Baseball, failure and life

"The game of ball is glorious." -- Walt Whitman\nWhitman got it right. \nI'm taking a respite from writing about the world of Supreme Court nominees, federal debt and national disasters to focus on one of my great loves: baseball. It's October, and that means the playoffs have begun. \nOf all sports, our national pastime is probably the most commonly discussed, and for good reason. There are many lessons to take away from baseball.\nFor starters, Alexandre Dumas was wise to write, "All human wisdom is summed up in two words -- wait and hope." Just ask last year's Boston Red Sox.\nBaseball isn't fair either. Just ask the St. Louis Cardinals, who would hold 10 World Series victories, not nine, if an umpire had made the correct call at first base in the 1985 World Series.\nBut there is a less obvious, yet more important, lesson to be learned from this great game: The best are only slightly better than the worst, and all are constantly beset by failure.\nIn college football, a team must win every game it plays to become the national champion. In the NFL, a top seed must win about 90 percent of its games and post perhaps a 15-1 or 14-2 record. \nBaseball is very different. Of the 30 Major League teams, only two of them won more than 60 percent of their games this year, and even they just barely accomplished this feat. The majority of teams finish within a few games of a .500 record. Let me put it another way. Many people agree that the 1927 Yankees, which featured legends such as Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig, were quite possibly the best baseball team in history. Yet even this squad only won about 70 percent of its games. Even the greatest of all time lost three out of ten games to unquestionably inferior teams.\nAnd this applies just as much to the individual level of play as it does to teams. A terrible hitter might post a .250 batting average, whereas an MVP might hit .350. This means the worst fail to get a hit 75 percent of the time, but even the best still fail a whopping 65 percent of the time. A 10 percent difference might seem so small and yet it separates the winners from the losers.\nCompare this to our typical experiences. Would it be acceptable to answer three out of 10 questions correctly on an exam?\nSo what does one make of all this? In many sports, striving to win every game dominates the approach athletes and fans take toward defining success; a loss is a failure to be avoided at all costs. Anyone who understands baseball rejects this mentality. Losses can certainly be inopportune, even frustrating or heartbreaking, but they will always be a common, necessary part of the game. There comes a point when I don't even consider losses failures anymore; they are simply inevitable roadblocks on the journey we all must travel. Like a struggling artist dealing with rejection while waiting for that one masterpiece, a ball player might fail several times at the plate each game, yet that one clutch hit is what people will remember.\nEven the best fall down regularly, and very little separates the winners from the losers. Maybe I love baseball because, of all sports, it reminds me most of life.