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

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 first rule of child psychology is that it applies throughout all of life.

But sabermetric orthodoxy, based on complex run-scoring simulations, says that the number-two batter—who makes almost as many plate appearances as the leadoff man, but bats with more runners on base—should be the club’s best hitter, instead of the high-contact, good-bat-control, move-the-runners-over type that teams have been sticking there since t

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.

Some aspects of Sean’s baseball background are the same as every other professional player’s. He remembers swinging one of those short plastic bats with the big barrels when he was barely old enough to stand, and he grew up going to his father’s rec-league softball games. By the time Jack Conroy stopped playing, Sean was old enough to start, and hi

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