Baseball is a proper and even noble pastime, but sometimes the kids who cover them get a little too granular for their own good, or anyone else's.
For instance, they have, because of their typical bias toward hyperaggressive pedantry, decided that the Cleveland Indians either have or have not broken the record for consecutive wins, based on the rules for tie games in 1916.
That's all you really need to know – that there is a debate over what baseball rules from 101 years ago were as opposed to what they should have been.
And now, to save us all from ourselves and hopefully to shut everyone up, the Indians must win five more games in succession.
Why? Because we cannot shut up on our own.
And shutting up isn't a bad thing sometimes. Sometimes, quiet disinterest is actually quite admirable, as in, "Your discussion bores me into catatonia. Wake me up five minutes after you've all left."
There is even a debate about whether winning 22 consecutive games has any meaning without a championship (which is just a modified version of the Oakland A's argument from 15 years earlier), as though the baseball season starts not in April but in mid-October. Once again, bending reality for a "hot" take that leaves both dispenser and listener worse for the social exchange.
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Either way, the wisdom from these two postulations is that the Indians can only validate what has been an extraordinary run of baseball by doing it for another week, but then replicating it in the World Series. Otherwise, they are frauds, pretenders and mountebanks.
And it makes the whole "shut up" thing a growing movement in a nation mostly used to shouting at the top of its collective lungs. If the alternative is having a President who wants to explain ESPN to us as though he were Calvin Coolidge fulminating about The Sporting News, how can shutting up be wrong?
