Going into Saturday, the Detroit Tigers are on pace to have the worst offense ever*.
In fact, they were on a record-setting pace last month. And have since gotten worse.

We always know these events are possible. And that everyone has bad seasons. And even that there is a chance that everyone has a bad season at the same time.

But what happens when the improbable becomes such a statistical anomaly as we are seeing right now?

This isn’t the case of long odds. Like a long shot horse winning the Kentucky Derby. This is like nine different long shots each winning 60 Kentucky Derbies in a row back-to-back-to-back-to-back…

The statistical probability of this level of futility is beyond comprehension. Our dialectic brains may refuse to call this truly impossible. But calling it improbable is like saying Babe Ruth was “decent.”

As Brandon Day argues, what do we do with this information? Do we assume this futility continues at this pace? Or do we assume the statistics will progress to the mean? Do we honestly assume it has to get better?

Are we like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, flipping a coin? It can’t possibly keep coming up heads, can it?

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*We have been in the modern era of baseball for about a century. I think we should feel comfortable saying ever and mean it without having to say every single time that we mean “ever in the modern era”.