Remembering the day Jordan Lyles almost no-hit the Colorado Rockies

Baseball is a sport where, no matter how much you suck, you can be king of the game for a day. It’s one of the reasons why I love it. Scooter Gennett is a fairly decent player but last year we saw him go yard four times in a game. It was remarkable. It will never happen again and it probably never should’ve happened. He was the best player in the world for a day.

On Tuesday, a more extreme version of this happened in San Diego. Padres starter Jordan Lyles almost dealt a perfect game against the Colorado Rockies.

Though Lyles didn’t finish the feat, he proves the point further than many past examples. Lyles is the same guy that was left for dead by the Rockies last season, picked up by arguably the worst team in baseball on a flyer for a minor league deal and worked his way back up. Before that even, you can make the case that Lyles has been the worst pitcher of the past decade.

Since his MLB debut in 2011, he has compiled a 28-49 record with a 5.36 ERA, which averages out a career ERA+ of 79 and bWAR of -3.4.

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The once prize of the Dexter Fowler trade for Colorado was really bad in Denver. In fact, his seven 1-2-3 innings on Tuesday may have been more than his entire tenure in Colorado as he had a near 1.500 WHIP at a mile high.

There’s no way to stress enough how bad Lyles’ MLB career has been. But for two-and-a-half hours on a random afternoon in mid-May, he was the best pitcher in the world. Hurling 10 strikeouts in 7.1 innings and allowing just two baserunners (both in the eighth), Lyles tossed a 90-GameScore gem in the process of retiring 22 straight Rockies.

Baseball is weird like that.

The Rockies are probably going to the postseason this year … or will at the very least finish above .500. The Padres will probably get near 75 wins and it will be considered a good season.

They play 162 games for a reason and that’s because it truly takes that many contests to undo the randomness of playing a sport for six months.

Triple-A teams routinely beat big clubs in exhibitions. Give them 10 contests to make it a series and the big boys will probably win eight. But still there are those two games where the preposterous happens.

There is a pretty simple mathematic explanation to all the noise today. Like that the Rockies have an historically bad offense, two of their best players did not start and they played in a defensive-freidnly park.

Though there’s something too absurd about Lyles’ performance.

French philosopher Albert Camus explored this thought in the 20th century in his essay, “The Myth of Sisyphus.” It is about a man who is doomed to push a rock up a hill each day only to watch it roll back down again.

That’s what watching baseball everyday is like nonetheless playing it.

Sisyphus becomes Camus’ rule of absurd when he recognizes the absurdity of his task, but decides to be happy in spite of it.

Baseball is cruel in the same way. It’s irrational and meaningless and yet we are desperate to find reason and meaning in it.

Camus says once you realize you’re stuck pushing a boulder up a hill (or watching baseball everyday), you come to a crisis in thought. There are only three choices for recourse. One, return to the cycle of daily life and don’t think about it. Two, stop watching baseball. Three, and this is the Camus-preferred option, rebellion. Accept the absurd and be happy anyway because who cares if baseball controls how you feel.

Next: A brief history of betting in baseball ... and how it may change very soon

I don’t know why I’m attempting to find meaning in a 4-0 Tuesday afternoon Padres-Rockies game but here we are. Something maniacal, mathematically plausible but ultimately utterly meaningless happened at Petco Park in May. Jordan freakin Lyles almost went 27 up, 27 down. It’s absurd, or as Bud Black would say, “That’s baseball.”

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