The Slow Game of Failure

This weekend, I am going to Cooperstown with my son’s baseball team. For a baseball fan, Cooperstown is close to holy ground.

There is something fitting about taking a group of young baseball players there for their final tournament together. Cooperstown is filled with the names of players who made the game look easy, but every one of them failed far more often than they succeeded. Even the best hitters made an out most of the time. Great pitchers lost games. Hall of Famers struck out, booted ground balls, missed signs, and had days when nothing worked.

Stanley Hauerwas once described baseball as a “slow game of failure.” That may be one of the best descriptions of the sport. Baseball does not let you hide from failure, and it does not let you rush past it. You have to stand there while everyone watches. Then you have to return to the dugout, sit with what happened, and wait for another chance.

A pitcher can be nearly perfect for eight innings and still lose the game with one bad pitch. A hitter can strike out three times and drive in the winning run in the ninth. A team can play badly on Saturday and look completely different on Sunday.

Baseball keeps insisting that failure is real, but it is rarely final.

That may be part of why the game feels so strange in America. We prefer speed. We want results now, answers immediately, and victory without the inconvenience of patience. We skip commercials, speed up podcasts, refresh our phones, and become irritated when anything takes longer than expected. Even children’s sports can become consumed by rankings, statistics, and the question of what comes next.

Hauerwas argues that our obsession with speed can become violent. When everything must happen quickly, anything, or anyone, standing in the way becomes a problem to be removed. Patience begins to look like weakness. Waiting looks like failure.

Baseball offers another way.