From a great piece by Patrick Flood:
But that’s life, really. Things often don’t work out the way they’re supposed to. You mess up, people around you mess up, the universe conspires against you through chance and randomness. Being a human being is often about dealing with failure, both your own and other’s. Sometimes Ramon Martinez boots the ball behind you, sometimes you get hurt, and sometimes you blow the call for no apparent reason. Sometimes no one scores for you. Still, dealing with failure the right way might be just as much of an accomplishment as succeeding in the first place. That was what was so nice about Joyce and Galarraga: they dealt with it in the right way. I suspect that the way Santana deals with his teammates inabilities is probably the right way to deal with such things as a pitcher. Those are accomplishments in their own right.
Lots of people have done the baseball-as-metaphor-for-life thing. And I don’t want to make too much of it, but that’s one thing I appreciate about the summer – the little insights I gain into people and behaviors and adversity vis a vis the game of baseball.