In the 1973 movie “The Paper Chase,” a first-year law student at Harvard fails so spectacularly and publicly in his first class that he runs to the restroom and loses his lunch. To which a friend remarks, “Hardly a propitious start.”
The movie is about a student named Hart who struggles to navigate his first steps in an unfamiliar world filled with cut-throat competition and an unforgiving professor, from which he learns harsh but valuable lessons.
It's a 50-year-old flick, but it serves as a timely allegory for Scott Harris, who flubbed his first big test as the Detroit Tigers’ president of baseball operations by failing to move his biggest piece, left-handed starter Eduardo Rodriguez, at the trade deadline.