Walk-off moments get remembered, but they only happen because of the earlier innings, quiet plays, and teammates who made the final swing matter most.
I was never a big sports fan. As a kid I never went to any professional sports event and even as an adult I very rarely do. I did make an exception once for a baseball game. It was a magical sports moment, right out of a Hollywood movie, and a great illustration of how much we remember the dramatic finish and don’t give enough credit to everything it took to get there.
In 2003, the Yankees and Red Sox, one of baseball’s great rivalries, met in the playoffs. While the World Series is technically the ultimate prize, given the history between those two teams, this felt just as fierce. The series was tied 3-3, with one game left to decide it all. Pedro Martinez and Roger Clemens, two of the best pitchers of their era, were going head to head. I paid very high scalper prices because, if ever there was going to be a baseball game worth seeing in person, this was it.
It didn’t disappoint. The Red Sox took an early lead. The Yankees came back in the seventh and tied the game in the bottom of the eighth. Game seven, ninth inning, tied score. Every pitch, every play had the weight of the entire season on it.
Then the ninth was scoreless. So was the tenth. Players got on base but couldn’t score. The game stretched on long enough that both teams seemed at risk of running out of pitchers. Finally, in the bottom of the eleventh inning, Aaron Boone hit a walk-off home run. What a game!
No doubt a sports writer (or any good narrative writer) could have captured that story better, with all the tension and excitement. Following inning after inning of suspense, the moment Boone hit the home run there was an explosion of excitement.
The crowd saw the hit and poured a season’s worth of enthusiasm into it, because that was the moment they could hold on to. Boone hit a great home run in a clutch moment, and I don’t mean to minimize that. But it was one of more than 200 home runs the Yankees hit that season, along with hundreds of other hits, runs, defensive plays, pitching decisions, and quiet moments that never made the highlight reel.
Had one earlier play gone differently, there may have been no game seven, no extra innings, and no walk-off home run. A few missed runs or failed defensive plays earlier in the season, and the Yankees might not have been in the playoffs at all.
All this is to say, it’s easy to see and experience that magic moment, but that moment only comes on the back of hundreds of others. In “The 1,001-Night Success” I wrote about a similar pattern for individuals: what looks like an overnight success from the outside often comes from years of hard work. Jerry Seinfeld's big break on the Tonight Show came from months of careful practice. “Mr. Watson, come here—I want to see you," was only uttered by Alexander Graham Bell after years of work before the telephone could transmit such a message.
With the Yankees, as with any team, it wasn’t just the culmination of Aaron Boone’s hard work that season, but of the efforts of the entire team. That hard work mostly comes in small, mundane steps forward, not magical moments that we love to see on TV. The photo finish of the race comes after 99.9% of it has been run to get to the end.
Most of us don’t play sports professionally, but we see similar under-crediting of team effort in our jobs, even when it is unintentional. Research shows that hospital cleaning staff found their jobs meaningful because they rightly see themselves as essential to keeping the patients safe (see “‘More than just cleaning’: A qualitative descriptive study of hospital cleaning staff as patient caregivers”). If the cleaning staff doesn’t do a good job, the postoperative infection rate will rise, causing more work for the hospital staff. A successful hospital is successful because of the doctors and nurses who treat the patients, the lab staff, technicians, and pharmacists who run the tests and provide treatment, the administrative staff who keep everything running, and the support staff, including the cleaning staff and orderlies, who play important, even if often unnoticed and underappreciated, roles. The successful surgery that makes the papers would have been much harder if the room wasn’t properly disinfected, the instruments were missing, the lab results took longer to come back, or work by people other than the operating room staff didn’t go as smoothly.
The feeling of hitting that walk-off home run must have been amazing. You may have had a similar breakthrough moment of achievement. Enjoy it. But remember that those who see further, or go further, often do so because they stand on the shoulders of giants. The moment you cross the finish line comes from the sustained efforts of an entire team over months or even years. Celebrate the walk-off moment, but remember the earlier innings, the routine plays, the steady defense, and the day-to-day effort of everyone who made that final swing matter.
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