Education Quote by John Thorn

Baseball sells itself as a machine - nine innings, three outs, a geometry of failure - then survives by constantly proving it isn’t one. John Thorn, writing as the sport’s leading historian-curator, leans into that contradiction. “Anything, absolutely anything, can happen” reads like a bedtime story for new fans, but it’s also a defense of baseball’s cultural relevance in an era that keeps demanding predictability, pace, and clean narratives.

The clever move is the hinge between myth and evidence: he pairs the sweeping claim with a timestamped receipt. “Just two days ago” drags eternity down to the present tense, and “something…that had never happened…before” is the historian’s favorite drug: novelty inside an archive. Thorn’s intent isn’t just to celebrate randomness; it’s to underline baseball’s endless capacity to generate “firsts” despite being a game obsessively documented for over a century. In a sport where fans can recite 1927 splits and argue about 1975 like it was last week, the possibility of a genuinely unprecedented event is a small miracle.

Subtext: baseball’s chaos isn’t a bug, it’s the feature that keeps the whole historical project alive. Thorn positions the reader as a learner - “he or she” - because fandom, in his view, is an education in contingency. You don’t watch baseball for inevitability; you watch because the record book is still unfinished, and the past can’t fully prepare you for Tuesday.