Like me, one of my childhood rabbis, Rob Dobrusin, is a baseball fan. In addition to teaching me Torah as a young person, he also taught me to appreciate the writing of Bart Giamatti, the late Commissioner of the MLB. So the other day, when he posted this meme about the Pittsburgh Pirates on Facebook, I was, like him, rather amazed:

The Pirates are, as my kids might say, notoriously “mid” as a team. Despite the fact that they have boasted some exceptional talent over the years—pictured here is Paul Skenes, arguably the best pitcher in the National League for the last couple of seasons—they have made just seven World Series appearances since 1909, the last one coming nearly half a century ago in 1979. The stats here bear that out: a perfectly balanced, ho-hum record.

But of course, this is the age of fake news. So at first I was like, “Come on, that has to be an AI-generated piece of spammy clickbait.” Which is to say, I distrusted the information. Which further implied that I subtly thought Rabbi Dobrusin had fallen for it. Which felt icky. Not until I checked with my oldest son (the one with encyclopedic baseball knowledge and the wariness of a kid growing up in the AI age) did I confirm that this was, in fact, real (“Yeah, WTF Stats is reliable.” Good to know.) and my faith in the sagacity of my childhood rabbi was restored.

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© The Times of Israel (Blogs)