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silveradept[This is part of a series exploring the Baseball Tarot. If you would like to prompt for a part of the game or a card from the deck, all the rest of the month is available for your curiosity, about either baseball or Tarot. Leave a comment with a prompt if you want in. All other comments are still welcome, of course.]
Watching baseball on television obscures certain things in its decisions to focus on individual players and the white orb in flight. Since television is about the experience of having really good seats at a game and setting things from impossible angles, this makes a certain amount of sense. With the advent of replay machines, it is possible to see just about any play from the angle that is best to understand it, at the cost of not being able to see that live.
Television, though, rarely chooses to set itself up in ways to watch simultaneous development of action, and so it can make things like throws from the outfield more dramatic than they are by focusing on the ball instead of the field, shutting out the viewer from knowing where the runners are at all times. TV baseball makes it difficult to demonstrate a statistical category that's important to determining whether a fielder is worthwhile - the assist. By television's reckoning, teams only trade and draft for hitting and pitching, and fielding is a distant consideration at best. As anyone who has seen a good fielder at work knows, sometimes you trade being able to make runs for being able to stop someone else from making theirs. Good defense makes a team that's struggling to find runs still able to win games.
The assist, much like its counterparts in basketball and ice hockey, is a statistical category that tracks players that are involved in a play with a good result. Unlike the ones in the other games, though, baseball assists track defensive achievements, not offensive ones. Players taking part in a relay throw, a double play, or other situations where the ball is loaded between defenders and an it is recorded ate eligible to be credited with an assist of they aren't the player actually making the out. For example, on a fly ball to the outfield where a runner is tagging up and will attempt to advance to the next base, should the outfielder's arm deliver the baseball to the next base before the runner arrives and the runner be tagged out, the outfielder with the cannon arm is credited an assist in the out, since they the the ball accurately and swiftly enough for the other fielder to record an out.
Figuring out who gets an assist is pretty easy, if you're looking on your score sheet. Anytime there's more than one number in the sequence (6-3, for example, is the ground ball to the shortstop that is thrown over to first base for the out), someone should probably get an assist. Even if the player is involved unintentionally, as in having a ball bounce off them before another player fields and generates an out. Infielders will amass a large amount of assists over the course of their careers, outfielders less so, but the presence of a lot of assists in an outfielder's statistics sheet indicates an excellent throwing arm and teams that were willing to test it. Enough times getting out from the rocket launcher in the outfield will make those teams less likely to attempt to advance.
The assist is a valuable and fundamental part of a functioning defense, a thing so essential that it becomes somewhat ignored in the search for more rare things, like hits, home runs, strikeouts, and double plays. Assists are proof that players are executing their assignments on batted balls and that the defense is working as it should be. It's a nearly-invisible statistic and process that only really becomes visible when the assist is a timely or dramatic one that saves a run or when the assist didn't go as planned and there are wild throws, bad exchanges, or speedy runners.
The presence of this card in your reading represents teamwork at such a fundamental level that it's taken for granted. It may be worth re-examining the way your processes are set up to make sure that the right players are in the right positions, and that everyone is getting correct credit for their role on the team. Or this card may be a subtle nudge to remember that you have a team that can help you with your question, and that this particular problem or issue is I've that does better when you let someone else help you.
Maybe you're being asked to provide the assist for someone else. Helping others achieve their goals brings satisfaction, often on a small level, but sometimes on a bigger one, if your assist happens to be one that helps a lot to someone who appreciates it. Most assists don't come with reward other than sincere thanks, but that thanks can definitely help provide some of the warm and fuzzies that help humans believe they are actually good people at their cores, regardless of their circumstances.
The card has a pair of possible downsides. The first is the person that gives too much of themselves into assisting others, the second not enough. Avoiding being Scrooge seems life it should be relatively easy, but humans get attached to things like their money and power, and they have a multitude of ways of justifying miserliness and hoarding all of those things beyond what would be a comfortable life for themselves. Others are taught from the beginning that they as a person aren't worthy of anything, and that they should be always willing to shoulder other burdens and give it their time and money to the point of their own impoverishment and ailment. Or that they should devote their lives to making sure the man in their life never has to think about any sort of burden at home and do nothing to help maintain it. These cultural attitudes that devalue caregiving and emotional labor disproportionately affect women, and combine with other attitudes that make office cultures that don't see their women as valued contributors who get assists, but instead as something "less" to be taken advantage of and assumed that they will handle duties like notes and coffee because they're women and women are selfless.
Assists are recorded on just about every out. Statistical credit us given where that credit is due. We could stand to do a lot more of that outside the diamond, so that everyone can see all the people who are involved in bringing things to life, not just the people designated the stars of the show.
Watching baseball on television obscures certain things in its decisions to focus on individual players and the white orb in flight. Since television is about the experience of having really good seats at a game and setting things from impossible angles, this makes a certain amount of sense. With the advent of replay machines, it is possible to see just about any play from the angle that is best to understand it, at the cost of not being able to see that live.
Television, though, rarely chooses to set itself up in ways to watch simultaneous development of action, and so it can make things like throws from the outfield more dramatic than they are by focusing on the ball instead of the field, shutting out the viewer from knowing where the runners are at all times. TV baseball makes it difficult to demonstrate a statistical category that's important to determining whether a fielder is worthwhile - the assist. By television's reckoning, teams only trade and draft for hitting and pitching, and fielding is a distant consideration at best. As anyone who has seen a good fielder at work knows, sometimes you trade being able to make runs for being able to stop someone else from making theirs. Good defense makes a team that's struggling to find runs still able to win games.
The assist, much like its counterparts in basketball and ice hockey, is a statistical category that tracks players that are involved in a play with a good result. Unlike the ones in the other games, though, baseball assists track defensive achievements, not offensive ones. Players taking part in a relay throw, a double play, or other situations where the ball is loaded between defenders and an it is recorded ate eligible to be credited with an assist of they aren't the player actually making the out. For example, on a fly ball to the outfield where a runner is tagging up and will attempt to advance to the next base, should the outfielder's arm deliver the baseball to the next base before the runner arrives and the runner be tagged out, the outfielder with the cannon arm is credited an assist in the out, since they the the ball accurately and swiftly enough for the other fielder to record an out.
Figuring out who gets an assist is pretty easy, if you're looking on your score sheet. Anytime there's more than one number in the sequence (6-3, for example, is the ground ball to the shortstop that is thrown over to first base for the out), someone should probably get an assist. Even if the player is involved unintentionally, as in having a ball bounce off them before another player fields and generates an out. Infielders will amass a large amount of assists over the course of their careers, outfielders less so, but the presence of a lot of assists in an outfielder's statistics sheet indicates an excellent throwing arm and teams that were willing to test it. Enough times getting out from the rocket launcher in the outfield will make those teams less likely to attempt to advance.
The assist is a valuable and fundamental part of a functioning defense, a thing so essential that it becomes somewhat ignored in the search for more rare things, like hits, home runs, strikeouts, and double plays. Assists are proof that players are executing their assignments on batted balls and that the defense is working as it should be. It's a nearly-invisible statistic and process that only really becomes visible when the assist is a timely or dramatic one that saves a run or when the assist didn't go as planned and there are wild throws, bad exchanges, or speedy runners.
The presence of this card in your reading represents teamwork at such a fundamental level that it's taken for granted. It may be worth re-examining the way your processes are set up to make sure that the right players are in the right positions, and that everyone is getting correct credit for their role on the team. Or this card may be a subtle nudge to remember that you have a team that can help you with your question, and that this particular problem or issue is I've that does better when you let someone else help you.
Maybe you're being asked to provide the assist for someone else. Helping others achieve their goals brings satisfaction, often on a small level, but sometimes on a bigger one, if your assist happens to be one that helps a lot to someone who appreciates it. Most assists don't come with reward other than sincere thanks, but that thanks can definitely help provide some of the warm and fuzzies that help humans believe they are actually good people at their cores, regardless of their circumstances.
The card has a pair of possible downsides. The first is the person that gives too much of themselves into assisting others, the second not enough. Avoiding being Scrooge seems life it should be relatively easy, but humans get attached to things like their money and power, and they have a multitude of ways of justifying miserliness and hoarding all of those things beyond what would be a comfortable life for themselves. Others are taught from the beginning that they as a person aren't worthy of anything, and that they should be always willing to shoulder other burdens and give it their time and money to the point of their own impoverishment and ailment. Or that they should devote their lives to making sure the man in their life never has to think about any sort of burden at home and do nothing to help maintain it. These cultural attitudes that devalue caregiving and emotional labor disproportionately affect women, and combine with other attitudes that make office cultures that don't see their women as valued contributors who get assists, but instead as something "less" to be taken advantage of and assumed that they will handle duties like notes and coffee because they're women and women are selfless.
Assists are recorded on just about every out. Statistical credit us given where that credit is due. We could stand to do a lot more of that outside the diamond, so that everyone can see all the people who are involved in bringing things to life, not just the people designated the stars of the show.
