[I had a little time to kill on the flight back from Toronto, so I got to thinking. And when I get to thinking, weird things happen. Like the following essay.]

It’s the middle of the third set and the dance floor is packed. You are playing songs people know and love. The audience has expectations of those songs and how they should sound, how they should feel.

As a performer, you always want to strike a balance between the listeners’ expectations and your own desire to create something unique. You are not Angus Young, and no matter how hard you might try to emulate his solo in “Shook Me All Night Long,” it’s never quite right. Your fingers do not know what his fingers know. So you make the solo your own, incorporating key passages and phrasing that the audience will recognize. The solo will seem familiar and keep listeners engaged.

Much of this is a matter of preparation: listening to the original recorded version hundreds of times, attempting to play along with it a bar or two at a time, working out the fingering, learning which parts of the solo are essential to the piece and which can be deleted or altered without damaging the song.

But preparation and real-time execution are different beasts altogether. And so tonight maybe a string breaks and you’re forced to decide, on the fly, whether to try and find the same notes on a different string so that you can still nail the passage, or whether to abandon the orginal plan and veer off in some other direction, hopeful that you do not lose your listeners – the ones dancing right in front of the stage – in the process. Every choice you make has an impact on the performance as a whole and its effect on those in attendance.

Like a baseball game.

I’ve never managed a team of any sort, at any level, so I don’t know what exactly transpires in terms of preparation, execution, and bridging the gap between the two. But I wonder if, say, the thought process for Bruce Bochy when faced with the question of whether to lift a struggling starter for a pinch-hitter early in the game, is anything like what goes on in your head when a string breaks in the middle of an AC/DC song.

With people waiting on your decision right this very moment, there is no luxury of time. You can contemplate and ruminate later, after you’ve made it through the show (and isn’t a baseball game, after all, a show?), and add this instance and any lessons learned from it to your wealth of knowledge in helping you to make a decision in future similar situations.

But for now, you must make a choice on the fly, based on preparation, experience, and (some may shudder at this one) intuition. You make the best choice possible based on what you know, you move forward, and you hope that it works.

I’m not suggesting that baseball managers – or any of us, really – shouldn’t be held accountable for their actions. Obviously they should be. But I do think that we – as critical evaluators of what goes on in each game, every choice that is (or isn’t) made – need to remember the context in which these actions occur. Generally, there are tens of thousands of spectators at the game and potentially millions more (if you’re lucky enough to be the Red Sox or Yankees) watching on television or listening on the radio. There are athletes on the field being paid obscene amounts of money to execute the manager’s plan, even if that plan has to be modified on the fly midstream. In short, there is a lot at stake, and precious little time in which to process too much information and choose the next course of action, in the hope that it will be the right choice.

It’s a little overwhleming when you think about it.

And in this light, I might suggest that we remember context when evaluating a manager’s in-game strategies. This doesn’t mean we can’t – or shouldn’t – rip somebody a new one for making what we think is a boneheaded move, just that we would do well to consider the bigger picture while we’re sitting at home scrutinizing minutiae.

Finally, I must note that I’m telling you this not because I think you don’t already know (I have no doubt you do), but because I, myself, needed the reminder. And the best way I know to clarify what I’m thinking, or what I’m trying to think, is to write it out and tell it to others.

So because I needed some perspective on how and why I analyze and criticize moves made in a particular baseball game (c’mon, it’s just a game!), you had to hear about it also. And if you’ve made it this far, I thank you for indulging me.

If not, hey, I wasn’t talking to you anyway.