Tuesday, June 16, 2009

Periods of Failure

Baseball is a game of nuance where three successful hits out of 10 makes you an expert. Two hits out of 10, on the other hand, makes you a real-estate broker or a shoe salesman or, in May, significantly better than Mr. Ortiz whose average for the month was .143. But the painful beauty of Mr. Ortiz’s slump, is that it does feel true to the essence of a game where all the best stories, as in fiction and life, are about adversity.


Read the rest of Nicholas Dawidoff's article on when brilliance hits a slump.

1 comment:

DarkoV said...

Great piece by Mr. Dawidoff. I spent part of last summer thoroughly immersed in 2 of hos books, both of which I'd recommend highly for those who enjoyed this WSJ piece.
2008's The Crowd Sounds Happy: A Story of Love and Madness in an American Family was Mr. Dawidoff's second baseball-based book,

The Catcher Was A Spy-The Mysterious Life of Moe Berg's being his first. Yes. Mr. Dawidoff doesn't believe in short titles; you'd never see one stitched on the back of an uniform.

The other book, and my favorite of his writings thus far, was In the Country of Country: A Journey to the Roots of American Music. Yes, another long title. I liked country music...on occasion. With the reading of this book, I appreciated country music (the older stuff, not the pretty-boy country playing these days) considerably more. As with most of Mr. Dawidoff's books, be sure to keep a dictionary handy. He loves words, especially esoteric rarely used ones, so he'll keep you on your toes and enrich your verbal data base.