Baseball: Fail Your Way to the Top

 

MASTER THE GRIND LIKE A GRIND MASTER

Embrace the suck

I’m writing this to you because I feel there has to be a need for this message to come to you this way today. Something tells me that a challenge is perplexing you.

Don’t worry.

A confrontation of this sort is precisely what a well-lived life is all about. Sure, it’s a pain in the nether regions, but the situation you find yourself in needs focus and motivation to achieve rectification. You need those two aspects to find the way out and on to a better time.

Nothing can teach you better about failure, and resolution, better than my favorite sport, baseball. In this most established of all sports, the way of playing is as venerable as the passage of time. It’s a game where success is as elusive as the time that passes as it’s being played.

If a baseball hitter’s time at bat is fruitful three times out of 10, that would be 30% of the time. They consider the batter an enormous success! The powers that be would consider the ball whacker of that seemingly insignificant magnitude for the game's hall of fame!

Truly a momentous achievement for, in many other cases, apparent mediocrity.

But the allure of the game pertains not only to overcoming its inherent persistence of trial and struggle. Baseball is the most elegant of all athletic competitions, comprising hitting, throwing and catching a ball.

When entering a ballpark, the first sense that you have stepped into another realm of place and time is the almost shocking greenness of the grass. Upon first sight, it will cause you to pause and gasp in apprehension. You’ll never forget the sight and will relive the moment for the rest of your time here in this glorious sphere.

As you gaze at the field of dreams, you’ll happen upon the cleanest dirt you will ever witness.

The sound of the fielders' cleats crunching in the pristine natural earth is also a sonorousness that uniquely will embed itself in the memory forevermore.

Cracking of hickory or pine against a tightly wound ball of yarn surrounding a core comprising rubber and cork covered by hide with 108 threaded stitches traveling at the highest velocity that are executed as a human can muster is another of those sounds that is only produced by my favorite pastime.

After they hit the ball, it will almost always find its way to the leather glove of a fielder with a resounding thump. If it doesn’t meet the mitt, it may have left the playing field and ventured over the fence into the waiting hands of fans.

If that happens, the sound that the fans make, if the hurtling ball is fair, will be a deafening roar! Likewise, if the ball lands into foul territory, it will result with a smattering of shouts and yells and probably light laughter as a few souls scurry in pursuit of the new souvenir.

The gracefulness of the athletes that make up the roster of both clubs will also have you transfixed. Baseball participants possess skills that are rare. The finesse and strengths of a player aren’t applicable to us everyday folk.

Their eyesight is keen. Reflexes are sharp. The speed of some players is like that of the wind. Some players are strong as steel. When there is a combination of these traits, the participant is indeed praiseworthy.

Players of this magnitude started the same way as all of us. When they began it was with a resolve to hone the craft. The process can be different. but it’s not easy. That’s the one commonality that bonds us together.

Hard work

When playing the game, you witness the specialness of these attributes firsthand. Experience will lend you the concept of how to improve yourself, mentally and physically, to compete at the highest level.

In sport and in life, baseball will help you excel at identifying where you need to work to be the best you can be.

It definitely will teach humility. Trust me on that.

Photo by Joey Kyber on Unsplash