SCENE: The visitor's clubhouse at Shea Stadium. Braves pitching coach Leo Mazzone is talking to his No. 2 starter, Mike Hampton, following the team's 10-6 loss the previous day.
"I want to look at some video," Mazzone says. "I think you were shortening your stride and your follow through."
Hampton sighs, "I'm not interested in the blame-game. We need to look forward, not backward."
"Just look at the video," Mazzone pleads. "You shortened your stride and grooved an 0-2 pitch to Matsui and he ripped it."
"Twenty-twenty hindsight," the pitcher says dismissively. "Finger-pointing and Monday-morning quarterbacking doesn't help us move forward."
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The above conversation is, of course, pure fiction. Hampton is a grown-up and a professional who takes his job and his responsibility seriously. He knows that failure is a part of baseball, just as it is a part of life, and that if we don't try to learn from our failures we will likely end up repeating them.
Hampton has gotten shellacked in his first two outings this year and he doesn't want his next start to go the same. You can be sure he's studying video and working closely with Mazzone to try to figure out what went wrong and to make sure it doesn't happen again.
This little sports analogy, like all sports analogies, is weak. But it's in response to another weak sports analogy that has been widely used in recent weeks with regard to the important work of the Sept. 11 commission: "Monday-morning quarterbacking."
The implication of this phrase is that the lessons of hindsight are somehow inappropriate. But if you are the quarterback, or the quarterback coach, or the head coach, then Monday-morning quarterbacking is not only appropriate, it's your job.
p.s. — embarrassing misspellings, including Mike Hampton's name, corrected post-posting
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