed by a dinner for all of the applicants.

It was a novel experience for me. The only thing I remember about the interview was that the person leading the five-person committee was blind. He smiled a lot, though, and had a friendly tone that helped keep everything from becoming too intimidating. And the only thing I remember about the dinner afterwards was commiserating with some of the guys from other schools about how we were missing Game 7.

I suppose I could have gotten out of it, but at the time it seemed like one of those things I just had to do. Looking back, it’s tempting to read my decision as one of those fork-in-the-road moments where I chose not to watch a baseball game as my younger self would have done, but instead did the “mature” forward-looking thing with an eye toward my future. That surely exaggerates the moment, though, charging it with more meaning than it really had.

I also remember how missing the game turned out to be much less of a big deal than it seemed at the time. Maybe it was because the game was -- much like last night’s Royals win -- a laugher, with Kansas City winning 11-0. Or maybe it was because lots of other interests had already begun to crowd into a boy’s still-forming mind, pushing baseball over into what would become a mostly-neglected corner.

I didn’t get the scholarship, although I did end up going to UNC-Chapel Hill, and that led to all sorts of other good things for me (not the least of which being meeting Vera during our first week on campus). The next fall I was a college freshman, way too distracted to pay much attention to another great World Series between the New York Mets and Boston Red Sox that would go seven games as well.

I’d look in on the World Series occasionally thereafter, and I became somewhat invested in the Atlanta Braves (my team as a kid) as they finally started winning and playing some exciting playoff games in the 1990s -- among them a heartbreaker of a Game 7 in 1991 which I did watch.

But I’d never again be as big a baseball fan as I had been prior to October 27, 1985, the day I didn’t watch Game 7.

Distant Replay

Was up late last night doing work with the teevee on and got caught up in a couple of these “Top 50” shows on the MLB Network. Decided it was kind of a brilliant format, given how mesmerized I was as they carried me forward 10 items at a time from commercial to commercial, working their way through their lists.

One of the shows was dedicated to the “Top 50 Calls of All-Time,” culling examples from radio and television over many decades’ worth of games. (Here’s a blog post someone pulled together listing all 50.) The call of New York Giants’ announcer Russ Hodges of Bobby Thomson’s “shot heard ’round the world” home run to win the NL pennant in 1951 earned the top spot in that compilation.

The other list was devoted to the “Top 50 Most Infamous Arguments” which was not just compelling but also got the adrenaline going a little bit at times. The “pine tar incident” from 1983 when New York Yankees manager Billy Martin successfully challenged that Kansas City Royals third baseman George Brett had too much pine tar on his bat when hitting a game-winning home run earned top honors on that list. The Royals would protest and the ruling would later be reversed, but Brett’s madman-charge of the plate still stands a fairly iconic moment in baseball history when it comes to arguments.

I realized while watching the shows that I had no particular interest in the actual rankings. That is to say, it didn’t matter much to me what famous call (for example) was considered the “top” one of all-time, what was second, and so on. Rather, my interest was piqued as a longtime fan who was more or less familiar with most of the plays being highlighted. I could remember having either seen them or replays of them -- or in some cases, having read about them -- in just about every case.

I remember the Brett homer vividly, having been a fan of his as a kid growing up. I even wrote him for an autograph, and like pretty much every big leaguer to whom I sent such letters to when I was a kid, he responded with an autographed photo.

I also remembered watching another of the “infamous arguments” on the list, one ranking around #5, I believe -- the ugly “bean-brawl” game between the Atlanta Braves and San Diego Padres from August 1984. It was the kind of game that really had to be seen to be believed, with several hits batsmen, multiple bench-clearing brawls, fans getting involved in the fights, and numerous jaw-dropping moments.

To give you an idea how crazy the game was, San Diego managed to have three different pitchers deliberately throw at Atlanta pitcher Pascual Perez during four different at-bats in the game. (Perez had hit a San Diego better with the game’s first pitch.) All of those Padres pitchers were ejected, as were the manager and a couple of coaches. It was basically Slap Shot from start to finish. This clip doesn’t even mention some of what happened:

I followed the Braves closely back then thanks to TBS showing every game, and so remembered all of the players involved. I always liked the idiosyncratic Perez who once missed a start when he couldn’t find his way to Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium and afterwards wore a jacket with “I-285” on the back to refer to the interstate on which he had gotten lost. (Was sad to hear of his death a couple of years ago.)

After a couple of hours of these countdowns I realized the format was smartly conceived and that the MLB Network had come up with some excellent off-season programming to keep viewers tuned in.

As I say, I imagine for other “Top 50” shows the rankings would matter more to me -- e.g., shows ranking players or teams or certain, measurable achievements. But for categories as nebulous as these, I was mostly pleased just to have those nostalgia nodes in my brain be massaged as I watched and remembered the plays.

Happened to turn the television on again this afternoon during an idle moment and saw All In: The Poker Movie being shown on one of the Showtime networks we’re getting for free right now. Was right in the middle of the Moneymaker-Farha heads-up, and again I found it hard to turn away despite being so familiar with what was being shown.

Something reassuring, I guess, about reliving the past and reaffirming our memories of it, memories which become more imperfect each day.