2024 Gets Remembered, Pt. 1

What will they bother to know about us 80 years from now?

I was trying to write about something that has been in the ball news recently, but I realized it was too entangled with my annual What Gets Remembered? piece. So I mashed them together, made something that got too long, and I am now splitting it into three parts. Today’s the throat-clearing Part 1, Wrong Answers Only; tomorrow will be the much sexier Part 2; then Monday or Tuesday should be the more thought-provoking Part 3, which is basically on a completely different topic (but entangled with sexy Part 2).

So, the original idea of What Gets Remembered is that a ball fan born 50 years from now will probably grow up to know only one or two things that happened during our most recent baseball season. (The first example that always comes to mind for me is Harvey Haddix losing a perfect game in the 13th inning—absolutely everybody my age knows that, and nothing else, from 1959.) We’re going to count down this year’s contenders for that one thing:

12. Jeremiah Estrada striking out 13 batters in a row (across multiple games)
I have developed a sort of overarching theory in my decade considering this question: The human brain wants to forget. Reality is too infinitely crowded for us to process it all, so we ignore, discard, block out or minimize whatever we possibly can, freeing up the mental space to focus on what we want to focus on. Since we’re essentially just egos in skulls, what we want to focus on is what we’re doing right now. Scaling this idea up to a species level: The present culture always considers itself the peak of human civilization, and wants to focus on itself. To attend to its own specialness, the present ignores as much of the past as it can.

The best way for a past event to get the present’s attention is to be a target. This way, whenever the present wants to congratulate itself—”Zac Gallen has thrown 40 scoreless innings, can you believe how great we are!”—it must cite whatever record Gallen is chasing. In this way, Orel Hershiser’s 59-inning scoreless streak stays famous.

Being cited is more important than being great. At this point a kid is more likely to learn that Earl Webb doubled 67 times in a season than to learn that Hank Greenberg homered 58 times in a season, because nobody in the present is ever chasing Greenberg, while somebody like Freddie Freeman is always chasing Webb. For that matter, the kid is more likely to learn about Webb’s doubles than to learn that Will White has the single-season record for innings pitched, because, again, at 680 innings nobody’s chasing that. Citation is more important than anything intrinsic about the achievement. It harnesses the present’s constant attention to itself.

Long way of saying that the Padres reliever Jeremiah Estrada struck out 13 batters in a row this year, breaking the record of 11¹ set in 2023 by José Alvarado. Estrada’s accomplishment wasn’t the biggest story of the season, I barely noticed that it had happened, just as I barely noticed that Alvarado had set it a year earlier. Estrada, the real pitcher, just isn’t all that interesting to us. But as time passes and he becomes a statistical target for other great(er) pitchers, he could be cited semi-regularly forever, his record becoming in that way more memorable than any number of generally better achievements from this year (Bobby Witt Jr.’s WAR) that the future won’t care about at all.

(I think it’s actually more likely that this mark gets broken a few more times before it settles in as a famous record.)

11. The Royals making the playoffs one year after losing 106 games
This will be cited for a while—anytime a future team goes from last place to first, their turnaround will be compared to The Worst Team To Ever Make The Playoffs A Year Later. But the Royals have two things working against their immortality: In the tanking era, 106 losses is barely even bad (see below). And in the expanded-playoffs era, merely making the playoffs alone is barely even success. If they’d won the World Series, like the worst-to-first 1991 Twins did, this turnaround would have had real legs.

Same goes for the Tigers white-flagging the trade deadline and then making the playoffs anyway. If they’d made the World Series—or if they’d gone so far as to trade Tarik Skubal and then make the playoffs—I’d strongly consider them timeless. But I think the Tigers’ comeback after the deadline is a classic 20-years story, contained to a single generation: Super interesting to those who experienced it, but not interesting merely as a description.

10. The Rickwood Field game
This exercise always ends up leading to a lot of speculative fiction about what could happen to make things memorable. The first Rickwood Field Game seemed like a big success, especially poignant because of the death of Willie Mays two days before it. A sequel game is purportedly in the works. You could imagine a Rickwood Field Game becoming a beloved annual tradition, even—if you squint a little—the annual centerpiece of MLB’s summer schedule. It’d eventually be named the Willie Mays Game, obviously. Maybe there’d be a display somewhere showing every Hall of Famer who had ever played in the ballpark—181 and counting—and maybe this would become a must-experience event in any future Hall of Famer’s career. Or maybe none of that. But we always try to identify which modest events might grow into something eternal, and this could plausibly be one.

9. Paul Skenes’ rookie season
It’s among the greatest rookie seasons ever for a pitcher, and by starting the All-Star game he joined a very short list of previous rookie-pitcher -manias: Nomo in ‘95, Valenzuela in ‘81, Fidrych in ‘76. (And, uh, Stenhouse in 1962.) If Skenes has a reasonably healthy career, there’s a good chance he’ll be an iconic pitcher and The Last Of His Kind—every era now producing a Last Of His Kind, given the constant diminishment of starting pitchers’ role.

But threading the needle whereby Skenes is historically important enough for us to remember his rookie season (a la Dwight Gooden), yet not so amazingly great that his career simply overshadows it is (a la Tom Seaver), is difficult—especially because, by failing to qualify for the ERA title, he didn’t set any official records. He would have: rookie ERA record, for one. But since he didn’t, his season won’t be cited very frequently, and he won’t be a target for future rookies to top.

8. Freddie Freeman’s Gibby home run/overall World Series performance
The former is a tad more likely on “there’ll be a statue” grounds, even though I’ve argued that it was the latter that was more special, “as consequential as any great World Series performance you could name.” But, ultimately, I don’t think Freeman was limping enough to make it into the distant future’s montages, nor were his World Series stats quite enough to be regularly cited as records. That said: “Grand slam to walk-off a World Series game” is the ultimate backyard fantasy, and he’s the only player in history to do it.

7. The bad uniforms
It won’t be very interesting to people in 80 years that players showed up to the 2024 spring training and found the lettering on the jerseys looked a little cheap and the opacity of the pant was of universal concern. The embarrassment of the situation was fairly quickly resolved and forgotten about, and the whole regular season was played without much further mention. On the other hand: There were pictures of ballplayers’ testicles AND MORE showing through their pants! Assuming something like an internet culture exists for another century, how could those pictures not pop back up every three or four years?

6. The bad White Sox
The first thing you think about in this exercise is, will the World Series champs be remembered? That’s just about the best way to make my list, by being a team so notable it gets a nickname. The 2024 Dodgers aren’t one of those teams. They would have been if they’d won the title in 2022—then they’d be in the greatest-team-of-all-time debate. And they quite likely would have if they hadn’t won the title in 2020—then there would have been the suspense of whether the best regular-season run in history would ever level up. Instead, though, they’re a pretty generic World Series champ: Not particularly great as a team, with just the 98 wins; not particularly memorable within their own narrative; not particularly rich as text, given that the tension had already been snapped by 2020. Lots of potential here, but ends up being just another common World Series outcome.

Then there are the White Sox, the one team that unambiguously set a record this year: the all-time record for losses, unseating a very famous bad team, the 1962 Mets. But, just as the 2024 Dodgers were the best team in baseball but in a bit of an unmemorable way, the White Sox managed to turn an unambiguous record into something sort of ambiguous. By winning five of their final six games, they finished 41-121—the most losses ever but not the worst winning percentage ever; so are they even the worst? It was fitting: These White Sox lost boringly, the exact opposite of those Mets. They didn’t have a quippy manager like Casey Stengel making sport of things; they didn’t have bloopers, blow-ups, busts, historically bad individual performances. There isn’t even a defining GIF of this season. The ~2012 Astros had three all-time GIFs of their failure: Marwin Gonzalez tripping on first base, Jonathan Villar’s butt slide, and infielders team up to do blooper. I will go to my grave convinced that those Astros were actually a much, much worse team than these White Sox.

The White Sox managed to make the 1962 Mets less likely to be famous 80 years from now, but I’m not convinced they’ll be all that famous themselves. Also, given the unprecedented run of 110-loss teams lately, we might as well expect some tanking team to undercut them before long.

*

We’ll get to 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 tomorrow. They’re all the same guy. Update: Here it is!

1. The record for a single game is 10, set by Tom Seaver, matched a couple times since, and very famous.