Ouch.

Dock Ellis was a pitcher for the Pittsburgh Pirates in the 1960s and 1970s and a damn good one. 

You might know him for having pitched a no-hit game while tripping on LSD and publicly talking about it. A short documentary on the game made Dock's feat notorious.

But he won 138 games lifetime, which is a lot of games. In 1971, the year the Pirates won the World Serious, he won 19 games against only nine losses. He had a sparkling 3.06 ERA, made the All-Star team and finished fourth in Cy Young voting. 

On this particular day in 1974, Ellis was pissed. The Reds were the team of the Seventies and had a lot of swagger. They were bullies. The Pirates, though they won it all in 1971, lost their anchor, Roberto Clemente in 1972 in a plane crash and had started the season losing six straight. 

About a month into the year they were dead last in their division. Worse, according to Ellis, they were intimidated by the Reds, whose starting lineup had three Hall-of-Famers, and a fourth, Pete Rose, who would have made it had he not be banned in perpetuity for betting on games.

So Ellis decided to try to hit with a pitched ball every Red he could. He wanted to show his Pirates not to be cowed by the Reds. In horsehide parlance, he wanted to knock the shit out of them.

Elllis managed to hit Rose, Morgan and Driessen, and just miss Perez, who successfully contorted himself out of the way of the spheroid object. Ellis was yanked from the game after that, without retiring a single batter, and hitting three. One of the oddest pitching lines ever. By the way, for the entire 1974 season during which Ellis threw 176 innings, he hit only four more batters, totaling an unremarkable seven for the year. His major league high for hit-by-pitch was ten in 1970. Ellis never came close to Hall-of-Famer Don Drysdale in the guided-missile category. Drysdale led the National League in that ignominious category five times, including four years in a row from 1958 to 1961.

I bring up Ellis' escapade because of something I learned from another ballplayer, Ken "Hawk" Harrelson, a  pretty-good power-hitter for the Red Sox in the 1960s. Harrelson became an announcer for the White Sox, on and off, through 2018. 

Harrelson came up with the phrase TWTW or TW², which I've carried with me for twenty years. TWTW stands for The Will To Win.

TWTW, whether or not you're throwing a 90-mile-per-hour fastball at someone's head, is something everyone, every agency, every account, every client needs.

You have to do what it takes.

Get the job done.

Roll up your sleeves.

Raise your hand.

Work until you win.

That's how you win.

I don't actively try to be an asshole. But I have TWTW. I often joke that I work as hard as I do less for the money than for the thrill I get from winning. Money comes and goes. Winning matters more to me.

TWTW.

Everyone needs one.

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