This is a fun little essay I wrote in 2009 or 2010. I’m sure I posted it somewhere else but I can’t find it. Anyway, enjoy:

Let’s say I’m about to throw a baseball. Before throwing, I take into account what things I know will affect the flight of the baseball, such as gravity and the wind, based on the “folk physics” gained throughout my life that teaches me how to account for such things. I also acknowledge some variables that are beyond my control, such as my naturally flawed motor skills and the expectation that wind speed will change throughout the flight of the ball, and then I make the best throw I can based on these factors.

Assume then that somebody walks up to me and says, “You know, if you spin in two counterclockwise circles before throwing, invisible fairies will guide the ball exactly where you want it to go.” I decide that it can’t hurt, so I try it and it fails. He says, “Well, you’re doing it wrong. You also have to call out to the fairies while spinning.”

At this point, I decide I need some reason to believe in the fairies before I invest any more time in this exercise, as I would like to get on with improving my throw in productive ways. His arguments for the existence of fairies are pretty bad and involve statements like, “Well wouldn’t it be nice if fairies did help you throw a ball?” or, “Somebody long ago wrote a book about baseball fairies.” When I press him for actual evidence, he says, “It works, they exist, I just can’t demonstrate it to you.” And then rather than trying to get me to believe in fairies any longer, he just starts to justify his own belief to me. He speaks about all the great things fairies have done for him, but none of these things seem to be documented under controlled conditions, and all could quite easily be made up or resulted from natural causes.

Additionally, I recall that I’ve thrown baseballs with other people and have never seen the influence of an invisible baseball fairy. I recall that I’ve seen some other baseball leagues where some of the players use this fairy-invoking technique, and others where players claim to rely on invisible “batting trolls”, but I haven’t seen any evidence that they perform better than anyone else. In some cases, their preoccupation with their invisible assistants caused them to miss important details of the game and actually make them worse at it.

Given all of this, I eventually recognize that it is most likely that he is extremely confused about how to make appropriate determinations of whether baseball fairies exist. I conclude that not only am I going to continue to throw baseballs as if baseball fairies don’t exist, but I explain to him that he could simplify own his practices and most likely improve his performance if he did the same and stopped believing in baseball fairies as well. I conclude that until there is some demonstration that fairies do exist, the game of baseball will be simpler and played at a higher level if all of the participants stop taking into consideration baseball fairies. We’ve certainly given the fairies (and the trolls) plenty of opportunities to demonstrate their existence, including a few controlled studies in which teams were given the chance to make pleas to the fairies or trolls and yielded no positive result. Of course they claimed that you can’t test for fairies because fairies don’t like to be tested.

At the end of the day, I conclude that for all intents and purposes, I won’t believe in baseball fairies, batting trolls, or any such thing for which there is no good evidence. I also conclude that anybody else who believes for any intents or purposes that baseball fairies or batting trolls or invisible catching dragons do exist is simply wrong and unjustified and should change their minds. Intents and purposes and things that truly and practically influence our lives are all that matter. So if people want to believe in such things without them having any impact on any intent or any purpose, I wish them luck and doubt they’ll actually be able to pull it off.

Some may say that fairies could exist, but we haven’t figured out how to demonstrate it, others that they may exist but not for any intents or purposes. To them I respond that we’ve wasted too many innings investigating these fairy claims and I’d appreciate my teammates’ help, so get your heads back in the game and play ball.