Baseball's Life Lessons

Countless young boys want to be professional baseball players when they grow up. A very countable number of those will actually make it. This is indisputable and universally understood. What is less accepted is why. Most people have bought into the common wisdom that so few ball players succeed because the game is so difficult, and while that is true it is not the real reason. The vast majority of ball players never play Major League Baseball because it is not what they want from life.

It is a sad fact that parents spend so much of their time, effort and money setting their child up for a lasting career in baseball. It’s not sad to spend the time, effort and money. It’s sad to do those things for the wrong reasons. The game is not bad. In fact, I believe that baseball has unique lessons to learn that cannot come as completely from any other sport experience. It is sad is that the early years of a player’s baseball experience is solely focused on preparing him for a later career that may not happen. We all want to teach our young players how to play the game well, but our primary focus should be teaching the life lessons that baseball has to offer.

Every baseball player must learn to throw, catch and hit correctly. Those are repeatable, mechanical actions, and they must be executed reliably and consistently in order to achieve success. There are actions and process within the game that are practiced and drilled to develop confidence and ensure consistency. The same is true of any sport, pastime or profession.

On the other hand, not every sport, pastime or profession ends in failure as easily or as often as baseball. If a player is to succeed at this game, he must learn to reject failure and move forward. This aspect of the game, probably more than any other, is celebrated by coaches and players. It is the perfect example of what this game can teach.

Perhaps more importantly, though, are the simpler lessons. People are rewarded when they are mentally and physically prepared to perform. We all do better when we study and practice. Visualization of a task at hand helps us meet the task and succeed. All of this is true in baseball and in life. Any coach that doesn’t draw the parallels between baseball and other life experiences is failing as a coach.

I blogged earlier about coaches who treat their teams like PlayStation games, trying to move each player on the field in real time as if it were they who were playing the game. The argument can and has been made that young players don’t process information quickly enough to be successful on the field within the context of the game. I don’t dispute that. At the same time, young players are not stupid. They can process a mistake made and learn from the experience.

As in life, we learn best by making mistakes. As a coach, I let players make mistakes. It’s the best way for them to grow as people. And if they are meant to play baseball later in life, they will grow more completely as ball players as well.