Sometimes, the Little Things Do Matter

As the Dodgers celebrated, the Yankees were left to ponder the error of their ways.

A baseball game is often lost on a slimmer margin than a foot and a yard. It’s truly been said it’s a game of inches.

—Harold C. Burr, The Brooklyn Eagle, 1929

Harold Burr, a wonderful old Brooklyn sportswriter who later in life would regale Vin Scully with stories about the Babe, is usually credited as the first to publicly call baseball a game of inches. He almost certainly was not—Burr himself made that vividly clear by prefacing his famous line with the phrase “it’s truly been said”—but if we are going to even try to understand the madness that took place at Yankee Stadium on the day before All Hallows’ Eve in Anno Domini 2024, we have to start somewhere.

Burr called baseball a game of inches after watching Cleveland beat the Yankees on a September day six weeks before the stock market crashed in 1929. The Indians caught two game-altering breaks in the ninth inning because of the geometric quirks of then-seven-year-old Yankee Stadium—one fly ball turned into a home run, one home run turned into a fly ball—and Burr was particularly taken by the fact that Yankee Stadium was designed by a firm of Cleveland architects.

“Look at what a set of engineers can do to ruin a ballgame,” he wrote.

In the 95 years since 1929—and surely even for a couple of decades before 1929—it has been canon that baseball is a game of inches, that you do the tiniest things well or you lose. Some of this, certainly, is nonsense. Many teams that play mediocre defense win the World Series. Many teams that run into too many outs on the bases win the World Series. Many teams with a bevy of shaky pitchers who too often walk the leadoff hitter or fall behind in the count win the World Series.

“That will catch up with them!” professional and amateur analysts will gripe when they watch the hometown team squander opportunities and bungle the fundamentals. Sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes the big things—titanic home runs and rocket line drives and magical pitches that jump over or limbo under bats—liquidate the little things. Sometimes, despite our deeply-felt belief that the sounder, sturdier, more alert team should win the game, it doesn’t work out that way.

And then, sometimes, yeah, sometimes baseball is a game of inches after all.