Baseball and Acknowledging Our Mistakes

Every sport has a set of somewhat peculiar rules. Soccer has yellow cards. Football a false start. Basketball has a flagrant one and even two. Hockey icing.

Unique among these sports stands baseball. No other sport keeps track of errors and makes a distinction between an earned hit and advancing to a base on an error. At each game the scorer sits in a box and makes the determination: earned or error. At the end of the game there is a tally: runs, hits and errors. In determining the standings all that matters are the number of runs. This, and this alone, determines the winner and loser of the game.

And yet there it stands: the team’s hits and the team’s errors. I know of no other sport that tracks errors and mistakes. A team can lose despite earning many hits. And a team can win despite committing several errors.

Sunday is the first day of the month of Elul. It marks the beginning of the High Holiday period, a time of introspection that culminates in Yom Kippur. It is a forty-day period that mirrors the forty days Moses spent on Mount Sinai communing with God. We are meant to turn inward, examine our deeds and look back on the past year.

We are meant to tally our errors. We are not meant to look at the standings. Our successes are immaterial. Our wins do not count. On these days it is only the error column that matters.

This may seem like a depressing exercise. But the faith of the High Holidays is that you can only get better, you can improve yourself, if you look at your faults. True introspection is about being honest about our flaws and owning our mistakes. It is about tallying our errors.

That is the faith that animates baseball. It is the belief that guides the Jewish tradition. If we acknowledge our mistakes we can improve our lives.

The hope that tempers this sometimes painful and other times awkward exercise of detailing our errors is that in those final minutes of Yom Kippur as the gates of repentance begin to close all can be forgiven.

The steps that begin in the approaching days is recounting our errors.