The Mets, the Movies, and the Improbable

“Nobody knows anything.”

It’s one of Hollywood’s most famous quotes, delivered by screenwriter William Goldman, of “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” and “All the President’s Men” fame. The three words were Goldman’s assessment of the entertainment industry, specifically the ability of filmmakers and studios to consistently create high quality, popular films. Goldman was basically saying that no amount of planning, projecting, casting, budgeting, and directing could ever guarantee a successful movie. There are always going to be the sure things that will flop, and there are always going to be the low budget underdogs that will soar. Why? Nobody knows. READ MORE AFTER THE JUMP.

What makes Goldman’s Zen-like wisdom so powerful is that it applies not just to movies, but EVERYTHING. Take, for instance, Carlos Delgado.

The Mets first baseman, a potential Hall of Famer and one of baseball’s most consistent sluggers for years, suddenly, in the middle of last season just… stopped… hitting. He was useless during the Mets September swoon, and he carried it over into this season. Delgado was barely hitting his weight at the start of July, the fans were booing, the team was collapsing, and there was even talk of releasing him just to get him off the team. Almost everybody, including me, said he had just gotten old and lost his skills. What other reason could there be for a player of his stature and history to just fall off the grid? Surely this man who’d spent much of the last two decades smashing baseballs hadn’t just FORGOTTEN how to hit… right? He was done.

Except that he wasn’t. Remember, nobody knows anything, and nobody would have expected something as improbable as what started happening in July; or as New York Time sportswriter Ben Shpigel writes today, in something of an understatement, “..little of it could have been forseen.” Delgado began not just hitting, but carrying the team. Over the last two months, he’s hit more home runs and driven in more runs than almost any other player in baseball. Six times this year.. SIX TIMES!.. he’s hit two home runs in a game. His blast the other night against the Phillies, his second of the game, was one of the hardest hit balls I’ve ever seen, sailing over the edge of the third deck in right field, out into the New York night.

Now the Mets are in first place, and the boos Delgado was hearing at the start of the season have turned to chants of “MVP, MVP.” Everybody was wrong about him. Nobody knows anything.

The tale of Eli Manning is even more improbable, ending, as it did, with the New York Giants winning the Super Bowl. But after eight games last year, they were 3 and 5, and the consensus was, Manning didn’t have “it” and never would.

Except that he did, leading the Giants to the championship game against the undefeated Patriots. But even within that scenario, the improbabilities that became realities kept coming, and I’m talking, of course, about The Play. The pass to David Tyree to set up the winning touchdown. Two thing happened on that play that, conservatively speaking, were 100-to-1 shots. Why wasn’t Manning tackled when the Patriots defensive line swarmed over him? Even Eli said afterward he hadn’t broken a single tackle in four years. But this time, for whatever reason, he did, and we all know what happened next. He threw a pass that David Tyree basically caught with his helmet, a catch he probably couldn’t repeat if he tried it a thousand times. Nobody would ever think that he would catch that ball. But luckily for Giants fans, nobody knows anything.

The phrase certainly applies to the political world. Five years ago, Barack Obama and Sarah Palin were total unknowns. Now they’re the most famous people in America. I don’t recall anybody really being out in front on that. I have to laugh as I watch the pundits and talking heads endlessly predicting what’s going to happen in the race, when the fact is, they have no idea. They couldn’t have any idea. Like everything else in life, the variables are too many, the quantum possibilities too complex, to possibly say what comes next.

But where Goldman’s famous quote really hits home is in our own lives, and that is both a thrilling and a frightening concept. We want to believe our plans and projections are taking us to a predictable future, but it’s an illusion. Stuff happens, everything changes every second. Hitters start hitting again, families fall apart and come together again; life renews and restarts itself constantly, and anyone who claims to know where anything is going to end up is, to use a quaint old phrase, just whistlin’ Dixie. Because nobody knows anything, and thank goodness for that.