The Only Rule Is It Has to Work

And they owe it to what Baseball Twitter would call a TOOTBLAN, “Thrown Out on the Bases Like a Nincompoop.”

Since 2009, on 3-0 counts with opposing pitchers at the plate, major league pitchers have thrown the ball in the strike zone only 68.0 percent of the time (520 times out of 765).

Yet the Barry Bonds of the Pacific Association was considered a borderline candidate for high-A, which is three levels below the big leagues. Baseball is hard.

Urgency is a hell of a drug.

There’s a relatively new cliché about failure in baseball that I like a lot more: The other guy lives in a big house, too. Not all failure corresponds to a lack of effort. Or a lack of desire. Or a lack of preparation. Or a lack of skill. We lose, sometimes, because the other guy is also really good.

Dale Carnegie was way ahead of me: “If you tell them they are wrong,” he wrote, “do you make them want to agree with you? Never! For you have struck a direct blow at their intelligence, judgment, pride and self-respect. That will make them want to strike back. But it will never make them want to change their minds. If you are going to prove anythin

A few months after this resolution, I read an article in the New Yorker that made me intensely happy to be argument-free. Its premise, based on the work of political scientists, was that the worst thing a president can do to advance his positions is to state them; as soon as he does, a huge number of people will position themselves in opposition, a

Once I started trying to win an argument, I found myself rotating every fact to suit my position. This was true of the facts that came out of my mouth and also of facts that went into my ears, which I heard only deeply enough to deflate or reposition. Conversation became an exercise in bullshit.

“The last few games I’ve been getting a few more high fives in the dugout, people starting to talk a little more. You gotta earn it. It’s not given. Everything is earned.”