Fenway philosophy

If you think baseball has been freighted with too many metaphors, Dr. Perri Klass agrees with you.

In this week’s New England Journal of Medicine, she resists the easy analogies as she tells the story of being on call while at a game at Fenway Park in 2005, before she moved to New York University. You know she’ll get the call pediatricians dread (and she does). She evokes not only the irritation at having forgotten she was on call, but also the terror that something was really wrong with the child who had a fever and pain in his neck (he was fine). No mystery or metaphor there, she says.

She was never on call at the ball park again, but she thought of that night earlier this year, when she was listening on the radio to cancer survivor Jon Lester’s no-hitter. What were the odds of that child three years earlier actually having the meningitis she feared? What were the chances that Jon Lester would prevail?

"Baseball is, after all, a game of statistics -- knowing the statistics, defying the statistics, celebrating the statistics," she writes.

This time there was a lesson to be learned about both baseball and medicine, she concedes.

“Maybe something about how it’s not only about the odds of survival – and sometimes about beating those odds – but also about how surviving means open odds on all the other likely and unlikely things you can do with the rest of your life.”