Every baseball fan, no matter what he or she may say, is a statistician at heart. If Derek Jeter is in the middle of a 5-for-40 stretch, everyone will say it’s just a matter of time before he gets hot. They know that his .318 career average is more telling than what he’s done in the past two weeks. In this one example, you see the two basic statistical concepts a fan needs to appreciate the game at work: An understanding that cherry-picked numbers aren’t useful, and an understanding that conclusions drawn from more information are more useful than those drawn from less information.

This is a neat and orderly framework within which to understand the game, and it explains most of what we see on the field more often than not. Jeter’s 5-for-40 stretch almost certainly has some specific cause, which could be anything from anger over poor cable reception to keeping his hands too high in his batting stance, but it’s also indistinguishable from a random stretch of bad luck, and so can and should be treated that way. From time to time, though, something happens to remind us that this whole rhetorical framework is just an artifice, and thus to remind us just how incomprehensibly strange a game baseball really is.

At the end of play on June 1, Cubs ace Carlos Zambrano, a pending free agent with a shot at breaking salary records this winter, was 5–5 with a 5.62 ERA, which just hinted at the miseries of his season. He’d struck out 6.31 batters a game to that point, while giving up 10.14 hits and 1.59 home runs. That meant he was striking out about a quarter fewer batters than usual, giving up hits about half as often, and surrendering twice as many home runs. With a fastball that often didn’t break 90 mph in the early innings of games, injury speculation was so rampant that Zambrano had to avow publicly that he was healthy and merely having trouble with his arm slot. This of course just provoked more speculation.

During that June 1 game, Zambrano got into a fight with catcher Michael Barrett, a ridiculously embarrassing incident caught by television cameras. Barrett ended up in the hospital and a sorrowful Zambrano ended up apologizing in public. “He came to me the next day, and he apologized and I apologized to him and we cried,” said the macho pitcher, who vowed to begin his season anew — and then, oddly, did so. In his very next start he struck out nine in 6.2 innings. His fastball was overpowering, his splitter crashed through the strike zone like a medicine ball, his slider sawed at bats. Since the Barrett fight, Zambrano’s ERA has been 1.43 over five starts in which he’s struck out 10.27 per nine, allowing .72 home runs and a ridiculous 4.3 hits. He carried a no-hitter into the eighth against San Diego before losing 1–0, and in his next start, a big one against the crosstown White Sox, he struck out seven of the first nine hitters he faced and nursed a 2–0 lead into the seventh before giving up his first run — a home run that was just the second hit he’d allowed all day.

It’s very rare that you not only see such a stark change in a player’s performance, but one that so clearly lines up with a vivid, dramatic incident. One day Zambrano looks as if he has, at best, succumbed to the grind of being worked like a dray horse through his early 20s, is at worst pitching through serious injuries, and is most probably a wreck, his confidence lost; several days later he’s suddenly a monster. Can baseball really be that easy? Can a player be worried over his contract and fighting mechanical issues and self-doubt and then essentially decide to just focus and turn into Bob Gibson?

These questions bring us right back to the artificial framework within which we all understand the game, which tells us that the answers don’t really matter: Zambrano’s problems may have been solved by the Barrett fight and by his subsequent public vow to begin a new season, but then they may not have been. His return to dominance is just what would have been expected anyway — he’s a first-rate pitcher, not a bum who can be expected to go out and give up six runs a game, and the bad was more or less bound to eventually be balanced out by the good. Of course a renewed focus and a clean slate helped — Zambrano isn’t a robot — but he’s also no more capable of simply deciding to be good than anyone else. So, anyway, goes the logic.

This may not be completely satisfying, but look at the alternative. If you do choose to ignore the nagging voice of the inner statistician and believe in Zambrano’s ability to consciously remake his season, you have to accept all the implications of that belief — among them that players who aren’t doing well are failing because they lack will. That’s insulting to players. In the end, everyone is a bit of a statistician because they understand that baseball is hard and luck is capricious, and that a great player playing badly will most often end up playing like one, given enough time. All through the season we detect little turning points, rarely so obvious as Zambrano’s fight, but always there. Are they illusions? Maybe, and maybe not — but if they aren’t, they certainly work as if they are.

tmarchman@nysun.com