Fundamentals

On my ride home from the field. Some days it actually turns.

 Wednesday

I have notes written down on a notepad, on the backs of receipts and in a note book about the things I have seen watching the Junioren (14-19 year-old) team and things that I want to work on in practice. The list looks like this: keeping the throwing arm up, running on the field, catching with two hands, footwork fielding ground balls, body alignment towards throwing target, batting stance, hitting for contact, bunting stance, and on and on until I covered nearly every single fundamental in the game of baseball. Even with all these deficiencies, the kids play baseball and love being out there. I can't hardly understand this. I would be frustrated to no end if I were to play and get such sporadic results.

Faced by this daunting task, I wrote my plan for last nights practice: Warm up, play catch... and that's as far as we got. I had to stop the team at this point and take them through the most basic throwing drills, isolating only the arm then adding in upper body rotation. To my amazement the kids took it in beautifully. When they played catch before every throw had a lazy arc and had a slim to fair chance of being online with the target. During the drills I was thrilled to hear the "pop" of the glove and see much fewer balls headed towards the outfield. I even saw some of those half stunned, half excited, all genuine smiles that spring up when your effort shifts from trying to performing. I have played this game all my life and this is why I play the game.

I continued the practice with the basics: throwing, footwork, catching and so on and the kids ate it up. Impressive comes far short of describing their improvement. In a way I am lucky that they have so little experience. Without the thousands of repetitions that American player would have a that age, they do not have engrained patterns of movement making change nearly impossible. I struggled with this through my playing experience and I face it now trying to learn this challenging language.

I am lucky for another reason. Being a 26 year-old "real American" baseball player who has played professional baseball, and on top of that looks like one of them gives me all the credibility I could ask for. I told them a story that was very important to me in my baseball career from when I was in Little League. The story  is about going to a real college baseball team's practice and hearing the coach tell us that you never walk on the baseball field. I told them the same thing. At first there was some resistance but yesterday, I saw guys FLYING around and when their teammates were walking I heard some of them barking at them to run.

The practice yesterday gradually got more intricate and we worked on things I had worked on in high school and in college. Although there still are a lot of baseballs heading in the wrong direction It is such a high to see them working so diligently and really taking a hold of their new skills. I hope they keep their hunger and only become more excited about the game because I don't want to have to write a post that negates all I have written here.

I hope you have a lot of good mojo in your day today and remember,
Truth rests more in Process than Product.