Cardinals win 7-4! & even up series in Baltimore
Camden Yards May 27:
(A Chronicle of Temporal Baseball Anomalies, 2025)
They said it began at 6:36 PM EDT (whoever started timing this stuff), but time had become suspect long before that. The quantum baseball field shimmered… under artificial lights that cast no shadows, while reality itself fractured into infinite possibilities with each pitch. If you follow chaos theory and butterflies and fractals and such.
In what we’ll call the First Inning (though linear time had ceased to matter, and was not matter), Lars Nootbaar—if that is even his real name—tore through the fabric of spacetime itself, with what the umpiring authorities labeled a “single.” The surveillance screens called it a line drive, but we all knew better. The New Cardinals, agents of chaos, were infiltrating Baltimore’s carefully constructed order.
Reality shifted again when Willson Contreras pierced the veil with his “RBI single.” He will do that from time to time. One run manifested on the scoreboard, though no one could be certain if it had always been there or had retroactively inserted itself into our collective memory. The moment only knows.
By the Second Inning, the simulation was breaking down. Is this all a hologram? Lars Nootbaar—that name again—violated all known laws of physics with what they claimed was a “home run.” Two runs appeared from nowhere, like replicants among humans. Who truly scored these “runs”? The score read 3-0, but in whose favor? And in which timeline? The Cardinals.
The Orioles, those binary beings of orange and black, fought back against the entropy. Ryan Mountcastle discovered a temporal anomaly that the matrix classified as a “double.” But the universe demanded balance, and two strikeouts followed, as if prescribed by some cosmic algorithm. The score remained.
Time began to collapse in the Fifth Inning. A “wild pitch” tore open a wormhole, and Ryan O’Hearn—if he ever truly existed—launched what observers called a “three-run homer.” The scoreboard flickered: 4-3. But which reality were we watching? Which timeline had won? Who was truly “winning”?
The rain delay in the Sixth—a clear attempt by the universe to reset itself—failed to stabilize the quantum fluctuations. Players phased in and out of existence as “pitching changes” rewrote the fabric of reality. What is this baseball?
The Seventh Inning: I suppose THIS is “Winning?” (Masyn Winn with an RBI single) 4-4
By the Eighth Inning, all pretense of normalcy had dissolved. Nolan Arenado’s “home run” split the timeline again. Then the Walker-Barrero paradox occurred—one player replacing another in a quantum superposition of baserunning states. Nevertheless, The Cardinals took the Lead with not one but two triples occurring, an artifact of the matrix. Nolan Gorman tore open the fabric of reality with his first triple of the year (and maybe last!). Jordan Walker followed suit with his own triple, scoring the other tirpler!
The Ninth Inning: saw Ryan Helsley—or whatever entity wore his form—appear to “close” the game. But what was he really closing? A portal? A timeline? A crack in the universe itself? Whatever it was we just witness earlier tonight, it was Saved.
The final score read Cardinals 7, Orioles 4. But in the end, who could trust the numbers? Who could trust that any of this had happened at all? Perhaps somewhere, in another reality, this game was still being played, would always be played, had never been played at all. All of the scores have been recorded. But this time, we won. Somehow, despite all the odds, we are here.
And Lars Nootbaar’s name? It echoes still, like a glitch in the fabric that is our reality, our timeline of timelessness: a reminder that in baseball, as in life, reality is never quite what it seems. Or is it?
Thank you for entertaining my goofy little sci-fi short story writing moment that allowed me to go back to my college years mindset for a moment or two
Tune in tomorrow same time as tonight, 5:35 CST. If time is absolute, and the large hadron collider do not crash our operating system!