There are some great examples of gamesmanship

“You spend a good piece of your life gripping a baseball and in the end, it turns out that it was the other way around all the time.”

For all the benefits performance rituals bring, they can carry costs, too. If we depend on our rituals too much, we can end up beholden to and lost without them.

Consider the case of another Major League Baseball player, longtime Red Sox third baseman Wade Boggs. Boggs had a spate of rituals all tied to the number seventeen. At 5:17 before each game, he began batting practice, and at 7:17 he ran his wind sprints. Boggs’s ritual was so well-known that Bobby Cox, then manager of the Blue Jays, asked the scoreboard operator to skip from 7:16 right to 7:18 at a game in Toronto just to throw Boggs off.