MLB.com has announced that the price of its online video feature, MLB.TV, is dropping from the normal $14.95 subscription fee to a planet-shattering $9.95 for the month of October. This has inspired MLB.com’s Mark Newman to leap from the Precipice of Sanity, arms flailing and face grinning.

Luck. It’s a funny word and no one talks about it enough, but it means so much to baseball and it will mean even more this week.

Luck is being a fan today and finding out that MLB.com has just lowered its prices on its popular MLB.TV packages. It now costs only $9.95 to watch live Major League Baseball games over your computer with MLB.TV for the remainder of the year. It’s also now only $14.95 for MLB.TV Premium, and just $4.95 to pay per day.

This is a fairly common pitch technique. Pick a simple concept — a single word, preferably — then fixate on it, as though the word and the product you’re selling are one and the same. Car commercials do this all the time.  The thing is … this just keeps going. As it turns out, the price reduction of MLB.TV has nothing to do with the laws of supply and demand, or a series of meetings between MLB.TV producers and marketers, or anything you can grasp.  It is luck.

Luck is being a baseball fan in 2008. Oh, it would have been amazing to have your choice of players and moments to see through time — Ty Cobb sliding into third, Willie Mays running with his back to home plate and making “The Catch” in 1954, maybe Babe Ruth going yard or Walter Johnson throwing gas. But all things considered, being right here is an amazing stroke of human luck. Because you are seeing this, you have the capability to watch the legends of tomorrow being made right now, live over your computer with MLB.TV, over a network of pipes called the Internet.

Yep. He is pitching an online video service and contemplating the arbitrary nature of humanity in the same sentence. He refuses to reside quietly into the confines the Internet have set for him.  He is not an inanimate basket of fruit. He is kudzu. He will grow, and grow, and transcend the expectations foisted upon him.  If you tell him, “hey, Newman, would you mind writing up a few words on MLB.TV’s price reduction,” he will come back to you with a sprawling, impassioned epic that places MLB.TV within the context of human existence.

Luck is being born with the natural ability to throw a fastball 100 miles per hour.

Luck is being born with the natural ability to hit a 100-mph fastball over a fence.

“Hello again, everybody,” Harry Caray used to say. “It’s a bee-yooo-tiful day for baseball.”

Luck makes it so. You can watch the rest of the way with MLB.TV and see for yourself, because luck is being able to view MLB.TV for under 10 bucks with lots of innings left. You know what baseball luck is.

Mark Newman spits the sort of provocative gumball-machine theory of fate that Dave Matthews sings about. You are who you are because you happened to be born as you. If you were not you, you would not be you.  1 = 1!  2 = 2!  And better yet, I can watch baseball for less money!  This is the greatest day of my life!

Luck is what got Spooky93 to 48 games in MLB.com’s Beat the Streak earlier this season, and luck is what kept him from 57 straight and a $1 million payday.

No classical pondering of existence is complete without a strange and unnecessary reference to an Internet handle. He’s like that guy in the writer’s workshop who tries to fit ‘boogie board” into a poem.

As the clock ticks toward another postseason, just remember what Satchel Paige once said:

Work like you don’t need the money.
Love like you’ve never been hurt.
Dance like nobody’s watching.

And “keep the ball off the fat part of the bat.”

That takes luck.

Guy apparently can’t find a single quote of a baseball player ever saying anything about luck, so he takes a quote that doesn’t have anything to do with the concept of luck, then cites an instance that is not dependent on luck, then wraps it up with the word, “luck.”

MLB.com writers, as a general rule, do not start losing their cookies until January.  Perhaps this stick-and-ball nonsense is finally beginning to erode them into delirium.