Eddie Pinero

Sometimes you can do everything right and still not get the result you want.

This, as the saying goes, is life.

I was chatting with my friend DJ recently.

He plays baseball in Austria in the summer and fall.

He's a pitcher and shared something with me that I'd never really thought about.

I guess simply being that I'd never pitched, right?

But I love baseball, grew up watching the Sox, and, you know, really love the metaphors for life.

I've talked a lot about that sort of parallel.

Most of them we've heard, right?

Like a batter that hits 300, which is essentially three hits out of every 10 at bats, excluding walks, is an above-average player.

That's a lot of failure.

That means they fail more than twice as much as they succeed.

We've all heard that on and on and on, but this angle I'd never heard.

We were a few of us sitting at dinner and he said, you know, there are times when the catcher calls for a particular pitch.

places his catcher's mitt exactly where he wants the ball.

And then, you know, DJ is the pitcher receiving the call and seeing the glove could theoretically execute on that pitch perfectly.

He could release the ball, have it move exactly the way he wants it to on trajectory to land right in the catcher's mitt, but still the batter makes contact.

Somehow the pitcher did exactly what he was supposed to and still gives up a hit.

And I'm listening to him describe it, and it was so matter-of-factly.

When he was talking about it, I was sort of anticipating some animation.