Thursday Morning Links

Managerial candidates Jeff Bannister and Joe McEwing interviewed with the Rangers Wednesday, answering questiosn like "the bunt... great baseball play or greatest baseball play?" and "we're making whoopie, what color is your ball gag?"  Here's T.R. Sullivan's take and here's Evan Grant's.

Evan Grant takes a look at Josh Hamilton once again blaming the fans for hating instead of himself for not playing and wonders if Hamilton just doesn't get it.  Josh thinks the fans are booing him despite the fact that a late season injury made him cold for the playoffs instead of thinking the fans are booing him because of the fact that a late season injury made him cold for the playoffs.   I don't think it's that he doesn't get it, or at least that's not it exactly.  What we see in Hamilton is the difference between succeeding on innate talent and succeeding on a combination of talent and effort.

Bloomberg View contributor Megan McArdle wrote a book about failure, and how failure is the rate limiting component in the formula for success.  Her thesis is that the truly exceptional build off of failures to reach the top of their game.  How we recover from failure determines how and if we can rebound to something greater... but you cannot use failure as something constructive if you do not recognize what mistakes you made that contributed to the suboptimal result.  If your failure is always because of energy drinks or the fans or God being angry at you then there is nothing to fix.  Nothing changes, you are a character with no arc, you continue to swing low and away because if you pray hard enough eventually you'll connect, and if you never hit again it's God or the fans or the sun in your sensitive and soulful blue eyes.

She theorizes that the reason so many writers are procrastinators is because they've spent their whole lives collecting the dividends on their talent.

If you’ve spent most of your life cruising ahead on natural ability, doing what came easily and quickly, every word you write becomes a test of just how much ability you have, every article a referendum on how good a writer you are. As long as you have not written that article, that speech, that novel, it could still be good. Before you take to the keys, you are Proust and Oscar Wilde and George Orwell all rolled up into one delicious package.

It may be a reach, but I kind of see these long, listless stretches of Joshless baseball as Hamilton remaining Hamilton in theory rather than Hamilton in practice.  As long as Josh is shaking his head sadly, lamenting all those energy drinks that turned his cornea into a junebug carapace instead of swinging the bat he remains the Josh of the homerun derby and not the Josh of early 2013.  Impostor syndrome, anyone?  Maybe it's just a certain personality type... I have a recurring anxiety dream where someone figures out that I'm a high school dropout and I have to go back to 11th grade.  Apparently my subconscious is no more sensible than my conscious self, though, because invariably I drop out again.  It's probably just because my dream-teachers aren't challenging me enough.

Josh Hamilton is baseball's Taylor Swift: writing tear smeared self-affirmations in his "Poor Me" journal because another heartless fan base has called him crazy.

And, finally, speaking of battling your treacherous mind, here's a lengthy story in Vanity Fair about Randy Quaid and his crazy wife Evi.  Not sex, not sharing your most shameful secrets, not lying together quietly in the darkest night... nothing in this world, Randy, is more intimate than sharing a delusion.