We must remember to zoom out when following baseball

A baseball season is a forest, don’t focus too hard on groups of trees

Earlier this week the Royals finished a disappointing home stand. How else could one feel after that went 1-3 over the last four games but led in all three games they eventually lost? That’s just an absolutely brutal stretch, and since the Royals had two days to go before the trade deadline, fans all over the internet began suggesting they should be selling off pieces for prospects to try to reload for next year or beyond.

There’s an old saying, “Can’t see the forest for the trees.” It means that sometimes we focus so much on the things right in front of us that we forget to take things in their larger context. At this point, most veteran baseball fans are familiar with the concept of the small sample size, but they’ll still let it get to them in weird ways. Consider the first paragraph for a moment. Everything there is factually accurate, but if we zoom out just a little bit, we see a team that went 5-4 over the entirety of the homestand and made up three games in the Wild Card race. In doing so, they passed the Boston Red Sox and went on the road in control of their playoff destiny even after those three brutal losses.

This is a problem - for me as much as it is for many of you - with being frustrated in general with this team as they careen toward meaningful baseball in September. Why can’t they just win consistently and often? I think we were a bit spoiled by the 2014 and 2015 teams. The 2014 team was famously incredibly good after the All-Star Break, which made people start watching them again. They were the best team in the entire American League for all of 2015. For that year-and-a-half stretch, there was almost nothing to complain about. We, I think, began to feel as if having a good team meant having no major complaints. But that’s not how it usually goes.

This year’s team has a lot in common with the 2014 team* with the difference that they were better before the break and so they don’t have to be nearly perfect to go to the playoffs, now. That’s a good thing! But it can feel frustrating because that better play earlier got us paying attention earlier and now that they’re floundering a bit, it doesn’t feel like business as normal, which is what the beginning of 2014 felt like and what it would have felt like if they had struggled to start the year.

*After I began writing this piece, fellow writer Matthew LaMar wrote one where he wrote that this team is very similar to the 2003 version, and he uses a different way of zooming out to reach that conclusion from the one I’ve used. That’s fine, and reasonable minds can disagree. Honestly, we won’t know until the end whether this team is more like the 2003, the 2017 (a team that also looked pretty good in the first half, started to crumble approaching the break, and then fell apart completely in the second half after a failed deadline deal,) or the 2014 teams. It might ultimately not look like any of them!

But, again, if we zoom out, we see a team that is in playoff position entering August.

Had you offered that to any Royals fan, sans context, to start the year, I think we all would have taken it and run away screaming, “NO TAKESIES BACKSIES!” But now, instead, we find ourselves depressed and frustrated, screaming on the internet that this team is actually awful and wondering why they don’t just blow the whole thing up. We’ve lost sight of the bigger picture.

Listen, I’m not telling you how to feel or how to be a fan. Certainly, if you walked into a forest and found a clump of rotting trees in an otherwise flourishing forest it would be worth it to investigate whether that was a natural phenomenon or one that needed to be addressed. But even worse than ignoring those trees would be to cut down the entire, massive forest because you couldn’t accept that things were, mostly, fine.

What’s right in front of us matters, but so does the larger context. We can all benefit sometimes from taking a step back, taking a deep breath, and approaching the situation with a different perspective in mind.