Sixty-two Reasons to Smile

It’s been said a thousand times that baseball is about failure. You want to know why Holden Caulfield, the American teenager par excellence, wears his hat turned around on his head like a catcher, cherishes his dead younger brother’s baseball mitt, and dreams of catching innocent kids before they fall off a cliff? Because life, like baseball, is a failure, until it is a success, and then it is a failure again, and so on—out of the cradle endlessly pitching, striking out, hitting and catching, until life fails, period. That’s why.