Merkle’s Paradox
“Has Merkle reached second yet?”
It was a reasonable question, a pertinent question, even a timely one, and often uttered, you can be sure, during September of 1908. But today, here, now, in the t.v. lounge of a state mental hospital, it seemed, how shall we say … utterly bonkers! Wacko. Completely unhinged, not to mention pretty damning evidence of the speaker’s deteriorating mental state.
I heard it, the orderly heard it—thank heavens the Head Nurse didn’t hear it—and we all laughed, for while dementia is a terrible condition for the victim and their loved ones—those who hang by the thinnest of spider threads to some sort of connection with the victim—to strangers and outsiders, on the other hand, to those with no thread of connection to the victim, which is to say, to all of us gathered in the t.v. room that blustery afternoon in 2008, dementia is hilarious.
We laughed riotously. We laughed until we were out of breath. We laughed so loud that the nurses—the curvy brunette named Rosie or Rosella or something like that, and the tall thin blonde we all called Legs because of … well, that’s neither here nor there, now is it? As I was saying, the nurses came running when they heard us laughing.
Outside, in that world we patients call Fantasyland, laughter is a sign of mental health, and a good loud laugh from a small group of old men would bring smiles to the faces of their friends and family, to passing strangers perhaps, certainly to men and women trained in the mental health business. But that’s Outside. Inside, raucous laughter brings nurses and orderlies and guards a’running. In The Real World, as we call it in here, laughter is inappropriate, a sign of failed therapy, a symptom. As Sean says, “He who laughs loudest gets The Juice.”
The Juice is hospital slang for electro-shock therapy, a form of torture so cruel, so insidious, so subversive that only modern medicine could have invented it. Sean says it’s proof God is dead, and Sean knows—he’s an orderly. Bobby Zeno says it’s evidence of who killed the Big Guy. Bobby is the one who was laughing loudest at the Merkle question. Bobby was wheeled off to “therapy.” He was still laughing when Sean and the other orderly, the short, hairy one, shoved him through the swinging doors. We could hear Bobby laughing, and shouting “Merkle’s Boner!” as he was rolled down the long hallway to the locked doors marked ECT. That stands for Everyone Comes To, because everyone does, sooner or later, after you get a little of the electrical medicine; and because everyone comes here to die.
No one gets out alive.
Not Bobby, not Tinker—who kept asking, “Has Merkle reached second yet?”—not even Sean nor the two nurses, certainly not me. No one gets out. Oh, sure, the nurses and orderlies can leave each day, go home to their Fantasyland lives, but come dawn they have to return to The Real World, like everyone else. Everyone comes here to die.
Maybe—just maybe—the docs and the Head Nurse don’t have to come back. Maybe—just maybe—they get to crawl off into some remote corner of their Fantasyland to die, but they are the exception. And doesn’t that prove the rule? Sean said that, the exception proves the rule, and I believe Sean. He’s a straight-shooter. He knows what’s going on. He understands more about The Real World than anyone else I know in this joint. Sean even knows about Merkle. It’s Sean who explained the Merkle Paradox to me. Sean gets it.
See, it happened like this.
It was back in 1908. I said that, didn’t I? Well, it bears repeating. The Giants and Cubs were battling with the Pirates for the National League pennant and a trip to the World Series. And Merkle blew it, for the Giants, he fucked up so royally, so egregiously, so … so … well, so much so that his name lives in infamy, forever enshrined in the phrase “Merkle’s Boner.” There’s a goddamn plaque in the Hall of Fame dedicated to his screwup. At least, I think there is. Sean said there was and Sean knows.
“Merkle’s Boner!” We could still hear Bobby shouting from way down the hall. Soon they’ll wheel him into the ECT. We could all imagine him lying on the stretcher, waiting for the doctor to come administer the “medicine,” shouting, “Merkle’s Boner!” and tugging on his crotch.
But it was Tinker who asked the question about Merkle, it had to be, who else is related to the famous Cub short stop Joe Tinker? Nobody else in this nut house, that’s for sure. Tinker is like the great-great-grand nephew or something of the Cubs’ short stop. And Tinker—not our Tinker, resident in The Real World, but the first Tinker, the baseball Tinker—was part of the world famous double play combination: Tinker to Evers to Chance. You’ve heard of them, right? Of course, everyone has.
“The saddest of possible words, Tinker to Evers to Chance.”
So what’s Tinker got to do with Merkle, you’re wondering. Everything. And nothing. That’s the way it is in baseball, everything and nothing, like twins joined at the hip. Same goes for The Real World. We got everything here, and we got nothing.
So when Tinker—our Tinker, not the Cub—cried out, “Has Merkle reached second yet?” he was speaking not just for himself and his family heritage, but for Evers and Chance and the entire 1908 Cubs team. Hell, he was speaking for the 1908 Giants too, since their fate was tied to Merkle’s journey around the base paths same as the Cubs. In fact, when Tinker, our Tinker, asked if Merkle had reached second, he was speaking for all of us, every last one of us in The Real World, whether we were in the tv room with him or in the cafeteria line waiting for the doors to open for lunch, or still asleep in the Men’s and Women’s Wards, or even sitting on the crapper in the lavatory. Wherever we were, whatever we were doing, Tinker spoke for us.
“Has Merkle reached second yet?”
Merkle’s journey is our journey, it’s my journey, it’s your journey, it’s the archetypal journey, from birth through life to death. Merkle’s journey is The Journey, and we’re all running the bases with him.
So how’d he get launched on this journey, you’re wondering. He smacked a base hit, should have been a double, but that was only the first of Merkle’s omissions, not stretching it into a two base hit. If he’d done that … well, the world as we know it would be a very different place, wouldn’t it? That’s what Sean helped me understand. And Sean knows.
Merkle’s Mistake changed The Real World.
So, it’s bottom of the ninth, two outs, Moose McCormick is on first and Merkle comes to the plate. Remember now, Merkle is a rookie, just 19, with only 47 at bats the entire season! He didn’t expect to play in this crucial game with the Cubs, a game that could decide the National League pennant—the Cubs and Giants were tied for first—but his manager, McGraw, pencils him in at the last moment, so there he is, at the plate, game on the line—the entire season on the line!—and the potential winning run on first with two down. Merkle lines a shot toward the right field corner, Cubs’ right fielder Hayden cuts it off before it reaches the wall, and McCormick lumbers over to third. But Merkle, rookie Merkle, decides not to sprint to second (he could have made it easily, or so later reports indicate) but holds up at first. Still, clutch hit for a rookie in a very important at bat. First and third, now, two out, and Al Bridwell at the plate. He wastes no time in lining a single over second base and McCormick strolls home with the winning run. Right? Wrong.
Everyone thinks the game is over, Giant fans pour onto the field, the players sprint toward the clubhouse entrance deep in center field, pushing and shoving their way past ecstatic New Yorkers who all believe that with this game the Giants have clinched the pennant. Merkle, Freshman Fred, sees the fans rushing onto the field and joins his teammates and the Giant players in heading for the safety of the clubhouse. Everyone, it seems, fans and players and umpires, are sprinting toward center field—players and umps to escape, fans to shower their Giant heroes with love and admiration (and perhaps grab a hat or jersey for a souvenir in the process). Everyone except Cub second baseman Johnny Evers.
Damn that Evers! It’s all his fault, that’s what Sean says, but sometimes … well, sometimes Sean wants things to be a certain way and ignores the way things just are, you know what I mean? Sometimes, I hate to say it, infrequently, but sometimes, Sean can be wrong. Sometimes there is no one at fault. We are all at fault. Sometimes.
Anyway, there he was, Johnny Evers, standing next to the second base bag, watching Merkle join the swarm moving toward center field. Evers notices Merkle never touches second base. And Evers knows the rule, infamous rule 4.09, a rule he tried to invoke two weeks earlier only to be ignored by the umpire, Henry O’Day, who ruled on that day that since he, the umpire, had not seen the runner on first fail to touch second, the run scored and the game was over. Evers and the Cubs complained bitterly to the National League President, Harry Pulliam, but Pulliam supported his umpires and the ruling stood. Still, everyone knew the complaint was legit and the umps had missed the call. The rule is clear:
4.09. A run is not scored if the runner advances to home base during a play in which the third out is made ... by any runner being forced out.
It was just two weeks before the day of Merkle’s Infamous Journey that Evers tried to get Umpire O’Day to enforce the rule. And even though O’Day refused on that earlier occasion, everyone remembered it, the controversy was in all the papers, Evers remembered it and Henry O’Day certainly remembered it, so when an identical situation arose two weeks later in the 9th inning of the final game between the Cubs and the Giants, O’Day made sure he watched for the runner on first to touch second base, and he made sure Evers saw him watching. O’Day came out from behind home plate and stood on the pitching mound as fans poured onto the field and players sprinted to escape. O’Day watched Merkle leave the baseline halfway to second base and join the crowds moving toward center field. And O’Day watched Johnny Evers, standing on second base, shouting to his teammates to throw him the ball.
Oh, the ball. I haven’t mentioned the ball, have I? With so much going on, it’s easy to forget the ball. Most of the players did, the crowd certainly did, but not Evers. And not O’Day. They formed a sort of 2-man anchor in the midst of a sea of rushing, swarming, flooding human beings all flowing toward center field. They stood their ground—one atop second base, the other atop the pitching mound—and they watched. They watched the frenzied crowds, they watched the panicked players, and they watched each other. Evers never stopped shouting for the ball, but who could hear him in that clamor?
The ball, Sean says, is a sort of mystery. You wouldn’t think a small orb of horsehide and string could cause such misery, would you? But it did. It disappeared. No surprise, with fans flooding the field and players scampering to safety, that the game ball, the one the heroic Bridewell lined into center field, was never found. Or at least never identified. Plenty of people claimed to have seen it, one man later claimed to own it, but no one could prove their ball was THE ball.
So there’s Evers, standing on second, shouting for the ball until someone threw him a ball, some ball, any ball. He caught it, stepped on second and looked at Umpire O’Day, who nodded to Evers and raised his right arm: out! Third out of the inning, a force out, according to rule 4.09 meant that the run scored did not count. The game remained tied. Merkle never reached second which means, officially, the runner on third, the unfortunate McCormick, never reached home. And that, Sean says, is the real lesson here. McCormick never reached home and none of us ever will either.
Umpire O’Day later explained that since the players had left the field and the fans had taken possession of it, he saw no point in trying to continue the game. He ruled the game a tie and notified the National League office of his ruling, which meant, if his ruling was upheld, that the game would be continued the next day from the point of the final out.
But it couldn’t be continued. The National League office received an official protest from the Giants which caused President Pulliam to convene a commission to study the reports and make a final determination. By the time they had heard all the contradictory stories of what had happened, and voted to support O’Day’s ruling of a tie game, the Cubs had left New York for their next series, and all Pulliam could do was schedule an extra game at the end of the season.
The Cubs won that playoff game and headed to the World Series, but that’s not the lesson here, Sean says. It’s not the reason I’m telling you this. Merkle is. Bonehead Merkle, as he has been known for a century, poster boy for mental mistakes in baseball. When Yogi Berra said (or didn’t say, we never know with Yogi) that baseball is ninety percent mental, he may have been thinking of Merkle, whose rookie mental mistake cost the Giants the pennant. Merkle’s Boner, that’s what it’s called, and that’s about all anyone knows about Fred Merkle.
“Merkle’s Boner!” I imagine Bobby shouting from within the ECT, before they put the electrodes on his head, before they silence his raucous laughter. “Merkle’s got a boner!”
But Sean says it wasn’t Merkle’s fault. Sean says it was impossible for Merkle to get to second base. Sean says mathematics proves that Merkle was never going to make it to second base, and Sean knows math. Here’s how he explains it.
You divide the distance between first base and second base in half: 90 feet divided by 2 is 45 feet. That, Sean says, is how far Merkle traveled in the first 3-4 seconds after Bridewell hit Christy Mathewson’s pitch into center field. Did he pause at the midpoint to consider the remaining distance to second? We’ll never know. But Sean says it doesn’t matter, he was never going to get there any way. Why? Because having just divided the distance from first to second in half (45 feet), we can now divide the remaining half in half again (22.5 feet), which if Merkle didn’t pause to contemplate his future but continued running he would cover in roughly 2 seconds, leaving him just 22.5 feet remaining to second base. If we divide that 22.5 feet in half again, Merkle in the next second or so would have covered 11.25 feet and have exactly 11.25 feet remaining to reach second. Dividing the remaining 11.25 in half leaves Merkle 5.625 feet short of second, and dividing that in half again, Merkle still remains 2.8125 feet from second, which, divided once again in half, still leaves 1.4 feet (and an infinitesimal fraction of an inch) to second base, which divided in half yet again still leaves the confounded Merkle 7/10 of a foot (roughly 8 inches) away from second, which we can divide again to leave him 4 inches from the bag, and again 2 inches, then 1 inch, then half an inch, etc., etc., etc.
By this point, Merkle and Evers and Umpire O’Day must realize what Sean has known all along: you can divide any distance in half an infinite number of times, which means that Merkle can never arrive at second base. Getting to second is mathematically impossible, Sean says and I can’t see any way to argue with him.
At some point, Merkle must have realized he was trapped in a paradox, and somewhere between first and second base, he gave up, left the base path, abandoned any hope of reaching second, and wandered off into the crowd spilling onto the baseball diamond. Merkle never reached second.
Evers knew it, O’Day knew it, and when some ball—we’ll never know if it was THE ball—was finally tossed to Evers where he stood atop the second base bag, O’Day threw his right arm up in the air in baseball’s time honored gesture for “out” and declared the inning over, the run void, and the game tied. Then O’Day joined Evers and the remaining ball players sprinting toward the safety of the clubhouse in center field.
Whether they ever arrived, we can’t be certain. Merkle’s Paradox would suggest not. Sean tends to agree, though Sean admits that the players got off the field somehow (he can’t explain it) because the Giants returned the next day to play another game. They finished the season tied with—who else?—the Cubs, so one day after the regular season ended, the Giants and Cubs met again in a tie-breaking playoff game to determine the National League pennant. The Cubs won and went to the World Series. Had Merkle not paused midway to second base to contemplate the impossibility of arriving at his destination, the Giants would have won the pennant and been headed to the Series. Merkle was blamed for their failure and forever after his mistake was known as Merkle’s Boner.
“Has Merkle reached second yet?”
That’s Tinker, again, asking the same question over and over. He’ll wander the halls all afternoon asking that question. He’ll ask the other patients, he’ll ask the orderlies, he’ll certainly ask Nurse Rosie, or Rosella, and he’ll giggle as he asks the nurse we call Legs, and when she turns away from him he might well mutter, quietly, so no one hears, the words that got Bobby Zeno sent to the ECT, “Merkle’s got a boner,” then Tinker will scuttle off to ask the security guards and the guests who wait in the lobby to see their loved ones. Hell, Tinker will even ask the water fountain in the main hallway and the trash can further down the hall toward the ECT. But Tinker won’t ask Bobby Zeno. Not even if they roll Bobby out of the ECT as Tinker is passing. He won’t lean over the gurney and whisper, “Has Merkle reached second yet?” to Bobby. That he will not do. Even Tinker has respect for those who return from “therapy.”
But Tinker will ask anyone—and anything—that his journey through the hospital this afternoon brings him into contact with. He’ll even ask me. “Has Merkle reached second yet?” And I’ll tell him:
Nope. Never happened. Never gonna happen. That’s what Sean says, and Sean knows. Merkle is forever trapped in the middle, halfway between first and second, and McCormick, the runner on third, never reached home. And that, Sean says, is what makes the story so important, because what is true for Merkle is true for all of us. We are all trapped here, in the middle of The Real World, and we ain’t goin’ nowhere. So Sean says, and he should know, he’s seen enough of us come into this place and not get out again. There’s no going home, which means there’s no escape.
Unless, of course, you think of death as the escape route. Which I do now, after learning about Merkle and talking with Sean. The only way out of this joint, the only way to second base, is dying. You have to think of death as a sort of home that you can get to. And that, I’m certain, is what Merkle realized half way to second base way back in 1908. Which is how Merkle’s Paradox changed my life, changed everyone’s life here in The Real World. Merkle is us. We are Merkle.
“Has Merkle reached second yet?”
No, Tinker, he hasn’t. And neither have you, nor I, nor anyone else. Not even Sean, who right now is wheeling Bobby Zeno down the long hallway to the one place you can get to, the exception that proves the rule, but also the one place no one ever wants to go, the ECT, where Everyone Comes To, eventually.