Goldman: The tale of Purnal Goldy, a ballad of us all
From SABR member Steven Goldman at The Hardball Times on January 18, 2018:
It’s impossible to say what percentage of a kid’s potential is merely observers’ perception of the same. Purnal Goldy suggests a good answer would be, “All of it.” A good answer would be “evolve or die.” A good answer would be, “When you come to a fork in the road, take it.” Maybe Yogi Berra said that, maybe he didn’t, but whoever came up with the words was neither funny nor clever, but cruel, because when the road divides you must choose without knowing whether either path is right, wrong, both, or neither. It may be you are too limited to choose the right path regardless. Our lives are cruel this way, presenting us with an endless succession of rigged, no-win forks. As the English biologist Thomas Henry Huxley wrote in 1868, “The player on the other side is hidden from us. We know that his play is always fair, just and patient. But we also know, to our cost, that he never overlooks a mistake, or makes the smallest allowance for ignorance.”
All of which is to say: If you can’t lay off the pitches out of the strike zone, well, your bad.
Read the full article here: https://www.fangraphs.com/tht/the-tale-of-purnal-goldy-a-ballad-of-us-all/
Originally published: January 18, 2018. Last Updated: January 18, 2018.