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

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.

Urgency is a hell of a drug.

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,

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

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

“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.”

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).

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.