Are you only here for the Raleigh-specific chats? That’s okay by me, but this post veers into real baseball and philosophy. Beware!
The term small ball refers to a strategy of maximizing the short-term practical moves you can make on a baseball field. You have a runner on first? Bunt the ball. That batter is out, but now you have a runner at second which can probably score on a base-hit. Bases loaded with no outs? Just make contact with the bat. Virtually any contact will score a run. Even a double play probably scores one run. This is an approach to baseball that some teams embrace all year. They are scrappy.
Other teams play for maximum damage. The team I’m following closely this year (the 2026 Chicago Cubs) never plays small ball. It drives me crazy. Many times they have loaded the bases and scored zero runs. Why? Because the hitting approach they follow as a team, as a philosophy, is to wait for their pitch and hit it hard. When a pop up to right field would score a run, they’ll take the pitch and let it be what it will be (strike, ball, wild pitch, whatever) because a pop up is not maximum damage.
Both approaches have merit. And both approaches apply to life in general. In high school I applied to Subway and ToysRUs (among other places) in Wichita Falls, TX. I wanted to work at ToysRUS. There were cool kids working there. The job was fun. But it was a more difficult job to land because of those things. I was offered the job at Subway immediately, because I was in fact an artist with sandwiches. No, because it was a crap job. ToysRUs wasn’t going to get back to me for a week or so. Take Subway or wait to take a swing at ToysRUs? I played small ball and worked a couple years at Subway. Like any teenager job it was fine and I made friends. But, ToysRUs did get back to me in a week and some employee had vouched for me… the position was mine if I wanted it. Too late, I’d sacrifice-bunted my one run in from third base.
This may be my least consequential life example, but I think there are people who wait for the right thing to come along and there are people who make the practical move more often than not. This is true in relationships, in jobs, in all life decisions. Is it a spectrum? Probably. It’s unlikely everyone is either/or. But the question is whether or not you can shift approaches when it is needed. Can you identify when to play small ball and when to play for the big inning?
The Cubs have one of the best offenses in baseball. They score many runs. I yell at them for scoring zero runs when they have the bases loaded and no outs. The next inning (in the same game) they’ll score 5 runs and I’ll bashfully admit that I over-reacted. Am I appropriately shamed into understanding their zero runs in the next similar situation? No. No, because I am a practical, small ball person I guess. They get to work at ToysRUs.
Or do they? Because sometimes ToysRUs doesn’t call. On an infinite timeline, everyone should wait for the right thing to come along. But we are finite beings. Sometimes skipping on the immediate, the practical, means stagnation. The baseball season is long- 162 regular season games. Maximizing slugging plays well over the long-run. The problem is the playoffs. In the playoffs, in the most critical and pressure-filled moments, the long-run is meaningless. Each game is crucial and the game is managed differently. Can a team- that has spent a season waiting for their pitch- make the in-game sacrifices necessary to win a 2-1 ball game? I’m skeptical. Maybe that’s my nature. Maybe a run-maximizer would say, “who cares about that 2-1 game if they win the other games 8-2?”
