Batting Average Quotes

To some people, I am kind of a Merlin who takes lots of crazy chances, but rarely makes mistakes. I've made some bad ones, but fortunately, the successes have come along fast enough to cover up the mistakes. When you go to bat as many times as I do, and continually improve upon your mistakes, you're bound to get a good average.

I liked that in obstetrics you end up with twice the number of patients you started with, which is an unusually good batting average compared to other specialties. (I’m looking at you, geriatrics.)

Some men know the exact amount of money in their bank accounts,” she continued. “Other men know how many miles are on their car and how many more miles it’ll handle. Other men know the batting average of their favorite baseball player and more other men know the exact sum Uncle Sam has screwed ’em. Your father knows no such figures. The only numbers Landon Carpenter has in his head are the numbers of stars in the sky on the days his children were born. I don’t know about you, but I would say that a man who has skies in his head full of the stars of his children, is a man who deserves his child’s love. Especially from the child with the most stars.

liked that in obstetrics you ended up with twice the number of patients you started with, which is an unusually good batting average compared to other specialties. (I’m looking at you, geriatrics.) I also remembered being told

I liked that in obstetrics you ended up with twice the number of patients you started with, which is an unusually good batting average compared to other specialties. (I’m looking at you, geriatrics.)

What a well-designed forecasting system can do is sort out which statistics are relatively more susceptible to luck; batting average, for instance, is more erratic than home runs.

The career batting average (.254) during parts of five Major League seasons for Francisco Cabrera—which proves that it takes only one big hit, on the right stage, to become a legend. Cabrera is still honored in Atlanta, and rightfully so, for winning the 1992 NLCS vs. Pittsburgh.

Since 2008, batters have hit only .175 against pitches thrown at 100 m.p.h. or above. Batting averages go up as the speed of the pitches goes down: .210 at 99, .213 at 98, .225 at 97, .242 at 96 and .252 at 95.

But here’s the secret to success when you possess a much-larger-than-average-size cock. You can’t just wave it around like a big bat. You’ve got to treat it like a baseball manager does a closer. A cock with firepower is your secret weapon, and it’s worth its weight in gold if you know what to do with the rest of the lineup. Meaning, the dick should never be the star of the show. The woman’s name should be the one in lights, and you need to make her feel that way from start to finish. Warm her up right. Use all your tools—hands, fingers, mouth, tongue, words.

It is only fair to admit, however, that my batting average in the crystal ball league is point, zero, zero, zero.

Most players who retire with 14 career home runs and a lifetime batting average of .200 will be little remembered in five years, let alone forty. But most players aren’t Bob Uecker.

Freddie Freeman led all Braves’ starters with a (.282) batting average in 2011. Not bad for a rookie. Then again, this is the kid who hit his first big league bomb against none other than Roy Halladay … the same kid whose leather at first is so flashy than at times it’s hard to decide which to be more excited about, his bat or his glove, the same kid who joined teammate Dan Uggla with concurrent 20-game hitting streaks in 2011—a first in modern era Braves’ history—and the same kid who won NL Rookie of the Month honors in July after hitting .362 with six homers, 17 runs, and 18 RBIs.

Eleanor Roosevelt wrote movingly about having her own equivalent of a Bat Cave, but in the end, she found consolation by telling herself, “Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people.” I agreed with this, but I still couldn’t get the small things or people out of my head. EVENTS IN MY PERSONAL LIFE required me to understand better where my “bats” were coming from.

If we read the Bible as carefully and as regularly as we read the daily papers, we would be as familiar with and as well informed about God as we are about our favorite player’s batting average during baseball season!

That also means the antivirus software you are running on your own computer is likely only catching 5 percent of the emerging threats targeting your machine. If your body’s own immune system had a batting average like that, you would be dead in a matter of hours.

Experts in diagnostic errors provided an answer to the puzzle that had been nagging me: How was it possible for missed diagnoses to be so common and yet not perceived by doctors as a major problem? The problem is that physicians, while generally aware that mistakes happen, greatly underestimate how often they make them. In his talks to doctors on the topic, Graber often asks how many have made a diagnostic error in the past year; typically, only about 1 percent of the hands go up. 'The concept that they, personally, could err at a significant rate is inconceivable to most physicians,' he writes. In short, they think it's the other guy. This overconfidence is not necessarily their fault: doctors simply do not get the feedback needed to gain an accurate sense of their batting average. They assume their diagnoses are correct until they hear otherwise. Since there are few, if any, health care organizations that systematically measure diagnostic error rates, they typically learn of their mistakes only from the patients themselves.

Real success is not visible. It has nothing to do with the size of your house, your batting average, or your bank account, or in our case, the number of medals you’ve managed to get. Those things are OK, granted. But success is how you feel every day. It’s being satisfied with the day’s work you’ve produced. It’s feeling at ease with yourself when you go home at night.

So these are the possibilities I see with regard to economic forecasts: Most economic forecasts are just extrapolations. Extrapolations are usually correct but not valuable. Unconventional forecasts of significant deviation from trend would be very valuable if they were correct, but usually they aren’t. Thus most forecasts of deviation from trend are incorrect and also not valuable. A few forecasts of significant deviation turn out to be correct and valuable—leading their authors to be lionized for their acumen—but it’s hard to know in advance which will be the few right ones. Since the overall batting average with regard to them is low, unconventional forecasts can’t be valuable on balance. There are forecasters who became famous for a single dramatic correct call, but the majority of their forecasts weren’t worth following.

It’s incredible, really, the amount of pain cricketers are prepared to put themselves through. Say you’re an opening batsman who gets out for a duck in the first over on day one. What compels you to hang around for the rest of the day, let alone turn up the following Saturday for day two? Yet you do, lest 10 blokes who you don’t even like think slightly less of you. You retain a sense of loyalty to the club, to your teammates, even though those same teammates will not hesitate to rate your girlfriend a ‘six out of 10’ in front of your face. During the time I’ve spent watching my teammates bat after getting out cheaply, I could have learned a language by now. I could be speaking Mandarin. Instead, all I’ve got to show for it is a career average of 13.6 and a 10 percent discount at our local pub.

The CRT is really hard. But here’s the strange thing. Do you know the easiest way to raise people’s scores on the test? Make it just a little bit harder. The psychologists Adam Alter and Daniel Oppenheimer tried this a few years ago with a group of undergraduates at Princeton University. First they gave the CRT the normal way, and the students averaged 1.9 correct answers out of three. That’s pretty good, though it is well short of the 2.18 that MIT students averaged. Then Alter and Oppenheimer printed out the test questions in a font that was really hard to read—a 10 percent gray, 10-point italics Myriad Pro font—so that it looked like this: 1. A bat and a ball cost $1.10 in total. The bat costs $1.00 more than the ball. How much does the ball cost? The average score this time around? 2.45. Suddenly, the students were doing much better than their counterparts at MIT.

At Bridgewater, every employee has a believability score on a range of dimensions. In sports, statistics for every player’s performance history are public. In baseball, before you sign a player, you can look up his batting average, home runs, and steals; assess his strengths and weaknesses; and adjust accordingly. Dalio wanted Bridgewater to work the same way, so he created baseball cards that display statistics on every employee’s performance, which can be accessed by anyone at the company. If you’re about to interact with a few Bridgewater colleagues for the first time, you can see their track records on seventy-seven different dimensions of values, skills, and abilities in the areas of higher-level thinking, practical thinking, maintaining high standards, determination, open-mindedness yet assertiveness, and organization and reliability.

Correlation is enough,” 2 then-Wired editor in chief Chris Anderson famously declared in 2008. We can, he implied, solve innovation problems by the sheer brute force of the data deluge. Ever since Michael Lewis chronicled the Oakland A’s unlikely success in Moneyball (who knew on-base percentage was a better indicator of offensive success than batting averages?), organizations have been trying to find the Moneyball equivalent of customer data that will lead to innovation success. Yet few have. Innovation processes in many companies are structured and disciplined, and the talent applying them is highly skilled. There are careful stage-gates, rapid iterations, and checks and balances built into most organizations’ innovation processes. Risks are carefully calculated and mitigated. Principles like six-sigma have pervaded innovation process design so we now have precise measurements and strict requirements for new products to meet at each stage of their development. From the outside, it looks like companies have mastered an awfully precise, scientific process. But for most of them, innovation is still painfully hit or miss. And worst of all, all this activity gives the illusion of progress, without actually causing it. Companies are spending exponentially more to achieve only modest incremental innovations while completely missing the mark on the breakthrough innovations critical to long-term, sustainable growth. As Yogi Berra famously observed: “We’re lost, but we’re making good time!” What’s gone so wrong? Here is the fundamental problem: the masses and masses of data that companies accumulate are not organized in a way that enables them to reliably predict which ideas will succeed. Instead the data is along the lines of “this customer looks like that one,” “this product has similar performance attributes as that one,” and “these people behaved the same way in the past,” or “68 percent of customers say they prefer version A over version B.” None of that data, however, actually tells you why customers make the choices that they do.

in a difficult market environment, profits will be smaller than normal and losses will be larger; downside gaps will be more common, and you will likely experience greater slippage. The smart way to handle this is to do the following: Tighten up stop-losses. If you normally cut losses at 7 to 8 percent, cut them at 5 to 6 percent. Settle for smaller profits. If you normally take profits of 15 to 20 percent on average, take profits at 10 to 12 percent. If you’re trading with the use of leverage, get off margin immediately. Reduce your exposure with regard to your position sizes as well as your overall capital commitment. Once you see your batting average and reward/risk profile improve, you can start to extend your parameters gradually back to normal levels.

But being short something where your loss is unlimited is quite different than being long something that you’ve already paid for. And it’s tempting. You see way more stocks that are dramatically overvalued in your career than you will see stocks that are dramatically undervalued. I mean there — it’s the nature of securities markets to occasionally promote various things to the sky, so that securities will frequently sell for 5 or 10 times what they’re worth, and they will very, very seldom sell for 20 percent or 10 percent of what they’re worth. So, therefore, you see these much greater discrepancies between price and value on the overvaluation side. So you might think it’s easier to make money on short selling. And all I can say is, it hasn’t been for me. I don’t think it’s been for Charlie. It is a very, very tough business because of the fact that you face unlimited losses, and because of the fact that people that have overvalued stocks — very overvalued stocks — are frequently on some scale between promoter and crook. And that’s why they get there. And once there — And they also know how to use that very valuation to bootstrap value into the business, because if you have a stock that’s selling at 100 that’s worth 10, obviously it’s to your interest to go out and issue a whole lot of shares. And if you do that, when you get all through, the value can be 50. In fact, there’s a lot of chain letter-type stock promotions that are sort of based on the implicit assumption that the management will keep doing that. And if they do it once and build it to 50 by issuing a lot of shares at 100 when it’s worth 10, now the value is 50 and people say, “Well, these guys are so good at that. Let’s pay 200 for it or 300,” and then they could do it again and so on. It’s not usually that — quite that clear in their minds. But that’s the basic principle underlying a lot of stock promotions. And if you get caught up in one of those that is successful, you know, you can run out of money before the promoter runs out of ideas. In the end, they almost always work. I mean, I would say that, of the things that we have felt like shorting over the years, the batting average is very high in terms of eventual — that they would work out very well eventually if you held them through. But it is very painful and it’s — in my experience, it was a whole lot easier to make money on the long side.

in stone—and you begin to consider how they can be improved. 2. Triple the number of ideas you generate. Just as great baseball players only average a hit for every three at bats, every innovator swings and misses. The best way to boost your originality is to produce more ideas. 3. Immerse yourself in a new domain. Originality increases when you broaden your frame of reference. One approach is to learn a new craft, like the Nobel Prize–winning scientists who expanded their creative repertoires by taking up painting, piano, dance, or poetry. Another strategy is to try a job rotation:

For example, having been in the rare position of working in the fields of both healing and management, I could not help but notice that the batting average in the war on cancer and the batting average in the struggle to heal chronically troubled institutions are remarkably similar, with cancer perhaps a little ahead. I have been struck by how families, corporations, and other kinds of institutions are constantly trying to cure their own chronic ills through amputations, “strong medicine,” transfusions, and other forms of surgery only to find that, even when successful for the moment, the excised tumor returns several years later in “cells” that never knew the “cells” that left. “New blood” rarely thwarts malignant processes, anywhere. Indeed, with both cancer and institutions, malignant cells that appear to be dead can often revive if they receive new nourishment. Or, to put the problem another way, when we say something has gone into remission, where do we think it has gone?

The batting average of baseball players, the horsepower of cars, the latest movements of the stock exchange. Sometimes it seems that for a man nothing is more exciting than a number. It’s the boy in them, I suppose.

I grew up in Boston. North End.” Bea twisted sideways to get around a cluster of men fiercely arguing batting averages. “You’re born within a hundred square miles of Fenway Park, hatred for the Yankees comes in with your mother’s milk.

Success is not about almost always succeeding. How would you feel if you were failing about 60% of the time? Sounds like a solid “F.” Well, in certain contexts you’d be a superstar. A major league baseball player who failed 60% of the time—that is, who had a batting average of .400—would be phenomenal. No living player is that good. So in baseball, every player fails far more than half the time. In mathematical or scientific research, the batting averages are dramatically lower still. If scientists or mathematicians answer even one truly significant question in their whole life, they will be rightly regarded with great esteem. Success is about persisting through the process of repeatedly failing and learning from failure.

Hpa-An A small and fairly average town in Southeastern Myanmar but it is a base for exploring some of the fantastic surrounding areas. There are lots of curious caves to discover with the giant Saddar cave and its reclining Buddha and the Bat Cave the best ones. The Bat Cave is best visited at sunset when a ridiculous number of bats (hundreds of thousands) fly out of it only to return the following morning. You can also rent a bike or motorbike and explore the tranquil Burmese countryside. Another option is to climb to the top of Mount Zwegabin which is home to a monastery where the resident monks will let you sleep.

Which is why every Bridgewater employee, including Dalio, has a digital "baseball card"--a summary that lists key personality stats the same way a bubblegum card shows a player's batting average and RBI totals. Each employee's baseball card is visible to every other employee--a way for people

In the aftermath of events such as Hurricane Sandy and Hurricane Katrina, people want to know whether they were caused by climate change. These are bad questions and no answer can be given that is not misleading. It is like asking whether when a baseball player gets a base hit, it is caused by his .350 batting average. One cannot say “yes,” but saying “no” falsely suggests that there is no relationship between his batting average and the base hit.

During my eighteen years I came to bat almost 10,000 times. I struck out about 1,700 times and walked maybe 1,800 times. You figure a ballplayer will average about 500 at-bats a season. That means I played seven years without ever hitting the ball. —MICKEY MANTLE I

The average reader of the New Testament reads Matthew before Mark and then goes on to Luke and John. Matthew gives him the impression that Jesus was born God's Son in a miraculous fashion. Mark begins only with the baptism, but the reader will think little of this: perhaps Mark begins in medias res. With Luke we are back to a miraculous nativity for one born the Son of God. In John the reader learns that Jesus had already been God's Son from all eternity. But suppose one read Mark by itself, as its first readers did. What impression would one receive? Surely in a book where the main character shows up as an adult and, right off the bat, experiences a vision of divine calling in which he and no one else is told that he is God's Son, the natural inference would be that the baptism was the beginning of an honorific Sonship. If he were already God's son, wouldn't he have known it? And then why should God tell him what he already knew? It seems that Mark might believe what others in the early church did, namely, in Jesus' adoptive Sonship. Ebionite Jewish Christians and Cerinthian (also Jewish) Gnostics were adoptionists, rejecting any miraculous generation of Jesus Christ from the deity. [...] Once we know this was a popular, though eventually controversial, option among early Christians, it begins to make a new sense that the earliest gospel, Mark, sounds adoptionist but is flanked and overwhelmed by subsequent gospels that have moved the Sonship further and further back, attributing to Jesus some degree of divine nature in the process.

to become stars. He’d played outfield with Lenny Dykstra and Darryl Strawberry. He’d subbed for Mark McGwire and Jose Canseco. He’d lockered beside Rickey Henderson. In his slivers of five years in the big leagues he played for four famous managers: Sparky Andersen, Tom Kelly, Davey Johnson, and Tony La Russa. But by the end of 1989 his career stat line (301 at bats, .219 batting average, .246 on-base percentage, .296 slugging percentage, and 11 walks against 80 strikeouts) told an eloquent tale of suffering. You didn’t need to know Billy Beane at all—you only needed to read his stats—to sense that he left every on-deck circle in trouble. That he had developed neither discipline nor composure. That he had never learned to lay off a bad pitch. That he was easily fooled. That, fooled so often, he came to expect that he would be fooled. That he hit with fear. That his fear masqueraded as aggression. That the aggression enabled him to exit the batter’s box as quickly as possible. One season in the big leagues he came to the plate seventy-nine times and failed

You think you’re “supposed” to consistently bat a thousand. In the game of baseball that would mean hitting every ball that comes over the plate. Not only is that virtually impossible, but a batting average of .333—meaning a player got a base hit 33.3 percent of the time—is considered outstanding.

Triple the number of ideas you generate. Just as great baseball players only average a hit for every three at bats, every innovator swings and misses. The best way to boost your originality is to produce more ideas.

The average American, one judge ruled, cannot reasonably be expected to visually distinguish between various varieties of persons of Asian origin. As if they were types of apples, or breeds of dogs; as if those persons of Asian origin did not count as average Americans themselves. As if any of this might be justified by careful distinguishing on the part of the one wielding the bat.

Over the hundreds of at bats he has each year, those random factors usually average out and result in some typical home run production that increases as the player becomes more skillful and then eventually decreases owing to the same process

God,...you have lousy taste in men...I should be insulted... I'm trying to improve my batting average,...no pressure. Pretty sure I can beat two duds.

Or I can just tell you that at the end of the 2011 season Derek Jeter had a career batting average of .313. That is a descriptive statistic, or a “summary statistic.

The good news is that in business, you only need to hit one Grand Slam Offer to retire forever. I have done this four or five times in my life. As for my track record, I have a 36:1 lifetime return on my advertising dollars over my business career. Consider this my lifetime “batting average,” if you will. That means for every $1 I spend on advertising I get $36 back, a 3600% return. That is my average over eight years. And I continue to improve.

a study that some colleagues and I (RG)18 conducted a few years ago suggests that way pitchers are given advance information about hitters can influence how they handle pressure. It has become common in baseball to give pitchers a “heat map” representing a particular hitter’s batting average for pitch locations throughout the strike zone. While it has been shown that athletes can use this type of information to improve performance,19,20 it also has the potential to change how athletes respond to pressure. The theory of ironic processes21 proposes that pressure will cause a skilled performer to maintain a movement profile typical of an expert but act as though he or she has a different goal: achieving a result that was intentionally avoided (e.g., throwing a pitch into one of a batter’s high average, hot zones). In other words, showing a pitcher where NOT to throw the ball might produce a “don’t think about pink elephants” kind of effect. To test this, we compared pitching performance for two groups: one group that was shown only their target (i.e., a cold zone) and a group was shown the target and an ironic (avoid, hot) zone. Performance was measured in low pressure (just pitching) and high pressure (crowd, monetary incentive for control) conditions. Consistent with the ironic process theory, the two-zone group missed their target more often, but not because they were wild and erratic in their delivery. This occurred because they threw significantly more pitches into the hot zone as compared to when they were not under pressure. Thus, we have two suggestions here. First, advance information should show the goal targets (cold zones) and not include things we want the pitcher to avoid. Second, this type of advance information should be included and manipulated in some practice activities. For example, in the Sniper Challenge described above, pitchers could be given different zones they are trying to target indicated using different types of advance information displays/graphics. This will allow the athlete to get practice at setting their intentions based on this type of information.

The average veteran who joined the Legion in the 1920’s had been unaware that big-business men were backing it to use it as a strikebreaking agency. When workers struck against wage cuts, Legion posts were informed that the strikers were Communists trying to create national chaos so that the Reds could take over. Legionnaires were given baseball bats to break up strikes and civil rights demonstrations. The American Civil Liberties Union later reported, “Of the forces most active in attacking civil rights, the American Legion led the field.

don’t know why being funny for someone was such a new idea for me. It had never occurred to me in connection with any other male I had been serious about. Denoon had early on made it clear I was free to include him and his foibles as ingredients and props in my routine if I felt like it, by not objecting when I did. So he was different. Or was it just that I was dealing for the first time in my life with an actual mature male, a concept which up until then I had considered an essentially literary construct and a way of not asking the question of whether or not in fact the real world reduced to a layer cake of differing grades of hysteria, with the hysteria of the ruling sex being simply more suppressed and expressing itself in ritualized forms like preparedness or memorizing lifetime batting averages that no one associates with hysteria. I was surprised at how pleased I felt to get such deep, easy, thorough laughter out of him.

Having Your Say Doesn’t Mean Always Having Your Way Go into situations with reasonable expectations: Just because you’re being given a voice on an issue doesn’t mean your ideas will be accepted. A good way to put this into perspective, and avoid letting these incidents deflate your confidence, is to think of a baseball batting average. If you get more than 30 percent of your ideas accepted during your tenure with a particular organization, you’re doing well. And those who have learned to master the art of listening and learning are likely to bat a 70-percent average. The point is to have reasonable expectations that being heard doesn’t always translate into things going your way. If you understand this, you will head off disagreements and potential conflict based on your own personal view of reality— because your reality may not be the same as someone else’s.

Late in his life, Leary looked back on everything he’d said over the years and compared his level of truthfulness to the batting average of major-league baseball players. “About a third of what I’ve said is just flat out bullshit,” he told a friend. “About a third of what I’ve said is just dead wrong. But a third of what I’ve said have been home runs. So I’m batting .333, which puts me in the Hall of Fame.

East Side High became well known some years ago when its former principal, a colorful and controversial figure named Joe Clark, was given special praise by U.S. Education Secretary William Bennett. Bennett called the school “a mecca of education” and paid tribute to Joe Clark for throwing out 300 students who were thought to be involved with violence or drugs. “He was a perfect hero,” says a school official who has dinner with me the next evening, “for an age in which the ethos was to cut down on the carrots and increase the sticks. The day that Bennett made his visit, Clark came out and walked the hallways with a bullhorn and a bat. If you didn’t know he was a principal, you would have thought he was the warden of a jail. Bennett created Joe Clark as a hero for white people. He was on the cover of Time magazine. Parents and kids were held in thrall after the president endorsed him. “In certain respects, this set a pattern for the national agenda. Find black principals who don’t identify with civil rights concerns but are prepared to whip black children into line. Throw out the kids who cause you trouble. It’s an easy way to raise the average scores. Where do you put these kids once they’re expelled? You build more prisons. Two thirds of the kids that Clark threw out are in Passaic County Jail. “This is a very popular approach in the United States today. Don’t provide the kids with a new building. Don’t provide them with more teachers or more books or more computers. Don’t even breathe a whisper of desegregation. Keep them in confinement so they can’t subvert the education of the suburbs. Don’t permit them ‘frills’ like art or poetry or theater. Carry a bat and tell them they’re no good if they can’t pass the state exam. Then, when they are ruined, throw them into prison. Will it surprise you to be told that Paterson destroyed a library because it needed space to build a jail?

In that crucible a new kind of newspaper was born, one that was not merely an organ of the commercial elites, but rather a mass-market medium—politically independent, designed to be read by the average person, and featuring exactly the sort of reporting that continues to mark most newspaper journalism today: crime, scandal, sports, entertainment.

I told her I felt kind of restless about the new poetry and I had high hopes the new poetry one way or another would be able to get at the real stuff of American life, slipping its fingers into the steel meshes and copper coils of it under the streets and over the houses and people and factories and groceries, conceding a fair batting average to Dante and Keats for what they wrote about love and roses and the moon.

Batting average is emblematic of how the weight of baseball history can be the largest impediment to success on the field.

There were a few other things he was afraid of, too. Like the fact that he might not make the basketball team, no matter how hard he practiced. He’d already failed at Little League—never hit the ball, not even once—and Boyd Middle School didn’t have football, so that would have to wait. Basketball was his best shot at becoming an athlete. You might as well be nothing if you don’t excel at something. That was one of his dad’s favorite expressions, and right now Chet was batting average at everything. Basketball could change that.

Though he is decried as lucky, it’s just possible that he realised that he could not only get away with playing the way he did, but could prosper by it. It may just be that all of those shots which just evaded a fielder’s outstretched hands were intentional and that he didn’t move his feet much because he didn’t need to. It’s just possible that nobody else played this way because they couldn’t. If he was just lucky and had poor technique, wouldn’t the world’s greatest bowlers have figured him? Instead, he got better and better and faster and faster; his first four Test hundreds were made at a strike-rate of 62 and averaged 122, the four ending with this 293 were made at a crazy strike-rate of 104 and at an average of 315!

It would have been unthinkable for anyone on the block not to know the names of the players, their batting averages, and the win-loss record of the pitchers. We knew who they were playing on a given day, where they were playing, who was pitching, and how many games out of first place they might be. We also knew as much information about their personal lives as the baseball cards we flipped and traded provided. Most of our contact with the Dodgers came through the radio and TV play-by-play commentary of Red Barber and Vin Scully, who were as familiar to us as the players.

In our society today, we have placed a great stress on being authentic. We have talked about placing masks over the face of our 'real' selves, and of playing roles which disguise our true and real selves. The implication is that somewhere, inside of you and inside of me, lurk our real selves. Supposedly, this real self is a static and formed reality. There are moments when this real self of mine shines out of me, and there are other moments when I feel compelled to camouflage my real self. There is perhaps some justification for this manner of speaking, but I think that it can be more misleading than helpful. There is no fixed, true and real person inside of you or me, precisely because being a person necessarily implies becoming a person, being in process. If I am anything as a person, it is what I think, judge, feel, value, honour, esteem, love, hate, fear, desire, hope for, believe in, and am committed to. These are the things that define my person, and they are constantly in process, in process of change. Unless my mind and heart are hopelessly barricaded, all these things that define me as a person are forever changing. My person is not a little hard core inside me, a little fully-formed statue that is real and authentic, permanent and fixed; person rather implies a dynamic process. In other words, if you knew me yesterday, please do not think that it is the same person that you are meeting today. I have experienced more life, I have encountered new depths in those I love, I have suffered and prayed, and I am different. Please do not give me a 'batting average', fixed and irrevocable, because I am 'in there' constantly, taking my swings at the opportunities of daily living. Approach me, then, with a sense of wonder, study my face and hands and voice for the signs of change; for it is certain that I have changed. But even if you recognize this, I may be somewhat afraid to tell you who I am.