Bates: Baseball norms, yesterday and today
From SABR member Mike Bates at The Hardball Times on October 26, 2018:
Be they Peterson or presidential or Sieburn, norms are underrated. They help give structure to our lives in a world where we can’t legislate and regulate every experience. Existence is too vast, imbued with too many possibilities. Knowing what generally to expect when we walk into a movie theater or a restaurant breeds comfort, and helps us feel safe. It’s only when these norms are violated or challenged that we start to realize how much we’ve relied on them, and need to question whether it was worth having them around in the first place.
I didn’t used to have a rule requiring my kids to wear clean underwear. In retrospect, maybe that’s on me. But I didn’t make a rule because the importance of it seemed self-evident. I relied on what I thought was a universal norm to get my kids to change shift every day.
So it wasn’t until I noticed that I wasn’t finding underwear from one of my kids in the laundry that it dawned on me that I needed to initiate a conversation and institute a new rule.
Read the full article here: https://www.fangraphs.com/tht/baseballs-norms-today-and-yesterday/
Originally published: October 30, 2018. Last Updated: October 30, 2018.