Sports Impersonality Of The Year

From The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach:

Baseball was an art, but to excel at it you had to become a machine. It didn’t matter how beautifully you performed sometimes, what you did on your best day, how many spectacular plays you made. You weren’t a painter or a writer - you didn’t work in private and discard your mistakes, and it wasn’t just your masterpieces that counted. What mattered, as for any machine, was repeatability. Moments of inspiration were nothing compared to elimination of error.

Whenever players are asked to comment on a game in progress they'll tend to say "we need to cut out the errors". Commentators, on the other hand, say "they need to produce something special". Never read anything which illuminated the different ways of looking at it quite as well as this.