Statistics lie.

Even Mark Twain said so. (He wasn’t the first; that itself may be a lie, or at least a misconception.)

Anyway, stats tell you only what happened. They don’t say what did not happen, or what could have, or might have. Or should have.

A box score of Game 7 of the 1934 World Series shows that Dizzy Dean pitched a shutout, and that Pepper Martin scored three runs. It says nothing about a play that could have changed everything.

Martin hit a ground ball in the third inning and was safe at first base. At least umpire Beans Reardon thought so. His call gave the Cardinals a chance they did not waste. They scored seven runs, and won the Series in a game that ended in a riot.

Today we could check Reardon’s call with video review. A team of studio umpires would look at the film, and the game would go on. Some sense of order, no matter what team you rooted for, would win out.

This came to mind during a re-run of “Perry Mason,” the black-and white TV standard in which a hero lawyer would clear the blameless and nail the guilty. Good won and evil lost. Week after week.

For most of baseball history. fans never got that. Right or wrong, an umpire’s decision was final. People would shrug their shoulders and philosophize, “The umpires get most of the calls right.” They wanted to believe in order, justice and certainty. They trusted authority.

“They get most of the calls right” never made much sense. First, most calls in baseball don’t take a big-league umpire to decide. A 10-year-old with bottle eyeglasses could get them right, though Don Denkinger and Jim Joyce took easy ones and changed baseball history.

And now we know that umpires get most of the close ones wrong. In the 2024 big-league baseball season, video review overturned 54 percent of calls. That doesn’t even count the close ones that never got reviewed. So much for order, justice or certainty.

Bad calls come into your life all the time. Illness, bad weather, accidents, change the course of a day, just as Beans Reardon may have nudged the 1934 World Series toward the St.Louis Cardinals.

This year I read “Fluke: Chance, Chaos, and Why Everything We Do Matters” by Brian Klaas. It begins with the story of how a sightseeing trip in 1926 affected the target for a nuclear bomb 19 years later.

You can try all you want to find certainty. But you can’t. Flukes happen. Perry Mason is Hollywood; bad calls are real.

So think about quality instead. You can control what you do. You can’t control how those things turn out.