Losing better

I'm fairly certain that I read this somewhere over the past few months but a recent situation brought it back to light. The situation was losing. In this particular situation, I was working a baseball camp and towards the end of the camp, we had a running competition in which two runners would face off against one another. The runners would run a suicide-like sprint. For the uninitiated, this normally works on a basketball court in different variations but a standard one looks like so - the runners run from the baseline to the half-court line, back to the original baseline and then all the way to the opposite baseline. Whichever runner makes it to the opposite baseline last is the "loser." 
So, we had a similar situation setup in our baseball camp. Two campers were facing off in the run and one runner got out to a large lead. The other runner began to realize that he was way behind and started to give up, allowing the other runner to increase his winning margin. 
This situation reminded me of this idea - that even though the losing runner was way behind, the sprint still represented an opportunity for him to improve. He might lose this race, but if he fails to take advantage of the opportunity to give his full effort and improve, he lessens the chance that he is going to win in the future.
The applications to baseball are pretty obvious here, but I'll present this situation - your team is losing in the middle or late in the game. If the margin is large enough, this presents a pretty good opportunity for a team to give up and just try to get the game over. However, the team needs to be reminded that this is a learning opportunity and although the score might be out of hand, it's a chance for them to improve for future competitions. Who knows, with this mindset, you might even get the team to rally and come back to win the game.
There's another twist on this that I came across while watching a small college fall practice this year. The college team was split up into two squads and they were completing their annual fall world series. Rather than keeping a culmulative score for the entire game, the score was based on how many innings each team won during the game. So the overall score did not matter! Team 1 could have scored 50 more runs than Team 2 overall, but if Team 2 won more innings during the game than Team 1, Team 1 would emerge victorious. I thought that this was a great idea to maintain competitiveness during games even when one team jumps out to a big lead - change the objective for sustained effort.