by Dr. Larry Moses
Submitted April 16, 2008
No one asked me but… Baseball has always been a part of our family. I played it as a kid and moved to slow pitch softball as I got older. All three of my boys played the game in high school and I coached a few years of high school baseball and a few more years of American Legion baseball. My wife and I have spent most of our anniversaries at baseball games, usually one of the boy’s games but not always. I remember one June we were traveling through a small Iowa town and saw the field lights so we stopped and celebrated our anniversary at the town team’s game.
While I also played football in high school and college and the boys played football, basketball and wrestled in high school, baseball has a special spot in our world. All sports have lessons they can teach. Football teaches you can be hit and even hurt and you will not die. Wrestling is a great sport to teach discipline. Basketball teaches the importance of teamwork. Baseball is a game that can teach many major lessons in life.
Baseball is played at a leisurely pace in a great pastoral setting. Football and basketball are played at such a fast pace that there is little time to reflect on what one should do next. This is not the case with baseball. Football is like a miniature war, basketball more like a mugging and baseball is like a walk in the park. Football has the blitz and basketball has the fast break suggesting violence and speed. Baseball has the walk, where is the urgency there? Baseball gives the fan time to digest what has happened and one soon learns there are many options that can result in a successful play. Not necessarily right or wrong, just options. Each of which will lead to a different outcome.
Most events in your life will give you multiple options. There will be many different decisions you can make, not necessary right or wrong, just options. The outcome will be different depending on the option you chose. That is life.
Baseball is an individual sport within a team setting. When you bat, you must take the task on by yourself. When you field a ground ball, there is just you and the task at hand. You face a challenge where only you can succeed. In life you will be the ultimate decision maker, even if it is to do what others tell you the decision is yours. You alone are responsible for what you do. That is life.
In baseball your times at bat will teach you how to handle defeat. The best major league hitter in the game never hit .400 over his career. The best in the game had to face the fact that no matter how hard they tried, nearly seventy percent of the time they would fail.
In a situation like that, you soon learn that you cannot center you life on the times you fail but only on the times you succeed. If every time at bat was a matter of life or death, you would die a lot. Thomas Edison stated that each experiment that did not result in a working light bulb was not a failure; it was a success in finding out what did not work. The doctor who developed the model for DNA took eight years sitting up his first experiment and when it failed an assistant said what do we do now and the doctor replied, “I don’t know about you, but tomorrow morning I will begin again.”
That is the kind of thing baseball can teach. What happened in the last at bat is not what matters, what matters is the next at bat. Those who dwell on the defeats of yesterday will never know the victories of tomorrow. That is life.
Baseball will teach you that sometimes you can do your best and the outcome will not be a win. You may go four for four and be perfect in the field but the pitcher may give up a home run to lose the game. In life you may do your best without the desired outcome because of things outside your control. That doesn’t mean you still don’t give your best. It merely means that you are not always the deciding factor. That is life.
In baseball, as well as in life, it is important who you place on your team. Once you have put your team together, with people you can trust to give their best, you need to be supportive of your teammates. Today, the shortcomings of a teammate may be the reason for failure, but one day the failure may be due to an error you make. Baseball teaches in these situations that you need to be supportive of those whose actions seem to have caused results less than desirable. The failure will become less important than the recovery. That is life.
Baseball is a great place to learn that life is not fair. There are those who can play the game well with little effort while others must struggle to hang on. There are those people who have natural talent in what they do and those who have to work to be adequate in daily life. There is no answer as to why this is, there is only the fact.
There are some people who can do things better than you, but that no way diminishes your role in life. Baseball teaches that no matter how hard you work, some others can do it better without working as hard. There’s the coach’s son in baseball and the bosses nephew in life. These are the people who are born on third base and think they hit a triple. They have an advantage, get over it. You may have to contend with prejudice due to color of your skin or your religious belief; you can dwell on it or work hard and make your self so valuable that those issues won’t matter. If you can hit .500, there is some team you can play for.
There are days when you hit the ball on the nose every time up right at someone for an out and then someone will win the game with a bloop hit. How many times in life have you done everything right with the right motives only to fail? Then how many times have you seen others give something less than their best and everything turns out great? Is it fair? No. But life is not fair and that is a lesson we all need to learn. That is life.
Baseball will teach you that some plays are not yours to make. In the field you have a position to play and you cannot play another. How many of us in life want to make the play for others because we feel we know best? President Teddy Roosevelt’s wife said of him; “Teddy wants to be the bride at every wedding and the corpse at every funeral.” Well, you can’t be.
Sometimes it is painful when the outfielder calls you off and drops the fly you know you could have caught, but it was not your play. Mom and dad how hard is it to let the kid make the call in life. You know what is best, but it is not your play to make. That is life.
In baseball, as in life, the actions of others will affect your success. How well others play will affect the outcome of the game. In life, what others do, some of whom you may not even know, will affect your life. If you don’t believe this, how many of the terrorist did you know that flew the planes into the towers on 9-11? Have you been to the airport lately? I, also, believe that your actions may well affect the outcome of people’s lives that you do not know. That is life.
Baseball is a game played best with emotions under control. Decisions made in life need to be made with emotions under control. When pressure builds, those who keep their heads generally makes the best decisions in life. Don’t you know people who view everything that happens as a crisis? How effective are they? Don’t you just marvel at the guy who can remain calm when all around seem to be in crisis mode?
How many times in life have you gone for the slam dunk, fast break or a blitz when you should have stopped to reflect and maybe settled for a walk? When life becomes a fast break, one needs to slow down and look for the walk. That is life.
Thought for the week…Success is never final; failure is never fatal, only courage counts.
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