Nice NYT Op-Ed by Doug Glanville

I found this by accident - I followed another blog's link to the NYT site and ran across this piece while I was wandering through. It's a opinion by Doug Glanville, former Cub draft pick

As I sat in my high school math class one day, my teacher asked a question that I doubt will find a consensus opinion in my lifetime: "Was math invented or was it discovered?" To this day, I still scratch my head. I (Doug Glanville, baseball player) was discovered — several years after that math class, but well before the phone rang a couple of minutes after six on an evening in June 1991. My junior year of college had just ended and I knew that the closer it rang to 6:00 p.m., the higher I was in the annual amateur baseball draft. And in draft terms, higher means better. At the other end of the line was a representative of the Chicago Cubs. He congratulated me and told me the good news: his organization had selected me as their first choice in the draft. It turned out that only 11 players in the country had been selected before me, so I was in good company.

With all of this attention, I started to ask myself, What do I have as a player that no one else has that’s putting me under this microscope? The quantifiable answer seemed straightforward. Most of it could be measured using a stopwatch or a radar gun: I could run, I could catch, I could throw and I could put a round bat on a round ball with accuracy. But even I understood that my ability to succeed at the next level of baseball would be predicated on a lot more than numbers.