One of the reasons I love baseball is that it doesn’t believe in clocks.

In basketball, football, and soccer, the clock is king. You can be mounting a furious comeback, finding your rhythm, feeling momentum shift in your favor—and then the buzzer sounds. Game over. Time has spoken, regardless of how you played during the last few minutes.

Baseball is different. Theoretically, a game could go on forever. If it’s tied after nine innings, you keep playing. Ten innings, eleven, twelve, as long as it takes.

And even when things look utterly hopeless, baseball leaves a door open.

Picture a team trailing 10–0 in the bottom of the ninth with two outs. Most of us would turn off the TV. But technically, the game isn’t over. There is still one more batter, one more pitch, one more swing. A walk, a base hit, a double into the gap—suddenly runners are moving. Is a ten-run comeback likely? Absolutely not. But unlikely doesn’t mean impossible.

That might be baseball’s greatest lesson for the rest of us: Never confuse the two.

Life has a funny way of surprising us just when we think the final score is set. We look at our own personal scoreboards and may decide it’s time to pack it up. A career path stalls, a relationship breaks down, a health diagnosis catches us off guard, or we make a mistake we’re convinced we can never fix. Or maybe we just reach a certain........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)