BY DAN VALENTI

PLANET VALENTI NEWS AND COMMENTARY

(FORTRESS OF SOLITUDE, WEDNESDAY APRIL 22, 2026) — While THE PLANET waits along with everyone else to see how the rapidly evolving situation with Iran turns out, we offer this change of pace.

Baseball.

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MEET DAN VALENTI @ BARNES & NOBLE PITTSFIELD 2 p.m. SAT., APRIL 25 BOOK SIGNING OF DAN’S NEW BOOK, SANITY MADE SIMPLE

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There’s something captivating by both the line score and the contest itself about a 1-0 ballgame, let alone one that goes extra innings won by the home team in walk-off fashion. 

You see, I’m a baseball outlier, preferring runs being at a premium, with great pitching and good defense. You can keep the bombastic bombing that today’s free-swinging sluggers produce with their 110 mph, 470-foot fusillades, that is, when they’re not striking out. Who cares?

Give me a 2-1 thriller, and I’m going home happy in under 130 minutes. Even better? The 1-0 affair, where every pitch might literally mean the game and the crisp, bell-like tension increases with every pitch. You can’t get that in a 12-10 blaster, with more canon shots than the Rebs’ attack on Fort Sumpter.

A 1-0 score is baseball perfection, Don Larsen notwithstanding.

The visiting Detroit Tigers and the Boston Red Sox played such a contest on April 17, 2026 at legendary Fenway Park. It was enough to revive the love for baseball in the heart of a long-time adherent turned off by the tsunami of money and rule-tinkering characteristic of the “National Pastime” as it’s played today.

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STOPY BY & MEET DAN VALENTI @ BARNES & NOBLE PITTSFIELD 2 p.m. SAT., APRIL 25 BOOK SIGNING OF DAN’S NEW BOOK, SANITY MADE SIMPLE

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For THE PLANET, the string of zeros representing of a 1-0 game hits perfection in the line score:

                     1 2 3  4 5 6  7 8 9  10

DETROIT — 0 0 0  0 0 0  0 0 0  0

BOSTON — 0 0 0  0 0 0  0 0 0  1

This looks harmonious. This looks clean, with no crooked numbers from rally inflation. That the run scored in the last at-bat seems the fitting coda. If you look at that line score, you see two strings of nine zeroes reflecting each other, like matched dueling pistols or the way a line of evergreen trees mirror themselves in the stillness of a mountain pond. Only in the 10th inning does Burr kill Hamilton or a stone thrown in the pond wipe out the equilibrium. The winning blow came as pinch hitter Masataka Yoshida bounced a single over the pulled in second baseman, scoring Jarren Duran from second base. 

We got to wondering: How many 1-0 games have the Sox played in their 123-year history. 

Turns out that the Red Sox have played 441 games all-time ending in a 1-0 score (216 wins, 225 losses … last loss: 3/29/24 at Seattle …  last loss at home: 9/23/23 vs. Pope Leo’s White Sox).

Of those games, 180 have been at home (103-77 record), including 157 at Fenway Park (91-66 record).

Some 48 of the total 1-0 games in franchise history have gone into extra innings (24-24 record) … They are 19-7 in extra-inning home games ending in a 1-0 score, including 16-7 at Fenway Park.

Diving deeper, we can get a sense of the rarity of the 1-0 score. From Opening Day in 1901 until the April 17 game, the Red Sox played 19,399 games with a winning percentage of .517 (10,052-9,347). With the 441 1-0 contests, we find 1-0 games account for 2/10 of one percent of the team’s games. 

———- ooo ———-

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STOPY BY & MEET DAN VALENTI @ BARNES & NOBLE PITTSFIELD 2 p.m. SAT., APRIL 25 BOOK SIGNING OF DAN’S NEW BOOK, SANITY MADE SIMPLE

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THE PLANET finds one and zero the most profound of digits. Consider, for example, the mathematical conundrum of 1 divided by 0. It has vexed algebra students, mathematicians, and philosophers for millennia, possessing strange properties and a quotient of “undefined.” 

Then there’s the AI tsunami, which threatens to take the analog world into the wormhole. Once you get down to the digital substrate, you find that all the HAL 900s and high-tech systems, including its monsters, exist only as bizarre sequences of ones and zeroes. Bits, the techies named them. “Buts,” I would prefer, as in the coordinating conjunction, indicating a transitional pivot point …

… back into the 1-0 baseball game.

There’s the great joke of the English cricket player in America, witnessing his first baseball game. He knows as much about baseball as the typical American knows about cricket. He has just seen a 1-0 affair, with the run coming in the top of the first. 

After the contest ends, his host and companion asks him what he thinks of the game. Alastair replies, “Jolly good, that, but one thing puzzles me.”

“What’s that?” His friend asks.

“The final score: One hundred million to naught. How on earth did they score all those runs?

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“Nothing is as hopeful as the bottom of the ninth” — Sir Donald Turpentine, Knight of the Bath.

“OPEN THE WINDOW, AUNT MILLIE.”

LOVE TO ALL.

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