Perseverance and the Love of the Game

July 19^th 2026: In the bottom of the sixth, the Giants and Mariners were tied 2-2. My husband and I, both Mariners fans, were watching the game from home. Dan Wilson sent in lefty Luke Raley to pinch hit vs right-handed pitcher Adrian Houser. My husband breathed a hesitant sigh of relief. “Good,” he said. “Luke has been amazing against righties this year.”

I responded, “Yes, he has been. Putting Luke in is absolutely the right call. But that doesn’t mean it’ll work, you know. The most likely outcome of this at bat is still an out. I know you get tired of me saying ‘Baseball is a game of statistics,’ but it’s true. The overwhelming statistical likelihood of any single at bat is always failure.”

For the record, I am indeed a Mariners fan. But I am also a physicist.¹

The Cognitive Dissonance of Hope

I know I probably sounded like an annoying Debbie Downer. But my love for baseball is partly because the game is a statistical quagmire of doubt, not despite it. This is what’s special about baseball to me. If baseball is a game of statistics and of failure, then it is also a game of perseverance and resilience.

It’s about showing up, over and over, three or four games a week plus practices from March through October. Rehabbing after injuries, persevering through slumps, knowing that each at bat is a unique event. Success or failure in a single at bat doesn’t necessarily influence the next, just like one roll of a die doesn’t influence the next.² Coaches and scouts and analysts and players make the best decisions they can based on the statistics, playing the long-game, the game of averages.

For players in particular, surviving this brutal game requires a sort of cognitive dissonance; knowing the most likely outcome is an out, yet believing that they will reach base anyway, each time they step up to the plate.³ Perseverance requires hope, above all else. How can you not be romantic about baseball?

The Inevitability of Improbability

The Seattle Mariners have been having a tough year. This is nothing new, unfortunately, but this year in particular, they have been plagued by injury after injury. These include a litany of your typical lat/groin/oblique strains, but also some that are the truly bizarre. For instance, at the beginning of July, Julio Rodriguez was put on concussion protocol after being beaned in the back of the head by a throw in a double play attempt. Three weeks later, after just a few games back, Julio was taken out of a game again after being hit by a throw (though fortunately not to the head again).

I cannot find actual statistics on this, but based on my own experience from years of watching baseball plus a Google search for headlines⁴, a runner is only hit by a throw from a fielder perhaps a handful of times over an entire MLB season. In this case, out of hundreds players across the league, it not only happened to the same player twice in the same month, but both resulted in an injury serious enough to be removed from the game. This is wildly improbable, to say the least. And yet, here we are.

OK but why are you talking about baseball on a chronic illness blog?

Lately I feel I have a lot in common with the Seattle Mariners. The hits just won’t stop coming, one thing after another. I fear I must conclude I have either incurred the wrath of one or more supernatural deities, or I am simply suffering in an unfeeling universe governed by the thermodynamics of chaos, where, given the vast amount of possibilities, wildly improbable occurences are inevitable.

Getting hit more than I’m getting hits

In short, folks, it’s been a Year^TM. I feel like my garbage collagen has taken the reins and is running the show, and I’m getting hit by more pitches than I’m hitting. To illustrate, here is an abbreviated list of maladies, in order of onset or when I started the latest treatment. I am only including conditions I have been actively working on.

1. Neck and shoulder pain: likely from my amateur pitching career
2. Dyspareunia (Pain during sex): turns out I have a hymenal tag that was repeatedly being torn open. (This is exactly as much fun as it sounds.)
3. Spondylolisthesis: Re-aggravated my lower back issue breaking down cardboard boxes for recycling.
4. Thumb/Hand/wrist/elbow pain in both arms: a few months ago I had surgery to essentially tie my thumb on tighter and am preparing to do the same on the right.
5. Avulsion fracture of my right calcaneus: Tripped on uneven ground outside at night.
6. Right ankle pain: despite the fracture itself healing, my ankle is still unstable and in pain, with sinus tarsi syndrome and deterioration of the interosseous membrane.
7. Grade II tear of gastroc med: While at physical therapy for #5/6, I tore the calf muscle on my other (left) leg while doing a single-leg lift.

Life with a chronic illness is a master class in perseverance

I am not writing this to whine or to seek pity, but rather because I know I am not alone. This is what having a chronic illness looks like. This is what hypermobile Ehlers-Danlos looks like. It means your biology is always working against you. You can do everything you’re *supposed* to and still suffer injury after injury, complication after complication. And, like a batter’s slump, the only way out is through. Even when you keep getting beaned with balls while trying to crawl your way out.

How do we keep going when it’s always one thing after another? Or worse, when it’s ten things at once? When we spend years trying every treatment, medication, diet, strategy under the sun and not only still wake up in pain every day but keep running into new complications? When we’re dismissed by doctors and colleagues and loved ones so often we start doubting ourselves?

We are able to keep going because our lives have bred us to be resilient. We’ve been training for this our whole lives, whether we knew it or not. Likely we’ve been running these drills since well before we discovered our pain, fatigue, etc wasn’t normal. In many ways, we simply did not have a choice other than to learn to persevere. But that’s only half the story. We also persevere because survival is insufficient.

We do it for the love of the game.

Incidentally, in that at-bat Luke Raley hit a home run to put the Mariners in the lead. They went on to win 6-3.

Footnotes

1. See also ‘insufferable know it all’
2. Of course, I put the word “necessarily” in there because humans are a bit messier than dice. Mood, temperament, emotions, and fatigue all matter, and are difficult to account for statistically.
3. This is an oversimplification. Reaching base isn’t the only measure of success for a batter. But I am trying not to let this turn into a baseball blog, so I am adding this footnote in lieu of a thousand words on offensive strategies.
4. Google’s AI summary tried to help, but as usual in my experience, it confidently spat out an answer without evidence. The frequency it gave did align with my experience, but it cited sources that had no actual numbers to back up the claim and were only tangentially relevant. After arguing with it for a while, it admitted it was guessing at the frequency based on headlines reporting on these relatively rare events. Please remember that artificial intelligence is a misnomer.