A Crowd Worthy of a Perfect Game
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As summer goes, my kids are out of school, and I'm trying to slow down and see the world through their eyes. My seven-year-old son is a native Angeleno with a closet full of Dodgers jerseys and strong opinions about the rotation. Which means we watch a lot of baseball.
He doesn't watch sports to see the other team fail. He watches to see something great happen.
Yesterday morning, immediately after springing from bed, my son insisted that I pull up the instant replay of the Dodgers collaborating brilliantly in a game saving double-play against the Phillies.
For him, winning means the game was real, the effort was total, and the moment meant something.
This summer, the World Cup was played throughout North America. The Knicks won the championship, and the excitement spread well beyond New York. And in Chicago, a sold-out crowd of White Sox fans, with every reason to be bitter, gave Dodger pitcher Yoshinobu Yamamoto a standing ovation after he carried a no-hit bid into the ninth inning against them.
That last one stopped me.
If it had been a White Sox pitcher, my son would have stood up too. Not because he's a pushover, he takes the Dodgers very seriously, but because at seven, he still understands something many adults forget: the point isn't for the other side to fail. The point is for something great to happen.
We spend a lot of time talking about what's broken. The polarization, contempt, the inability to be in the same room with people who think differently.
And we’re not wrong. Something is broken.
But those White Sox fans weren't reading from that script. They applauded a man who, in that moment, was their opponent, because the moment demanded it.
Beneath the competition, they grasped something essential: you cannot have a great game without both sides showing up fully, a perfect game without worthy opponents, or a memorable night without a crowd capable of recognizing it.
What two decades of complex litigation taught me is that even adversaries are more connected than they realize. Most people want systems that work. But systems create incentives, and those incentives can pull participants away from the very purpose the system was meant to serve.
Litigation is a good example: it exists to resolve genuine harm, yet rewards delay, escalation, and extraction for everyone involved. Most disputes arise not because people want fundamentally different futures, but because the systems around them quietly reward them for behaving as if they do.
Sports makes that interdependence visible.
The World Cup brought nations, some allied, some adversarial, into the same stadiums. They disagree about politics, history, culture, and any number of things outside those walls. Yet crowds gathered together in cities all over the world to see the beauty of the tournament, which depends on every team competing at its best.
You need the other side.
Their excellence makes yours matter.
We understand this instinctively in sports. Nobody wants to win because the other team failed to show up. The value of the achievement depends on the quality of the competition.
Outside of sports, we often forget the same truth.
Democracies, markets, communities, and institutions are all forms of cooperative competition. They depend on different perspectives and interests meeting within a shared framework. They work best when the people we disagree with are capable, engaged, and committed to something larger than the disagreement.
The goal is showing up ready to engage.
Democracy, at its best, does not eliminate differences. It allows people who disagree about almost everything to coexist, compete, and build something larger than themselves. And not because we've resolved our disagreements, but because we've agreed the game is worth playing and that we need each other to play it well.
Sports remind us that this is possible. That wanting the whole system to thrive is not naïve. It is practical. It is durable.
It is the only version of winning that holds.
Sometimes it's as close as the seven-year-old sitting next to you on the couch watching baseball.