According to The Motley Fool Web site, Jimmy Buffett, baseball’s richest fan, takes his from a classic baseball title
One key factor for Buffett’s success is his keen instinct to go only
for investments where all the stars align; the no-brainer situations
Buffett refers to as “the fat pitch.”Buffett has a simple explanation for how he sticks to investments that he is all but sure to walk away from with a smile. A longtime fan of baseball, Buffett often mentions The Science of Hitting, a book written by Red Sox great Ted Williams. In it, Williams describes part of the secret to his phenomenal .344 career batting average.
Greed at its finest
The theory behind Williams’ runaway success was quite simple. He split the strike zone into 77 cells, each of which made up the size of a baseball, and rather than swing at anything that made its way into the strike zone, he would swing only at balls within his best cell — the ones he knew he could hit. If balls didn’t enter his best cell, he simply waited for the next one — even if it meant striking out now and then.
How does this relate to investing and Buffett’s success? Buffett, like Williams, will “swing” only at investments that come right down the center, at just the right speed, straight into his best cell. As Buffett describes, the analogy works out better for investors than for baseball hitters because investors can never be struck out. Patient investors can wait around as long as they wish until they are served exactly what they demand.
And I thought baseball was boring.
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