To process my grief over the imminent end of the season, I’ve been reflecting on baseball’s lessons for instructional designers. (Stick with me.)
Baseball—distinctively among major American sports—is constituted by sequences of discrete, observable events. Pitch, swing, ground ball to short, throw to first: that’s a common baseball play of four successive events involving four unique players, each performing a single act with the ball which, in a sense, he has no choice but to attempt. (Baseball is more like tennis or golf in this regard than like basketball, a game constituted by complex, fluid, and contingent actions.)