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On Failure and Baseball

You get three chances at the plate, three outs to an inning, and up to nine innings a game. Baseball is also the only major sport that tracks errors. But failure, according to one expert, is even more fundamental in this pastime.

Here’s the quote:

Baseball teaches us, or has taught most of us, how to deal with failure. We learn at a very young age that failure is the norm in baseball and, precisely because we have failed, we hold in high regard those who fail less often – those who hit safely in one out of three chances and become star players. I also find it fascinating that baseball, alone in sport, considers errors to be part of the game, part of it’s rigorous truth. – Francis T. Vincent, Commissioner of Baseball

Photo © Flickr User Rajiv Patel (Rajiv’s View)

Comments about failure and baseball are easy to find. You may have heard before that the best hitters in the game have a .300 batting average, which means seven out of ten times they step up to the plate they fail. Or in the words of legend Mickey Mantle:

During my 18 years I came to bat almost 10,000 times. I struck out about 1,700 times and walked maybe 1,800 times. You figure a ballplayer will average about 500 at bats a season. That means I played seven years without ever hitting the ball.

Thanks to reader Kelli Schmith, who caught this quote in a Twitter picture.

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 2nd, 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through RSS 2.0. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.