Ian Malcolm Knows Why Billy Wagner Blew A Save

The lack of humility before nature that's being displayed here, uh... staggers me. Pemulis, you think that uh... with two outs in the ninth and two men on you can just uh... already have a text message prepared that reads "Big Motherfucking Pelf"? Now, of course I'm not saying that I knew Wagner would give up a home run. I'm simply saying that, uh... against the Mets this season, life, uh... finds a way. If there is one thing the history of Mets baseball has taught us it's that the other team will probably not be contained. They will break free, expand to new territory, and crash through barriers, painfully, maybe even dangerously.

Obviously, uh... having the text message prepped and ready to go was uh... a part of something called "The butterfly effect". This is part of a larger notion called "chaos theory". I'm going to, uh... get some help from my friend wikipedia here to explain these to you.

Chaos theory describes the behavior of certain dynamical systems – that is, systems whose state evolves with time – that may exhibit dynamics that are highly sensitive to initial conditions (popularly referred to as the butterfly effect). As a result of this sensitivity, which manifests itself as an exponential growth of perturbations in the initial conditions, the behavior of chaotic systems appears to be random. This happens even though these systems are deterministic, meaning that their future dynamics are fully defined by their initial conditions, with no random elements involved. This behavior is known as deterministic chaos, or simply chaos.

The butterfly effect is a phrase that encapsulates the more technical notion of sensitive dependence on initial conditions in chaos theory. Small variations of the initial condition of a dynamical system may produce large variations in the long term behavior of the system. So this is sometimes presented as esoteric behavior, but can be exhibited by very simple systems: for example, a ball placed at the crest of a hill might roll into any of several valleys depending on slight differences in initial position.

Another way of explaining the, uh... butterfly effect is: Let's say you uh.. are holding your hand up. If I were to drop this bead of water on your knuckles, which, uh.. which way would it drip down your hand? Unpredictable. Chaos theory.

And so it's like I said to Pemulis when I saw him, uh... prepping that text message: Don't you see the danger, Pemulis, inherent in what you're doing here? Cellular power is the most awesome force the planet's ever witnessed, yet you wield it like a kid that's found his dad's gun.

Another example of chaos theory? Two outs, bottom of the ninth, two men on, Mark Reynolds is hit by a pitch. Umpire decides "hey fuck you, bat anyway". Chaos theory. Because he hit the shit out of the next ball so hard that I, uh... I thought to myself, "that's an impact tremor, that's what that sound is... I'm fairly alarmed here. " You've got to hand it to Pelf though, he's... uh... tenacious. As for Wagner's outing? That is one big pile of shit.

Alright, I'm, uh... outta here. When you gotta go, you gotta go.