There’s a nagging paradox at the heart of baseball — or any sport, really — and it’s this: The goal of every single player is to play the game perfectly; but if they ever did, there would no longer be any reason for us to watch.

To the fans, perfection is not only boring, it’s useless. It defeats the purpose of caring in the first place. The reason that baseball is interesting at all is because it’s hard, because it can never be played perfectly. The value of sports is not in watching perfection, but in watching players try to achieve perfection while inevitably failing, just like the rest of us do in real life every day.

Ceddanne Rafaela is a freak of a baseball player. He is capable of consistently doing things on a diamond that no one else can do. Things like this:

And this (there’s

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