Saturday, October 24, 2015

With the Omaha Cyclones set to face the Gloucester Fishermen in the 2015 Planetary Extreme Championship, many people around the baseball world are still scratching their heads at what happened this season. Sure, the Cyclones have been an up and coming team for the past few seasons, but few outside of Nebraska thought they’d reach the postseason. In fact, the only other city where the press predicted them to reach the postseason was our good friends down in San Antonio. No one close to PEBA baseball thought they’d advance even one round, but maybe we should’ve.

The Fishermen were even less highly thought of. While some pundits picked them to finish third, they were also picked by others to finish dead last in their division. Instead, they were just one win shy of the best record in the IL. We all knew they had Mayor Manuel Corona at the top of their rotation as arguably the best starting pitcher on the planet. He was worse this year than last year. Really, though, if we had just paid attention to the signs, we’d have known that 2015 would be their year.

There are numerous reasons these two teams played so well this year, and both teams are worthy contestants for the Rodriguez Cup. Despite losing António Coronado to the LRS, Reynaldo Estrada stepped up and played just as well. Wesley Scott finally had the type of season everyone has expected of him for ages. In Omaha, Jason Corbett arrived with one of the best seasons a catcher has ever had, and starter Vincente Coronado took a big step forward, as well. These are all things that baseball pundits might have guessed at coming into the season, but even then, they would’ve pointed to success by these teams as individuals. The reality, however, is that not only should the individual success of these teams be expected, but this PEC matchup was actually predicted much further in the past. If people paid attention, we’d have known this was coming ages ago.

One of the most famous prognosticators in human history is Nostradamus. While many of his predictions centered around the rise and fall of empires, the end of the world, and other catastrophes of the modern age, he was not immune to visions of modern athletics. One of his quatrains has even been interpreted to predict Denver’s improbable victory over Green Bay in the 1998 Super Bowl. It has now come to light that another of Nostradamus’s quatrains is very likely to refer to the 2015 PEC.

Sur le point culminant de la lute
La règle sera rendu boiteux
Le tourbillon se réunira la baleine
Aube se cassant sur le nouvel âge

Translated roughly to English as the following:

At the culmination of the struggle
The ruler will be rendered lame
The vortex will meet the whale
Dawn is breaking on the new age

The third line is the one that jumps out at you as clearly stating that the Cyclones and Fishermen are destined to meet, while the first line indicates that it will be in the postseason. Most shockingly, however, is the prediction that Manuel Corona (“Mayor” or “ruler”) is going to get hurt. The final line is still open to interpretation, but it seems to indicate that a new era of PEBA baseball is going to be ushered in as a result of this series. What that means exactly isn’t clear. Perhaps it’s an indication of prolonged success of the teams involved. Perhaps it’s an indication that some of the old guard in the PEBA, the teams that have been at the top for some time now, are likely to fall into a cycle of struggle.

However, this prophecy of Nostradamus is not without one glaring problem: It doesn’t say when this is going to happen. Anyone who came across this prediction prior to the season starting would likely have dismissed it as having nothing to do with 2015. Perhaps a few seasons down the road when both teams had some more established stars, but not this year!

The thing that makes this season so special, however, is that we have not just the one source, but corroborating evidence from an additional source: the Maya calendar. Their calendar system has been used as a way to divine future events for centuries and is described as the last calendar you’ll ever need. It is actually based on three calendars: a 365-day solar year, a 260-day ritual year, and a 5,128-year world time calendar. Each of these involve stone rings that rotate within each other. On the ritual calendar, this results in the alignment of various symbols to represent oracles and tones. The outer ring contains the oracles, and here is where we find our 2015 PEC participants. The symbol “Ik” represents the white wind and is drawn as a spiral whirlwind, while the symbol “Muluc”, representing the red moon, is interpreted as the head of a fish. However, with each of these symbols on the outer ring, they can never align.

Along comes the inner ring, representing the various tones. As the tones rotate within the oracles, they align with the each other to form combinations. Since there are 20 oracles and 13 tones (260 days), different combinations of oracles and tones take some time to manifest themselves. When they do, they come at various points in the Gregorian calendar. There is a lunar tone, a spectral tone, and a cosmic tone among them, but the key one that brings things together is the magnetic tone. The magnetic tone draws the two oracles it touches in succession close to each other, and it just so happens that in October 2015, the magnetic tone touches Ik and Muluc in succession.

In and of itself, this may not have been strong enough evidence to predict a Cyclones-Fishermen matchup this year, but combined with the Nostradamus quatrain, it seems almost too good to be true. Had you placed a hefty wager on this matchup with the Vegas bookmakers last March, they might be thinking the same thing.