When Being Wrong Feels Good

There is a particular kind of wrong that does not sting at all. It arrives with a clean crack, a sudden lift of the ball, and the brief electrical pause in a ballpark before everybody realizes what they are seeing. It is wrongness with a scoreboard attached. It has witnesses. It has a landing spot. And if you are lucky, it also has a home run attached to it.

The count was 3-0 with a runner on first. One of those little baseball moments where a person who has watched enough games begins to feel unusually qualified to explain what is about to happen. The hitter has the advantage. The pitcher is behind. The conventional wisdom says the hitter is probably taking. The pitcher, trying to avoid the humiliation of four straight balls, is likely to offer something close enough to the plate to make the at-bat respectable again. There is a reasonable chance of a very hittable pitch. There is also a reasonable chance nobody swings at it.

I leaned toward my wife with the confidence of a man who had recently assembled several pieces of information into a tiny, temporary tower. Here comes the no-swing strike, I said. Then, because the first statement had not yet sufficiently demonstrated that I understood baseball, I continued on about the probability of a hitter taking a 3-0 pitch. The pitcher began his wind-up, then the delivery, it felt like I saw it happen frame-by-frame. As the ball approached the plate you could see Jones lock-on and nearly imperceptibly commit to the pitch with subtle shifts in his stance. Spencer Jones did not take it. He swung, smacked it out of the park, and turned my little lecture into a souvenir nobody was going to retrieve for me.

It felt great.

Not merely because the home run was exciting. Of course it was. A home run is a little public malfunction in gravity, especially in a ballpark where you can feel the whole place register the fact that a ball has gone from ordinary to gone. Lights go out, then the strobe effect kicks in. But the best part was being wrong in a way that improved the night. My analysis had pointed toward the sensible outcome. The game chose the better one.

That is one of the quiet gifts of baseball. It gives you enough pattern to make predictions, then humiliates your certainty with enough frequency to keep you from becoming unbearable. The sport is built on tendencies, matchups, counts, mechanics, scouting reports, positioning, sample sizes, and all the other pieces of evidence that invite people to feel smart. See Moneyball if you have not. Then a hitter decides that the 3-0 pitch is the one he has been waiting for, or a utility infielder takes a perfectly reasonable plan and hits it into a place nobody had stationed a fielder, or the ball bounces wrong, or the wind decides it has a point of view.

The people who know baseball well are often good at holding two thoughts at once. They can say, That was the right decision, and also, I am very glad it did not work. They can recognize that a manager had a sound reason for a move while privately hoping the player proves the calculation too cautious. They can understand why a batter took the pitch, laid down the bunt, protected the plate, or worked the count, while still enjoying the moment a player decides to do something more reckless, more human, or simply more powerful than the expected script.

There is a difference between being wrong because you were careless and being wrong because the world had something better to offer. The first kind should teach you. The second kind should loosen you up.

We do not always let it. Outside the ballpark, being wrong is treated as a small personal defeat. Somebody asks a question in a meeting. We answer too quickly. The new information arrives. Instead of feeling curiosity, we feel the internal tightening: the need to explain why our original answer was actually adjacent to the correct one, why the conditions were unusual, why our thinking was reasonable at the time. Sometimes it was reasonable. Sometimes it was not. Either way, the correction becomes about identity before it becomes about learning.

Baseball offers a better rhythm. A player can make the correct read and still get out. A player can make a terrible decision and still get a hit. The scoreboard records the result, but everybody who understands the game knows the result is not the only thing that happened. There was timing. There was selection. There was execution. There was luck. There was a pitcher trying to do one thing and a hitter trying to do another. There was a ball that did not care which person had more confidence in their opinion.

That is why the 3-0 home run was such a satisfying little correction. I was not wrong because I knew nothing. I was wrong because the batter had a better answer than the expected answer. He saw an invitation and accepted it. The pitcher, perhaps obligated by the count to offer something hittable, offered one. The hitter did not need my permission to depart from the usual sequence. He did not need to honor the statistical comfort of the man in the seats explaining the situation to his wife. He needed to recognize the pitch and make a decision with a bat in his hands.

There is an important life distinction there, although baseball makes it less embarrassing to say. Preparation matters. Patterns matter. Knowing the percentages matters. But none of those things should turn into a rule that says the future is required to behave itself.

A lot of people confuse being prepared with being certain. They are related, but they are not the same thing. Preparation gives you a better starting point. It helps you notice what is likely. It allows you to see the shape of a situation before everybody else does. Certainty is what happens when you begin to believe your preparation has given you ownership over the outcome.

Nobody owns the outcome. Not the manager. Not the hitter. Not the fan with a very persuasive explanation of why the hitter will almost certainly take the next pitch. Baseball is a game of decision and response, not prophecy. A player studies the count, knows the scouting report, knows the game situation, feels the pitcher, and still has to decide what to do with the next few tenths of a second. The decision may be brave, stupid, brilliant, impatient, or all four depending on what happens after contact. That is not a flaw in the game. That is the game.

That is a useful correction for people who work in systems. We build plans because plans are better than vibes. We use data because guessing without evidence is just confidence wearing a hipster moustache. We identify patterns because patterns save time, prevent mistakes, and make it possible to act before the room catches fire. But a plan is not an arrest warrant for reality. Data tells you what has happened often enough to notice.

Sometimes a person needs to take the well-advised pitch. Sometimes the best choice is patience, restraint, and a clean walk to first. Sometimes the pitcher is wild, the situation is early, the lineup is deep, and there is no reason to manufacture drama. The ability to wait correctly is a skill. The ability to recognize the one moment when waiting becomes a missed opportunity is also a skill. They are not enemies. They are siblings with different jobs.

A good baseball fan learns to enjoy both. The walk that loads the bases. The productive out that moves a runner. The hitter who refuses to chase a pitch that is almost designed to make him look foolish. The stolen base that was set up by two earlier pitches, a little extra lead, and a pitcher who got predictable. The long at-bat that does not make the highlight reel but causes the bullpen to stir. These are not lesser forms of baseball. They are the machinery underneath the big moment.

But the big moment matters too. Sometimes the machinery produces a home run. Sometimes it interrupts the speech you were giving about the machinery. That is healthy.

There is a small humility in sitting at a game and letting a player surprise you. It asks you to be informed without becoming rigid, attentive without becoming joyless, and confident enough to have a thought without needing the thought to win. You get to say, I did not see that coming, while standing in the middle of a thing you are glad happened.

That may be the best kind of wrong there is: the kind that restores your sense that the world contains more possibility than your forecast allowed for. It is not always pleasant. Sometimes we are wrong because the news is worse, because someone fails us, because the plan breaks, because the ball takes a cruel bounce. Those moments require a different kind of response. They call for repair, adjustment, and maybe a little less confidence next time.

But when being wrong means the hitter went bigger than expected, when the conservative read gets replaced by something loud and improbable, you should let yourself enjoy it. You should not rush to preserve your credibility. You should not say, Well, technically, that was not the percentage play. You should stand up with everyone else. You should watch the ball disappear. You should accept that the person with the bat had access to information you did not: the pitch, the timing, the feel, the tiny opening between what was expected and what was possible.

So yes, on 3-0 with a runner on first, the hitter may be expected to take. The pitcher may be expected to throw a strike.

Then Spencer Jones may swing. May you be that happily wrong more often.