It Contains an Element of Mystery

Don’t look now but the Milwaukee Brewers may soon become the first club in major league history to break league winning- and losing-streak records in the same season.

It just goes to show you that winning streaks are overrated. Just ask the German army.

The key to victory is really consistency. Ralph Waldo Emerson said that a foolish consistency is the “hobgoblin of little minds,” but how many pennants did he ever win?

I would think the absolute, definitive word on winning streaks was offered by the 1916 New York Giants. They had one winning streak--baseball’s longest--of 26 games. And they didn’t win the pennant. But wait a minute! They had another winning streak that year of 17 games. And still didn’t win the pennant!

Can you imagine a team that went a total of 43 games without a loss in two stretches during the season finishing--a little drum roll, please, professor-- fourth?

You would think the Giants of that era would have put up an all-time losing streak. How do you lose 66 of 152 games in a season in which you go 26-0 and 17-0 in two stretches. But John McGraw’s Giants are nowhere to be found in the consecutive-losses list. They were just mediocre when they weren’t brilliant.

Streaking teams often streak right into the pennant. But not always.

One of the most famous streaks of all was the Giants’ run in 1951, when they shoved aside a 12-game Dodger lead in the pennant race and swept to 16 straight victories. There would have been no “Miracle of Coogan’s bluff”--Bobby Thomson’s famous playoff home run--without that streak. Because there would have been no playoff.

Teams that blow 12-game leads in August usually crumple like an old air bag, but the Dodgers actually played acceptable pennant ball that year. The Giants, on the other hand, just played well over their heads. Streaking teams usually do.

There’s a hypnotic quality about winning streaks. It’s an almost mystical experience. Every golfer can attest that there are days when, through no fault (or gift) of your own, the ball just seems to have a will of its own, to be targeted to greens and fairways on every shot. You don’t know what you’re doing right, but every putt runs right for the hole, every chip seems on a track of its own.

Writers have been known to lock themselves in a creative funk and start putting words on paper with no idea where they came from.

It’s what seems to happen in winning streaks. Almost as if it’s an outside-the-body experience.

It’s an idea that so fascinates Hollywood that it seems unable to make a baseball picture without resorting to metaphysics. Every film seems to have angels in the outfield or a guy who lights cigarettes with his fingers making a deal with a daydreamer for a pennant or a magical potion that, rubbed on the arm, turns an economics professor into a 20-game winner.

Baseball has that effect on people. All sports have superstitions, but baseball is ridiculous. Guardian angels are not considered too farfetched in the dugouts in this game. Ballplayers, to a man, believe there are outside forces at work in their game.

Listen to the shriek of an aggrieved batsman when somebody breaks his favorite bat: “There were still 50 hits in there!” The bat, you see, has a life of its own. Fielders take their gloves to bed with them.

It goes beyond wearing the same underwear through a winning streak or stepping across the same foul line in the same way when you go 4 for 4. There are forces to be appeased out there.

Losing streaks are believed to be supernaturally directed, too. Ballplayers call them slumps, and they know positively in their hearts that slumps are never wholly the fault of the people or the team in them. It’s the fates, not the stance, the stride or the swing.

You get out of slumps when the mysterious elements out there get bored and take their whammy elsewhere, hopefully to the Yankees. As soon as he or she or it stops positioning fielders in the exact trajectory of the line drives your team is hitting, you get out of the slump and not before.

You don’t escape a slump by pretending it’s not there. You do the next best thing. You pretend it’s there, but it’s not your fault. Somebody out there has it in for you. Somebody you can’t see.

It’s a standard tactic that enables great athletes to keep their self-esteem.

The pitcher is getting you out repeatedly? He’s doing something illegal, then. He’s scuffing up the ball, greasing it.

You can’t get the ball out of the infield? They’re letting the grass grow too high, watering the infield.

That’s why a winning streak has an unreal quality, an element of tables levitating, lights appearing in an abandoned house.

The best teams in baseball history lose 50 games a year. The 1927 Yankees only lost 44, but that wasn’t a team, it was an apocalypse. The trick is never to lose them in clusters.

The most effective winning streaks are usually the late-season ones, but here again, the 1916 Giants confound the percentages. They won 26 games in the final month in 1916 but finished seven games behind Brooklyn.

The Chicago Cubs in 1935 put together the most telling September drive in the game’s history, winning 21 in a row and overtaking the Dizzy Dean Cardinals in the last week.

The Brewers are the first team to break the league record for consecutive victories at the start of the season and find themselves in third place by the middle of May.

There’s never any logical explanation. That’s why Hollywood scenarists, baffled by the inconsistencies of the grand old game, turn its scripts into sci-fi. Baseball defies logic.

The Milwaukee Brewers are a good club. Otherwise, they would not have won their first 13 games and 16 out of 17. A team that has Robin Yount, Cecil Cooper, Rob Deer and a no-hit pitcher is not a candidate for an all-time losing streak.

That’s why Americans love baseball. It’s not a game, it’s an eccentricity. It wasn’t invented, it came out of a lamp.