(With apologies to The Boss who wrote an outstanding post yesterday titled “How Baseball Works”)

It's a wonderful message board that is built around failure.  It's not totally avoiding failure that matters, it's managing failure better than the others.  That's why people who don't regularly post get so upset and don't especially enjoy a thread.  If you can figure out that a series of failures doesn't necessarily mean the thread is going badly, then you might develop an appreciation for this crazy message board.

On VTTW, it's worrisome if a poster has converted on entries only twice in ten tries.  But knowing that Coach Tony is 0 for 37 when he tries to post humorously never bothers me, I know that he manages failure very well and there's a good chance he'll write an important post.  That's why a sacrifice pun is valued so highly.  It's a failure!  The poster made us groan!  But the value comes from the poor attempt at humor.  That's managing failure that results in a win.

Barner posters managed failure a little better than the Gators yesterday and won.  They failed miserably against Albert, but were able to weasel out a couple of decent posts in the end.  The VS didn't manage failure well enough late. Hungary’s post wasn't the right post to get Pensa in.  Had it been deeper or- better yet- a recipe, Pensa would have posted.  Had they managed that failure better, other posters would have joined and created a phenomenal thread.  Of course, some lurkers would have screamed that the thread should have been deleted, especially if the next poster struck out. 

The situation we have now is that we didn't manage failure well enough yesterday, but can we manage THAT failure?  Part of my original point is that Mud's strength as a board owner and admin has been managing failure.  The VS has multiple losers, but only fifty or sixty thousand times did a loser follow another loser and only one time did losers post consecutive times following an unwanted infestation.  That's a strong record.

Part of being a VSer is living with lousy posts, but my overriding philosophy of being a VSer is that I NEVER feel bad about a lousy post before it happens.