The Art of Closing: What Baseball Taught Me About Finishing What You Start (And How I Apply It To Writing)

Writer's desk, where the closing begins

How can writers use the "closer mentality" to finish their first drafts?

There’s a belief that finishing things comes naturally to certain people, and that those people are the ones who are successful. They are successful because they naturally sit down and see projects through to the end. Others—the rest of us—struggle to close the gap between idea and finished project consistently. The ability to finish is a personality trait, something you’re born with. You either have it or you don’t. At least that’s what I thought.

Baseball taught me that is wrong.

Finishing is indeed a skill. That’s why there are men who are called upon specifically to finish baseball games. But it’s a skill that can be learned, honed the same way your favorite ballplayer honed their skills. It’s a process of repetition, failure, and showing up every day, even when things don’t go well. Just like a baseball player doesn’t go from draft pick to the majors, the ability to finish what you start doesn’t always come fully formed. You have to develop it the same way baseball teams develop their players. As soon as I drew this parallel, my relationship with every unfinished draft, every scrapped story clogging up my hard drive, changed forever.

The Long Season

Baseball is a sport that humbles even the strongest of men with its length. 

A Major League Baseball season spans 162 games, running from early spring all the way to early and even mid-October if your team goes on a playoff run. There are no shortcuts, no ways to skip the slow stretches and get right to the good parts. Every team, regardless of its roster, will go through stretches where nothing is working. Bats go cold—I’m looking at you, 2025 Braves—pitchers lose the command they may have had to start, and the team might go through a rough stretch defensively. All these factors can come together to make a team that looked unbeatable in March look completely lost by the first of June.

What separates the teams that make postseason runs from those who don’t isn’t talent alone. The teams that end up hoisting trophies at the end of October are the ones who make it through the hard stretches. They are the teams that show up for a Tuesday game in August that no one outside of the stadium really cares about and play like it’s October. The best teams have a mentality that every game matters, because it does. Every game in a 162-game baseball season matters. Whether you play poorly or nobody watches, or if your pitcher throws a perfect game, they all matter at the end. They’re all part of the final record.

Writing is a lot like that. The sessions in which the words flow easily are the ones you will remember at the end of a project. But it’s the days you sit down distracted, tired, and uninspired. You write anyway. These are the sessions that move your work forward in the most meaningful way, a way you may not appreciate right away. Regardless, they count. Like a heartbreaking late-game loss or a comeback win, they’re all part of the final record too. 

What an Unfinished Draft Costs You

Before I started writing in Google Docs exclusively, I wrote in Word. I have a folder in my OneDrive that I don’t open often; it brings back memories of self-doubt and getting stuck. Full of false starts, stories I never got off the ground, and blog posts I got three paragraphs into and shelved, this folder is a symbol of how doubt can handicap you more than anything else. These unfinished drafts are the remnants of projects that excited me at midnight on a Friday, but by Monday morning, the idea had fallen flat and my zeal was gone. This folder was a concrete example of inspiration’s ebbs and flows, of being genuinely excited about a project until I’m not. 

For many years—though it doesn’t seem that way sometimes—I told myself that folder was a symbol of a creative mind, of character development, if you will. As silly as it sounds to me now, there is a grain of truth to that. Not every idea deserves to be a finished project. Some drafts languish on the cutting room floor.

But if I’m being honest with you—and myself—most of what’s in that folder isn’t there because the ideas were not good or not enough. It’s there because finishing isn’t easy, but starting is painfully so. Somewhere between the excitement that comes with starting a new project and the grind associated with actually completing it, I stop and let myself off the hook for it. 

A baseball team doesn’t get that luxury. They can’t look at the calendar in July and decide the rest of the season isn’t worth working through. The season is the season. You finish it.

I now apply the same logic to writing. The draft is the draft. I finish it. 

The 2021 MLB Playoffs: A Perfect Example of Perseverance

I admit to a mild bias because I’ve been a Braves fan since I can remember, but when I think about situations that embody finishing what you start and having it pay off for you, I can’t help but think about the 2021 Braves. On the heels of a heartbreaking defeat the 2020 NLDS at the hands of the Dodgers, the 2021 Braves team broke spring camp with something to prove. But 2021 would not go according to plan, at least not at first.

When you hear about what the 2021 Braves did, you often hear of the fact that they were at or below the .500 mark until the 8th of August. A week later, they claimed sole possession of the lead in the National League’s Eastern Division mere weeks after losing their star right fielder, Ronald Acuña Jr., to an ACL injury on July 10th.

I won’t go into detail as to what exactly happened in the wake of that injury. You can find that anywhere online, as well as in one of my articles on Blogger here. What I will say is the 2021 Braves didn’t quit. They kept playing. They finished. And in the end, they hoisted a trophy. 

I didn’t think about it this way then, but as I sat there at my work desk on the night of November 2nd, 2021, Ben Ingram’s voice echoing through my head, “Is this happening? It is!” I was witnessing the perfect example of what happens when you look adversity in its eyes and finish what you start. A team that had seemingly lost everything less than four months ago had beaten the odds. Even if you’re not a baseball fan, the story of the 2021 Braves is something you can learn from and be inspired by. It all comes back to one principle: finishing the race. 

Finishing as a Practice

If there’s one thing I’ve learned about finishing—both from baseball and the drafts I’ve been able to see through to the end—it’s that it gets easier the more you do it.

Not easy. Just easier.

When you push through those first few tough pieces, trudging through that arduous stretch in which the initial excitement has worn off and you can’t yet see the light at the end of the tunnel, it can feel like wading through a mud hole in cement shoes. Your brain will naturally provide several rationalizations for setting the project aside. You discover a new idea and find that it would be more interesting. The current draft will seem flawed, and you’ll convince yourself that starting fresh is the right move, the move a more seasoned writer would make. 

Let me be the first to tell you, it isn’t. 

The writers I admire most aren’t the ones with the most ideas, or even the best ones. They’re the ones with the most completed work. There’s a discipline that is associated with finishing a project that can’t be faked and certainly can’t be overlooked. It’s built one draft at a time, one blog post at a time, one story told to its completion, even when the end is difficult to see. 

You often hear baseball players talk about building good habits early in the season to carry them through to September—and hopefully October. The same principle applies to anything creative. Every finished project—even if it’s small or imperfect—builds up the creative muscles. You learn. You grow.

Most importantly, you gain confidence. With every finished project, you’re telling yourself that you’re someone who sees things through. That identity, once established, is everything you need. 

The Imperfect Finish Still Counts

There’s one more thing I’ve always thought baseball got right. A win is a win, even if it’s ugly.

Some of the most important wins a baseball team gets throughout the season are games that go off the rails quickly, and nothing goes according to plan. The starter gets knocked out early, the bullpen struggles, or the offense goes cold until the late innings. Yet somehow, against all odds, your team finds a way to record that all-important 27th out while remaining on the right side of the scoreboard. It wasn’t pretty. There won’t be any highlight reels, but it all counts the same in the win column.

My favorite example of this is Game 1 of the 2021 World Series. The Braves and Astros opened in Houston. The stadium gave a collective gasp as Charlie Morton took a comebacker off his right leg off the bat of Astros first baseman Yuli Gurriel. He retired two more batters and returned to the dugout, limping slightly, determined to shrug off the injury. He wasn’t done until his leg told him he was.

As it turned out, it was three more batters. After striking out Jose Altuve on a signature hammer of a curveball to lead off the following inning, Morton’s right leg had the final say. It turned out he’d fractured his right fibula, and he still had enough strength and resolve to not only face one more hitter, but strike him out. If that doesn’t exemplify finishing what you start, I’m not sure what does.

Your finished drafts work the same way. That post you wrestled with for two weeks and rewrote three times, it counts. That story you let people read, the one they said you should publish, the one you almost stopped in the middle, that counts too. That piece you put online even though you weren’t sure it was ready, counts too. Imperfect work that you see through to the end is infinitely more valuable to you than something you filed away never to see again. Finished imperfections are real. They exist. Unfinished work does not, and that which does not exist cannot reach people.

Stop waiting to finish cleanly. Finish however you can. Whether it’s an elegant win or an ugly one, the final record is the same.

The Skill You’re Building Right Now

If you’ve got an unfinished project sitting somewhere, in a drawer or some digital purgatory, I want you to think of it less as a sign of failure and more as an at-bat you haven’t completed yet. Trust me, the count’s in your favor. You haven’t struck out yet. You just need to get the bat off your shoulder.

Finish that project, not because it’s perfect or because you know it’s the best thing you’ve ever created. Finish it because finishing is a skill, and the only way to build it is to do it.

It’s a long season. Every game counts. You just have to show up at the ballpark and play.

Do you have a draft you’re working on finishing, something that has been sitting around collecting digital dust for who knows how long? I’d love to hear about it in the comments.