Sam Miller, from The Only Rule Is It Has to Work
I've won plenty in my life--board games, Ping-Pong tournaments, hands of poker, etc.--and so I know how little winning changes anything. Winning doesn't end the quest to win. Winning doesn’t relieve the pressure to win. Winning is fun, and then it’s over. If we win this season...the world will not stop and applaud every time we enter the room. “Oh, you’re the guy who won!” nobody will say. If we win, I will drive home afterward and be as broken and flimsy as I ever was. I will struggle not to eat junk food, I will be a jerk to my family sometimes, I will get angry at people who say bad things about my work, I will get nervous about this cough that won’t go away, and when I remember that I’m going to die and that so are my parents and so is my wife and so is my daughter I’ll survive the existential dread only by convincing myself that none of it really matters, all of it is an illusion. Winning, especially, is an illusion, or at least an exaggeration.
But then what is losing? Losing is the sad inverse of winning, and yet not so easily disregarded as an illusion; losing is ruining me. Why does losing cost me so much more happiness than winning provides? Because, I come to realize, losing is not only the absence of victory but also the expenditure of an opportunity for victory. (...)
This is why losing is different. There’s a variable here besides the outcome of the game: time. Say you could monetize happiness, perfectly. How much would the happiness of winning a championship go for? Let’s say...$1,800... You’d trade a flat-screen TV for it, but not your car for it. Fair?
So now how about the happiness of losing a championship? Why, that’d be $0. I wouldn’t pay a cent for that. That sounds awful. So the difference between the two is $1,800. But there’s another variable in this equation:
Outcome + Opportunity Cost = Net
And how much is the opportunity cost? How much would you pay to have this summer back? In twenty-seven years, when you’re tumbling toward the earth in a skydive gone wrong, how much would you pay for those ninety days of health and happiness and relative youth and the chance to win that celebration on the field? All the money in the world. Everything you ever earned, for the chance to do it again.
If you win, the opportunity cost feels like nothing. You came to do something and you did it. If you had that opportunity back, you couldn’t do better than you did; it doesn’t feel like a lost opportunity at all. But if you lose, it means you came to do something and did nothing. You could have done so much more with that opportunity. So we now have:
The value of a lost summer is negative infinity. This is the math I settle on. Baseball is a game of failure. Every game fails to forestall death.
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