Perhaps the most important lesson I picked up in all the years of baseball and softball I’ve played: minimize the mental errors. I can have a plan at the start of every at-bat for what happens based on how the number of outs and where runners are. A liner, a hard hit grounder, a softly hit one. I can make a plan before each pitch so that if that happens, I don’t have to figure out what to do with it. I already know what to do.

That doesn’t mean I’ll be able to execute. I might boot the grounder or make a wild throw to first. Execution errors can be drilled away with practice. But there’s no real “practice” for not having a plan, for making a mental error. It’s just lazy not to come up with a plan.

Earlier today, I described that the currency of baseball is outs: you only get 27. Fundamentally, baseball is a race to score more runs before each team spends their outs. You can’t get more outs; you can only lose them. Thus, it’s critically important not to give outs away. Empirically, as teams have made this realization, we see a dramatic decrease in cheap outs (e.g., the sacrifice bunt): in 1985, approximately 1% of plate appearances were sacrifice bunts; in 2025, it was 0.3%.

Similarly, in pickleball, the currency is Points. (I’ll capitalize Points for the score and refer to the play in lowercase.) It’s a race to a set number of Points: you cannot reduce a team’s Point count: each additional Point they accrue is one less they need to get to the goal line. But not every point played results in a Point for the opponent, since Points can only be accrued by the serving team. This is important!

It means that the decisions in the play should be different whether you’re serving or receiving. If you’re receiving, you cannot score. Your opponents can. You cannot get closer to the goal line. But your opponents, the servers, can get closer to the finish line.

Therefore, the receiving team needs to play more defensively to prevent the the serving team from winning a Point. That is, be more cautious and safe with decisions: do everything to keep the play alive, avoid taking marginal chances for winners. A marginal chance that wins does not accrue the winner a Point. The marginal chance that loses gets the opponent one step closer to victory. The expected value of the marginal shot is negative. This is especially true on first-serves, but it’s probably still true on second-serves.

The serving team can afford to take some chances. If their marginal chance loses, the worst thing is no one won a point and they may get another serve. If their marginal chance wins, they are one step closer to victory. For servers, the expected value of a marginal shot is positive. That’s not to say take badly aggressive shots. But a serving team can afford more leeway with aggression than receivers.

One of the realizations I have had in watching video of my games is that I need to be more active with a pre-play routine: