Every time the Colorado Rockies play baseball, I find myself following their games closely, waiting for the batting order to turn over. I have never been to Denver, and I do not root for the team. Ten days ago, I had never heard the name Trevor Story. Today, I will wait anxiously for Story to come up to bat. This weekend, I started laughing out loud when I saw that he had hit another one. Baseball is a beautiful thing. April is wonderful. Small sample sizes be damned, a rookie shortstop for a terrible team is the best thing going in all of sports.
Story isn’t Barry Bonds reborn. He’s not going to be the next Troy Tulowitzki. Of course not. Those guys weren’t this good. Six games into his Major League career, Story has hit seven homeruns. This is silly; his rate will slow. An optimistic projection for him going forward probably has him finishing with 30 bombs, not the 189 he is on pace for. He strikes out too much. Baseball, perhaps more than any other sport, relies on large sample sizes to eliminate these types of outliers.
Fluky beginnings to seasons or careers are not uncommon. Shane Spencer stopped dispensing homeruns after his magical September in 1998. Career .212 hitter J.P. Arencibia had four hits and two homeruns in his debut. A hot streak like Story’s isn’t spectacularly meaningful in predicting his future. So what? Doesn’t the fleeting nature of this streak make it that much more fun?
April is here, and baseball is back in our lives. That should be enough. Story’s incredible debut is simply a cherry on top of the wonderful sundae that is the pageantry of Opening Day, the thrill of the first walk-off homer and the agony of the first blown save. In a game with such a rich history — no sport has a thicker encyclopedia — I will always fall for the player doing something that has never been done before. The fact that Story is a relatively unheralded prospect is yet another bonus, a tiny bit of extra whipped cream that finds its way to the top of that delicious cherry.
Yes, Story will come crashing down to Earth soon enough. Major League pitchers will find the holes in his swing. He will go a week and then two without a dinger. I will stop checking my phone for Rockies updates every couple of minutes. Fans will look back and recoil at the number of “Story” puns that were made. We will wonder how the hell this happened. All of this is certain.
Ernest Hemingway observed that “…all stories, if continued far enough, end in death, and he is no true-story teller who would keep that from you.” He still found many worth telling. This story will end too. It’s been incredible fun thus far though.
You can't predict baseball
