Listen to this post: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube
It’s been a few weeks. I’m getting over it.
When Julio Rodríguez struck out to end the Mariners’ season, I started thinking about what it really takes to become an all-time great. How all of us, even the best of us, struggle against our own nature.
The secret to success, thank goodness, isn’t to press. It isn’t to strive for perfection. The real unlock is eliminating those big blunders. Becoming blunderless.
It’s easy to default to a tidy narrative: someone has talent, leans into it, makes it big, and the rest is history. Athlete or artist—talent plus time, it’s a done deal. But real performance is messier.
Julio is one of the most electric players in baseball, a budding superstar. He’s brilliant, but also a bone head, a little too aggressive.
It comes from a good place. He wants it. He wants to be an all-time great. And because he wanted it so badly during that last at-bat in Toronto, he did exactly the opposite.
For Mariners fans, that aggression is part of the charm. We’ve learned to live with the strikeouts because the payoff. First pitch swinging lasers in the gap. But as he chased pitches well out of the zone, I was cringing. It was expected. I’d seen this movie before. Anyone who’s watched as many Mariners games as I have knows the pattern: bust him inside, sweeper away, game over. But with MVP candidate Cal Raleigh waiting on deck, it was hard not to wonder—why can’t he be more patient?
After the game, as clips of that final at-bat filled social media, armchair analysts pointed out that Julio didn’t see a single strike: six pitches. All balls.
I’m sure he was thinking, with two balls and no strikes, this guy has to come to me. He’s got to put one over the plate. And when he does, I’ll lose it over the left field fence.
That pitch out over the plate never came.
We all know Julio can expand the zone when he wants it too much—a textbook unforced error. What I didn’t know is that there’s a name for games like this.
The Loser’s Game
In Extraordinary Tennis for the Ordinary Player, Simon Ramo observed something about how matches are won and lost.
At the professional level, tennis is a winner’s game—matches go to the player who can hit the most winners, the shots opponents can’t return.
At the amateur level, tennis is a loser’s game—matches go to the player who makes the fewest mistakes. Points aren’t won so much as they’re lost.
You don’t need to read past the cover flap to get the point:
“The greatest mistake the ordinary player makes is in thinking he must ape the techniques of the pro—the big service, rushing the net, decisive slam shots—requiring top training, top conditioning, and instantaneous reflexes. The average player has neither the skill nor the stamina to use such methods.”
Ramo put it numerically: professionals win roughly 80% of their points by skill; amateurs lose about 80% of theirs through unforced errors.
The distinction between amateurs and professionals is useful—but it’s not two different games. The principle is the same at every level; pros just execute it relentlessly. At the highest level, winning still looks like blundering less, Letting the other side make the last mistake.
Julio, though operating at the highest level, was susceptible to the amateur’s trap. Losing at the hands of his own unforced errors. Each time he chased a pitch out of the zone, he was turning the pitchers mistake into his own. Simply staying put, waiting for a strike, might’ve kept the season alive. At least for one more at-bat.
Ramo’s framework influenced broader ideas, like using error avoidance in business, specifically in finance. Charles Ellis’s investing essay “The Loser’s Game,” helped bridge that gap, arguing that most investors would beat the market by avoiding common mistakes rather than chasing exceptional returns.
Successful investors were nodding their collective heads while reading Ellis, but the ideas stayed in those professional ranks until Warren Buffett decided to put his money where his mouth was.
In 2007, Buffett made a bet with Ted Seides that a simple Vanguard S&P 500 index fund would beat a portfolio of five hedge funds over the next decade. The stakes? $1 million to charity.
Buffett crushed it, and all he had to do was sit on his ass. In his own way, he was winning by playing the loser’s game.
Ramo was onto something—but even he complicated things. The insight from Ellis and Buffett is that even in the professional ranks, it’s still a loser’s game. Outperformance comes less from brilliance than from blundering less.
And if that’s the game most of us are playing, what do we do? First, you’ve got to know what a good opportunity looks like.
Recognize Your Pitch
Ted Williams used to say the most important thing in hitting is getting a good pitch to hit. He didn’t stop at strikes—he charted how well he hit each part of the strike zone.
Low and outside? Technically a strike, but one Williams would prefer to take. He waited for pitches he could hit—and hit well. That’s a Hall of Famer winning the “loser’s game.” Refuse marginal pitches, reduce your error rate, dominate the sport, go grab a beer.
I’m sure Julio has seen this chart; I’d be surprised if any professional ballplayer hasn’t. But seeing and observing are different things. Early in his career, even Williams would chase pitches outside his ideal zone. He had to train himself to wait for the pitches he could hit and hit well. A discipline that turned his natural talent into legendary skill.
But knowing your pitch is only half the battle. What do you do when an opponent is forcing the action?
Create Empty Space
My son enjoys chess. We’ve attended chess club at the local library, and watching him learn the game revealed something: most of the kids were beating themselves.
I’ve always been a bit of a Julio Rodríguez when it comes to chess—lunging at opportunities instead of letting the game come to me. I wasn’t the best choice to teach him the game, so we took a few online lessons through Chess.com and Duolingo. Just the basics: control the center, free your knights and bishops, castle early. But what they didn’t teach explicitly was the power of the blunder check.
One kid at chess club—his dad recording his every move—played aggressively, launching attacks and pushing the tempo. Most kids panic and launch an ill-advised counterattack. My son just sat back, defended calmly, and waited. Eventually the aggressive kid overextended and left his king exposed. Checkmate.
Josh Waitzkin, in The Art of Learning, discusses this dynamic. Early in his career, Waitzkin’s aggressive style left him overcommitted; he would beat himself. He matured, learned to bleed fewer points, and engineered opponents’ blunders instead of committing his own.
Waitzkin learned “the power of empty space.” When an aggressive attack is launched, create a void, step back, and let the aggression fizzle out with minimal damage. There’s a natural tendency to meet aggression with aggression. That’s a loser’s bet. It makes you susceptible.
Here’s a concrete tactic Waitzkin teaches: before any aggressive move, ask yourself, “What am I giving up?” Check for undefended pieces. Check the squares you’re abandoning. One deliberate blunder check per move. Simple, but often the difference between brilliance and a bad beat.
Will you screw up? Sure. But as chess master Savielly Tartakower said, “The winner of the game is the player who makes the next-to-last mistake.”
Creating space is defensive wisdom. But what about when you need to win—not just survive?
Be Gravity
In the late 1980s, a young phenom from Las Vegas named Andre Agassi was trying to find his way on tour. Skilled, but erratic.
He found Coach Brad Gilbert, a retired pro who crushed Budweisers and told it like it was.
Why was Agassi failing? He was trying to be perfect—trying to hit winners with every shot.
Gilbert saw a different path. With Agassi’s footwork and return ability, all he needed was to keep the ball in play. He needed to play the loser’s game. Gilbert told him to be like “gravity”—an unrelenting, undeniable force. A “returning machine” that forces opponents to keep playing until they falter. “Make them feel you,” Gilbert said. Keep the pressure on until they wilt in the sun on center court.
Gilbert understood that when you play high-probability shots, you rarely miss, and pressure accumulates. Every return that stays in bounds forces the opponent to make another decision, take another risk, expend more energy. Agassi’s consistency didn’t just reduce his unforced errors—it raised his opponent’s forced errors. Facing someone who never gives you a free point wears on the mind.
Apply pressure, gravity, and force mistakes from the other side.
Aggression can work. I’ve told my son’s teams to be “default aggressive.” But maybe the better word is persistent. Pesky. Take what they give you. And when your opponent gets aggressive and starts to beat themselves—let them.
Have you seen Top Gun?
“Mav, you wanna know who the best is? That’s him. Iceman. It’s the way he flies. Ice cold. No mistakes. He just wears you down. You get bored, frustrated, do something stupid, and he’s gotcha.”
— Top Gun (1986)
Iceman sounds blunderless to me. And it’s only after internalizing this that Maverick becomes the best pilot he can be.
Against Your Nature
In his 1989 Wesco Financial Annual Report, Charlie Munger wrote, “It is remarkable how much long-term advantage people like us have gotten by trying to be consistently not stupid, instead of trying to be very intelligent. There must be some wisdom in the folk saying, ‘It’s the strong swimmers who drown.’”
In this shareholder letter, Munger makes the case (and a good one at that) for slow and deliberate growth. He outlines the somewhat boring investments they made in The Gillette Company and Champion International. Razors and socks. But his closing remark is what sticks.
“Wesco continues to be more like a tortoise in a race of hares. And, as we have demonstrated, this particular tortoise is not very sprightly.” He sharpened the image, “Moreover, what sprightliness remains is often deterred by remembrance of past outcomes which were as bad as the writer’s dog when it limped home from its first foray outside the yard, injured by a car and bloated from overeating garbage.”
That sprightliness is our nature. We lose some over time, and we suppress even more because it often comes with pain—injury or bloat.
The hard part is resisting the impulse to make something happen. The best investors, like the best hitters, learn to wait for a good pitch.
None of them played this way naturally. Williams chased early in his career. Waitzkin’s instinct was chaotic aggression. Agassi wanted every shot to be a highlight. They all had to push back against their nature.
They needed coaching, discipline, and years of practice to internalize the lesson. You might need the same. Mistakes will be made, but there is no shame in letting them happen to the other guy.
Actually, that is the mark of a pro.
In Tin Cup, Roy McAvoy faces this fight with himself. On the final hole of the U.S. Open, needing only a safe lay-up to win, his caddie begs him to play it smart. McAvoy can’t. He goes for the green over water—splashes it—and throws away the title.
McAvoy admits, “The one time in my life I know the play is to hit the lay-up—my whole life and future and career on the line—and I still can’t make myself do it.”
He knew, he just couldn’t do it. Because he’s a bone head too. Most of us live somewhere on the spectrum between too much risk or too little.
Roy’s girlfriend, Molly, she is a smart cookie. She says we should listen to the tuning fork. The two sides vibrating together.
Will Julio listen? I can’t wait to find out. When that moment comes, I’ll be watching, cringing, hoping that he’s just a bit less spry than the season before.
If you enjoyed this post, please share it with a friend.
What do you think?