Hey, Who Took My Momentum?!

After all these years of inquiries about the nature of this effable quality so many call "momentum," Major League Baseball has finally provided clarity. Here is today's headline about the St. Louis-Pittsburgh NLDS series, knotted at a game apiece following the Bucs' 7-1 victory.

Strategy Shifts Momentum in Pirates' Favor

So there you go. Momentum is . . . a win. A single nine-inning triumph, according to the official mouthpiece of MLB, constitutes momentum. A team secures one of these on-field victories, much as it had done 94 times during the season, including 10 times against the opponent in question, and it suddenly has this . . . thing, momentum.

Before that one victory, evidently, the Pirates did not have momentum. In fact, it appears that Major League Baseball asserts that the Cardinals, with their 9-1 win the previous day, took custody of momentum until it was transferred the following evening to Pittsburgh, much like Baby Veronica recently got shuffled from her adoptive parents in South Carolina to her biological father in Oklahmoa and back to the adoptive couple. Apparently, the Capobiancos now have momentum, as well as Veronica. The difference there is that their fight for momentum required court rulings, bench warrants, extradition requests, arrest threats and the intervention of an entire Indian tribe, whereas the Pirates merely had to build a lead and get three outs in the ninth.

The two teams will play again, twice, in PNC Park, where, we are to infer, momentum will be up for grabs, like the Little Brown Jug in the Michigan-Minnesota football rivalry. The magic power of Pittsburgh's momentous Game 2 victory will shrivel to irrelevance as momentum is bestowed upon Game 3's winner, and then presumably transferred back again after Game 4 and so on. If the series goes back and forth to a deciding Game 5, momentum will have been tossed about like a hot potato until it suddenly evaporates in the wake of actual elimination. 

God help poor momentum in a back-and-forth seven-game series. It must get vertigo spinning around from one club to the other until finally falling exhausted into the prevailing dugout.

Before PETA and the ACLU get hot and bothered about the inhumane treatment of momentum, there is good news. This wanton abuse of momentum is a figment of everyone's imagination because . . . momentum is a figment of everyone's imagination. In a five-game series, the survivor must win three games, not two and not one. Winning the first game does not convey any special advantage except banking one of those three wins. Being up two games-to-none, or two-to-one, or whatever, has proved pretty thin gruel (see: 2012 San Francisco Giants) for teams unable to close the deal. Each game is a separate entity beholden to that day's starting pitchers, game conditions, lineups,  tweaks of strategy, luck, more luck and a host of other factors.

Someone has to win Game 3. What they will have then is two wins and nothing more. They will still need to outscore the other team in one of the two remaining contests, and momentum is not going to help them one iota.