What baseball can learn from Silicon Valley

Favoring caution over a possibly historic pitching performance runs against the merits of risking failure

The Monitor's View

Every now and then a baseball pitcher will throw a perfect game: 27 batters, 27 outs. It has happened in the major leagues only 23 times in 150 years, on average once every 10,000 games. On April 13 there was nearly a 24th. Clayton Kershaw, longtime ace for the Los Angeles Dodgers and one of the best arms of his generation, retired 21 batters from the opposing Minnesota Twins – 13 by strikeout – over seven innings. He had thrown just 80 pitches. And then, in a move that left many fans gobsmacked, he was pulled from the game.

The game that Americans have played since the Civil War has always held a mirror to society, offering a reflection of the country’s evolving values. But in one significant way, baseball and society may be moving in opposition directions: in their attitude toward risk.

Here’s one way to measure that divergence. Between 2010 and 2021, the total number of stolen bases declined by 750. During that same period, the number of business startups in the United States jumped from 2.5 million to 5.4 million, according to the Economic Innovation Group. Both of those trends are shaped by attitudes about risk.

On the ball field, more complex analytics “has led to a reduced risk-taking mode,” New York Yankees manager Brian Cushman told Athlon Sports. So have labor costs per season. Salaries for top starting pitchers have swelled to eight figures. So has caution. Managers now use more pitchers per game to avoid injuries. That is why Mr. Kershaw was pulled.

Growth in technological innovation, meanwhile, suggests that “cultural factors such as trust, patience, and individualism” are deepening, a recent study in the Journal of Economic Growth found. One reason for that may be a wider embrace of the merits of failure. In recent years countries like France, China, and Mexico have sought to boost entrepreneurship by lifting cultural taboos about failure.

Similar attitude shifts are unfolding in education and conservation. A study published in World Development in February, for example, found that acknowledging failure requires more of environmental groups in developing countries than just learning how to do something better. It involves the honesty and humility to assess how their work might result in “adverse impacts on local populations and incitement of negative attitudes toward conservation more generally.”

A “right to fail” has also gained currency as a key approach to learning. A study published last year in the Review of Educational Research underscored a key distinction between teaching by instruction and teaching by problem-solving. The former assumes a lack of knowledge and seeks to avoid failure. The latter emphasizes the discovery of ability and agency through “productive failure.”

“Individuals who approach tasks with a growth mindset – where they are prepared to fail and learn from that failure – are much more likely to be successful in the long term compared to those who operate with a fixed mindset where they see ability as inherently fixed and unchanging, and failure as fatal,” Indiana University professor Greg Fisher told The Economist.

Whether Mr. Kershaw had six more flawless outs in him will never be known. But for a sport struggling to reverse its declining audience, the widening global embrace of risk holds a cautionary tale. Trial and error are a safer play than timidity and caution.