Re: Can you handle it?

At the risk of getting (further) off-topic I'm somewhat aghast at the 
assumptions made in a couple of recent posts.

The difference between a sport (read: athletic competition) and 
something like qb, bridge, or poker, has far less to do with chance 
than the recent posts suggest.

(To be really pedantic, um, sports require physical prowess where many 
qb players, card players, and so on, aren't quite physically fit. :-))

Perhaps people have forgotten the role chance plays in sports but it's 
really everywhere.  The best example is probably just what happens to 
a baseball after a batter makes contact.  A ground ball might go 
directly to the shortstop for an easy double-play; it might find the 
perfect gap between two fielders and become an RBI single.

In fact, a couple years ago a baseball researcher by the name of Voros 
McCracken found that a baseball pitcher has surprisingly little 
ability (perhaps no ability) to control the rate at which batted balls 
become base hits.

The choice of particular tossup/bonus answers in a given pack seems to 
me somewhat analogous to the direction/outcome of a batted baseball.  
In either case -- getting back to the excellent post that started this 
-- even when you have less control than you'd like to have, a huge 
part of the thrill of competition is the ability to succeed when you 
most need to, to step up -- or at least maintain -- your game when the 
pressure is on.

(Hmm, I've invoked baseball stathead wisdom but then hailed the 
virtues of clutch performance in the next paragraph.  In case you were 
about to reply on that point... yes, in baseball, "clutch" performance 
has yet to be statistically verified over the long haul.  Still -- 
Kirk Gibson?  Jack Morris?  Th

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