The Art of Losing

Roger Angell is the best prose writer about baseball. Here he quotes one of Elizabeth Bishop's greatest poems, One Art. Sadly he entirely misses Bishop's irony, the unbearable force driving the poem. Torre has (by the front office's standards anyway) lost and lost for years now, and his mastery of winning was questionable. It seems to me that in walking away from his players and millions more dollars than any other manager makes, and in attacking the team's ownership (and hence the team) in doing so, he has reached the pinnacle of losing.