Cohen says that: “When my revered friend and teacher William James wrote an essay on “A Moral Equivalent for War,” I suggested to him that baseball already embodied all the moral value of war, so far as war had any moral value.” He concludes by looking forward to “the establishment of the true Church Universal in which all men would feel their brotherhood in the Infinite Game.”

The wikipedia article points out that although economic theory says that it is irrational to consider sunk costs in making decisions, evidence from behavioral economics shows that: “Sunk costs greatly affect actors’ decisions, because many humans are loss-averse and thus normally act irrationally when making economic decisions.” An article in the American Economic Journal Microeconomics (November 2011) by Sandeep Baliga and Jeffrey C. Ely—”Mnemonomics: The Sunk Cost Fallacy as a Memory Kludge”—gives the example that: “France and Britain continued to invest in the Concorde supersonic jet after it was known that it was going to be unprofitable.” Nick can sympathize with another example: if a baseball team takes on a very expensive contract with an outfielder who is not good enough to play, it would be rational to release the outfielder and move on.

I have never been interested in postgame questioning of players. The questions are usually of the “How does it feel to lose this game [or win this game]. This yahoo article by a different writer notes the real problem: “leaving reporters to think up their own stuff.”

In the next game of the Series, Pujols hit 3 home runs and led his team to victory while setting a World Series record for most extra bases in a game.