Anyone glued to their televisions on the night of November 1st—actually the early morning hours of November 2nd—will agree: They don’t come any closer.
It was the bottom of the 11th inning, in Game 7 of the World Series, with the Toronto Blue Jays trailing the Los Angeles Dodgers 4 to 3. But now the Blue Jays had runners on the corners:
Vladimir Guerrero Jr., representing the tying run, was on third; Addison Barger, the potential winning run, was on first. With just one out, the Jays’ catcher, Alejandro Kirk, came to the plate.
The Dodgers’ superstar pitcher, Yoshinobu Yamamoto—soon to be declared World Series MVP—wound up and delivered a 92-mph fastball. At that speed, the ball takes barely four-tenths of a second to reach the plate.
Kirk swung—made contact—and broke his bat, sending chunks of wood flying through the air.
The ball bounced into the infield, was scooped up by the Dodgers’ shortstop, Mookie Betts, who quickly jumped on second base and threw to first, completing the double play and giving the Dodgers their second consecutive World Series victory.
If you’re a Blue Jays fan—or really, any kind of sports enthusiast—you can’t help wondering what if. What if Kirk’s bat had remained intact? Even if it was still a grounder, it might’ve been more difficult for Betts; maybe he’d only have gotten the out at second but not at first—meaning that Guerrero Jr. would score, tying the game and potentially forcing a twelfth inning. Or what if he’d hit a home run? That would have won the game instantly for the Jays. (This was something they also had a chance to do in the bottom of the 9th, when they loaded the bases but then stranded all three runners when the Dodgers’ Andy Pages caught a deep fly ball while colliding with teammate Enrique Hernández.)
It’s easy to take these what-ifs for granted—this happened, but it’s possible that that could have happened.
But I like to think of them as very deep and important acts of the imagination. When we talk about what-ifs, we are imagining alternate universes.
In recent years, physicists have come up with various theories—rooted in string theory, or in quantum mechanics, or in a version of the big bang model known as cosmic inflation—which seem to predict the existence of parallel universes. These “multiverse” theories remain controversial, but many physicists do take them seriously. However, the kind of universes that I imagine when watching Kirk’s bat shedding splinters across the infield are of a different sort, linked more closely with the world of philosophy than that of physics.
The philosopher who thought most deeply about these “possible worlds” was the American scholar, David Lewis, who died in 2001. The kind of multiverse that Lewis embraced was almost startlingly simple. He talked about worlds that could have been, if events had unfolded ever so slightly differently from how they did unfold. For Lewis, those alternate worlds were real.
A moment’s thought shows that if new universes are sparked by baseball, they’re sparked by everything: If the flight attendant offers you chicken or pasta, and you choose chicken—well, you could have chosen pasta, right? The way David Lewis saw it, you really did choose the pasta—in some other universe. Philosophers call this view of reality “modal realism.”
“It’s very simple,” Barry Lam, a philosopher at the University of California at Riverside, says of Lewis’s view. “Every possible universe is a real universe. Our universe is just one universe among all the possible universes.”
We can apply this line of reasoning to major world events and, equally, to the tiniest of seemingly inconsequential occurrences (will I scratch my nose with my left hand right now, or with my right hand, or not at all?) The number of possible universe stacks infinities on top of infinities.
Of course, these ideas have paid off handsomely in Hollywood, from the most recent Spider-Man films to the 2022 Oscar winner, Everything Everywhere All at Once. In the first Doctor Strange film, from 2016, the Ancient One (Tilda Swinton) says to the doctor (Benedict Cumberbatch): “This universe is only one of an infinite number. Worlds without end… Who are you in this vast multiverse, Mr. Strange?”
That’s fine at the multiplex—but is modal realism, with its incomprehensibly large array of universes, just too nutty to be taken seriously? Perhaps. And indeed, although many of his colleagues lauded Lewis for his genius, few philosophers have latched onto modal realism. And yet, with serious physicists arguing for various multiverse theories, one gets the feeling that such ideas at least deserve a hearing.
“It may very well be that the theory that solves the most problems—that makes the math work out best—is some version of a multiverse hypothesis,” says Lam. “But once you accept that, then you’ve got to accept similar kinds of thinking in philosophy.”
Which doesn’t mean he finds such arguments convincing. “Any time you’re that far removed from the empirical consequences of a theory—as a philosopher, I don’t know how to assess that,” he says. “I don’t know whether I should believe it.” Other philosophers, perhaps with Occam’s razor in mind, argue that explanations for what we observe in this universe shouldn’t appeal to the notion of additional, unseen universes.
And yet, says Lam, these exercises of the imagination serve a very real purpose: They allow us to speak rationally of the things we observe here and now. For example, what do we mean when we say that Donald Trump could have won the 2020 election, rather than Joe Biden? “We think of statements like that as being true—but they’re not claims about the actual world,” says Lam. “There’s nothing you could observe in the actual world that would be like, ‘Oh, I see that Trump could have won.’ It’s just a hypothesis that explains other things that you could see—like the vote count in Ohio, and so on.” In other words, this act of imagination—of picturing alternative outcomes—allows us to make sense of the world we live in. Contingencies are everywhere; the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune point to uncountably many worlds, at least in our imaginations.
And so I wonder about the conditions in the orchard in which the ash tree grew, from whence Kirk’s bat was crafted… What if more rain, or less rain, had fallen in the final season before the tree was cut down? What if the wood had been a tiny amount tougher, his bat ever so slightly stronger? And what if he had swung three milliseconds earlier, or three milliseconds later…?