Lost in Translation

We’re warned to take eyewitness accounts with a grain of salt. Humans are very good at pattern-matching, and we’ll often make up details to support our memory’s version of a story – or even completely reverse details: an eyewitness to a car accident might, for example, say that he saw Bob get out of the Subaru’s passenger seat to look at the damage caused by the Mazda when, in fact, Bob was a passenger in the Mazda and never came close to the Subaru. Memory and perception are funny things, and we can’t always rely on them to be accurate.

In browsing TV Tropes today (I won’t link, so as to save you from wasting the entire day), I came across the page for The Casey Effect. It’s a sports trope that dictates that fictional sports games invariably go down to the wire, with one final push, buzzer-beating shot, or last-ditch home run winning the game for the protagonists who were otherwise sure to lose. The page reminded me of a baseball game I’d watched about ten years ago: it was a Mariners game, where the opposing team had scored a large number of runs – 20 or more – in the early innings, but then the Mariners came back from behind in a massive rally that won them the game. I remember watching it at a friend’s house here in Richmond, and I remember all of us being sure that the Mariners couldn’t win the game, and getting more and more excited as they fought out a win anyway.

The trouble was, I couldn’t remember who they were playing or what date the game was on, or even what the final score was, and records of the Mariners’ seasons about that time didn’t mention a comeback like that. So I went hunting. I knew that the game had to be in 2001 – in 2000 I hadn’t met the friends I was watching the game with, and in 2002 I’d moved away before the beginning of the baseball season – so I went to the definitive baseball reference and started looking through each game of 2001, looking for a high-scoring, close-scoring game that involved the Mariners. After about half an hour, I found what must be the game in question: on August 5, 2001, the Cleveland Indians defeated the Seattle Mariners 15-14.

Wait, what?

According to my memory, the opposing team (the Indians make sense; since Cleveland is nearby, we had a reason to be watching the game) scored at least 20 runs early on, and then the Mariners came back from behind to win the game in a breathtaking rally. In reality, it was the Mariners who’d scored 12 runs in the first three innings; the Indians scored two in the fourth, but the Mariners scored 2 more in the fifth to re-establish their lead. The Indians then spent the 7th, 8th, and 9th innings tying the game – they were the home team, so they really did tie the game up in the bottom of the ninth – and then scored another run in the 11th inning to win. The majestic Mariners comeback that I’d been holding in my memory for almost a decade was actually a game where the Mariners had been the favored team – they were 18 games ahead of the Indians – and they’d lost the game.

Strange how our memories choose the wrong things to remember.