What sports taught me: Part 2
Today we’ll start with a story from World War 2, but just right now I can’t remember where I heard it which should not stop you from accepting it as 100 percent true because – let’s face it – if you think you know what day you were born, you’re just the kind of person who believes whatever people tell you.
For all you know you’re not an Aquarius, you’re a Taurus and maybe you weren’t born in America, you were born in some strange foreign land like China or Bermuda or certain parts of Florida.
Also, your name’s not Sharon.
And just because you have a piece of paper that says it is, doesn’t make it so.
Give me an hour and nearby Kinko’s and I can give you a birth certificate that says you’re actually a Separated-At-Birth-Siamese-Twin, you’re from Cambodia, your real name is Bopha and if your mother has a sense of humor and goes along with the scheme, you’ll probably wind up traveling to Phnom Penh to explore your non-existent ancestral roots, which let’s face it, would be an awesome practical joke and really makes me wonder how the word “practical” snuck into that phrase.
Anyway…
Back in WW2 the Allies were winning and after some battle that went our way (and I say “our” like I had something to do with it) an American decided to lord it over a captured German and point out how much better America was than Germany and how much better Democracy was than whatever the fuck Hitler had going and the very disillusioned German replied that he was in charge of artillery and his job was to blow up the American tanks that came down the road and:
“We ran out of shells before you ran out of tanks.”
Which to my mind is a much more logical explanation than God being on our side because if God was on America’s side how do you explain the Trump Presidency and the growing popularity of soccer?
The point being that if you know enough about a situation there’s usually a very logical and rational explanation for what happened, but if you don’t know enough about a situation you might try to fill in that information gap with uniformed speculation focusing on factors like emotion, personality and who God likes better.
So here’s today’s first lesson:
There’s a logical explanation for pretty much everything even if you don’t know what it is…
True story.
Royals pitcher Luke Hochevar once told me you had to watch out for Red Sox slugger David Ortiz because early in the game Big Papi would let you jam him inside in non-RBI situations like two outs and nobody on, and he’d do that because Ortiz couldn’t run a lick and a two-out single meant his team might need three more singles to score him which probably wouldn’t happen, so that being the case Ortiz might let that two-out situation go by and wait for a better one.
And then once Ortiz convinced you to pitch him inside, late in the game with runners on, Ortiz would stride away from the plate – more toward first base than the pitcher’s mound – and create space to swing the bat and now he could hit that inside pitch that got him out in the first inning and he conned you into throwing again in the ninth.
Or…
You could believe Ortiz was a “gamer” or “rose to the occasion” or “wanted it more than the other guy” which is the kind of crap people say when they don’t know what actually happened.
The overwhelming importance of the routine play
Tom Poquette was my outfield instructor at Royals Fantasy Camp and the first thing Tom told us was he hoped none of us made a great play that week.
Which sounded like the kind of unwarranted negativity it takes most relationships decades to develop, but Tom explained what he meant: the only time great plays were required was when absolutely everything was completely screwed up and you had no choice but to attempt one.
And great plays are considered great because they don’t happen very often, so odds are your attempt at a great play wouldn’t work anyway, so if you weren’t a self-centered, delusional knucklehead (which as we’ve recently learned is a sizeable American demographic) what you actually hoped for was a game full of routine plays.
And we needed to keep those routine plays routine.
In other words: don’t attempt a great play when a great play wasn’t necessary.
Play a sinking line drive in front of you for a single because it takes at least three singles to score a run and hitting three singles in one inning isn’t easy; don’t try to make an unnecessary diving catch, miss the ball and have a guy circling the bases while you chase the ball you missed.
Hit the cutoff man; don’t try to throw the ball all the way to home plate which probably wasn’t going to work anyway and would allow the guy who hit the ball to move into second base and be just one more hit away from scoring because you went nuts and threw a ball into the dugout.
All of which sounded really, really boring to a bunch of guys who watched way too many sports highlight shows and wanted to make the great plays we’d seen on TV even though we didn’t have the talent required to make them.
Bottom line:
The vast majority of the time, the job of a defense is limiting the damage and making the other team earn everything they get. Keep your ego under control and don’t try to be Superman when the situation calls for Clark Kent.
The team comes first
When analytics became a thing some of the first people to take analytics advocates seriously were fantasy baseball league players because they were always looking for an edge and thought analytics might provide one.
So far, so good.
But – just in case you don’t know – fantasy leagues are made up of individual players drafted by fantasy owners and leagues are won by those individual players putting up good statistics so no fantasy league owner wants to see one of his players give away an at-bat by sacrifice bunting or moving a runner over, which is fine and understandable in fantasy baseball, but unfortunately that Fantasy League Attitude has leaked over into Real World Baseball.
If you want to understand sports, you might want to write this down or get it tattooed in reverse on your chest so you see it every time you look in a mirror to check how much more fat you’ve acquired since Thanksgiving:
Fantasy leagues are won by individual achievement; real leagues are won by team achievement.
So you can sign a bunch of star players with good individual numbers and then those star players turn out to be titanic douchebags, play selfish baseball to protect their good numbers and get beat by a group of guys who are willing to sacrifice –in some cases literally – for the good of the team which if you think about it, is what actually makes you a team and not a bunch of selfish jerks who just happen to be wearing the same uniform.
Which goes a long way in explaining why some teams loaded with star players never win jack shit.
It’s good to keep your promises
People play sports for all kinds of reasons and sometimes they’re bad reasons like thinking they’ll get a college scholarship or sign a pro contract or make it to the Big Leagues and wind up with an eight-digit contract and Halle Berry’s phone number.
But according to the internet:
About nine percent of high school ballplayers will play in college, less than two percent will play Division 1 college baseball and 0.5 percent (approximately one in 200) of high school seniors will sign a professional contract.
And of the 0.5 percent of the kids who sign a pro contract, only about 10 percent will ever make it to the Big Leagues and if they beat the odds and make it to the top, the average Big League career is 2.7 years, which is 3.3 years short of the service time required to become a free agent and make big money.
Since the odds are heavily against you becoming one of the few multi-millionaire ballplayers with long careers, you better figure out another reason to play sports and just in case you can’t think of one right now this second, here you go and as usual I’ll make my point with a story:
When I was coaching kids I told them they needed to play catch for at least 15 minutes every day (hitting is a lot more fun, but throwing and catching a ball is the main skill baseball requires and you have to practice it) and since I was the coach I made sure my son played catch with me and one day it was hotter than a Homecoming Princess and my son complained that I was making him play catch every single day when he knew his teammates weren’t.
I told that story to the guy who got me started on baseball – the previously mentioned Chris Egelston – and Chris said if baseball taught my son to keep his promises, baseball gave him a lot.
Now let’s look back at the lessons I learned from being a mediocre athlete:
Ignore criticism from the ignorant.
You can always do more than you think you can.
There’s a right way to do things and you’ll get better if you learn them.
Focus on the process, not the result.
Luck is the result of preparation.
There’s an explanation for everything, you just need to dig to find it.
What you do all the time is more important than what you do once in a while.
The team comes first, you come second.
It’s good to keep your promises.
So don’t obsess about your personal statistics or the trophies you won or lost; take a step back and focus on the larger lessons you learned along the way because long after your creaky knees, bad back and growing desire to avoid embarrassment keep you off the field, you can still use those lessons each and every day of what’s left of your life.
And that’s what sports taught me.