Sporting memories: The day I finally learned now to hit a baseball

I excelled at almost all sports as a child, a teenager, and as a 20 something. I went to college on a full athletic scholarship and during negotiations ( I was recruited by multiple schools) it was discussed that maybe I could walk on for the American football team at that school as well. I know this was just the guy trying to "sweeten the pot" to get me to go to that school because although I think I was pretty gifted as an athlete, there are only a handful of people that have ever lived that can pull that off and I don't think I was one of them. I didn't end up going to that school by the way because it as Division-1... It was James Madison University in Virginia, which isn't a bad school but not on the level of the other schools I was recruited by, which were Miami (FL) and UNC.

Through all of this excellence though, there was one sport that completely eluded me, and that was baseball. I wasn't just "not the best", I was terrible.

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In young leagues the teams and coaches are forced to let everyone play regardless of ability but one of the things that they do with the kids who suck is to put them in right or left (out) field. The worst player is normally reserved for left field and guess where I always played?

I couldn't hit either and it wasn't by lack of trying. My father tried to help me to learn this as did the coaches on the two or three teams I played on before eventually giving up the sport, but it just didn't click. With all my hand/eye coordination in basketball, football, and especially soccer, I guess I just wasn't meant for the swing motion of baseball. I also had a really weak throw despite the fact that I could throw a football spiral like nobody's business.

None of it made sense to me and I just resigned myself to the fact that you can be good at everything. I did end up going to support the high school baseball team though and I think they appreciated it. What they didn't realize was that I was in awe that they had the ability to do this because it was something that just seemed like magic to me at the time even though i would destroy them at any of the other sports.

IT wasn't until I was in my 20's and beyond college and all my dreams of going pro had been dashed (I didn't really have any notions of going pro... that wasn't really a thing in USA at the time outside of the truly top talent), that I was just hanging out in a bar where I had a temporary job and they just happened to have batting cages upstairs at this bar.

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_{absolute chaos}

This was a long time ago and for the most part this is no longer legal because we are a bunch of pussies as a society now, but back then if you wanted to, you could get raginigly drunk and then go have 80 mph fast balls thrown at you. There wasn't even anyone there monitoring the situation: You bought tokens on the ground floor and went upstairs and got in the cage and had a swing.

It was at this time that a work colleague of mine that was really into baseball pointed out that everything about my stance was wrong and he did an example both in and outside of the cage showing me how I should stand, and how I should swing in order to get some juice behind the hit.

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It only took me about $2 worth of tokens to figure this out and the next thing you know I was hitting zingers with almost every ball that was being tossed at me by the machine.

This felt good but it also opened my eyes to the absolutely abysmal state of coaching that existed in the United States when I was a kid. Basically, the parents were the coaches and it didn't matter at all if they actually had any coaching abilities for the job. Many of my coaches were overweight, carried rulebooks with them (because they didn't know the game) and one of them was permanently disabled. I guess when we are talking about 300 million people and the fact that none of these "coaches" were being paid and were just donating their time, that we can't get too fussy.

It is just funny to me that my friend, who had never been a coach and only played something like 1 or 2 years in high school, was able to accomplish more in that batting cage after 4 beers than several years of weekly "coaching" at the hands of people who claimed to have a real passion for the sport.

I wasn't on assignment for that job for very long but we ended up going back to that batting cage a number of times and even now, 20 years later, I still go to a batting cage every now and then even though the over-the-top safety requirements are so annoying and as a result, the price to do it is 10x what it used to be.

They took all the fun out of it because a few idiots got hit by a ball... That's what I have to imagine happened.

In most companies, they do these team-building days where they will normally play softball with a neutral pitcher who is just serving up easy to hit balls for everyone. I had normally been a useless player at these things in the past but now, and I didn't tell anyone, I was basically the Babe Ruth of my team.

At my first at bat I hit the ball so far out that I got a home run. There was no fence as this was just a park field, but it was so far away that I easily cleared the bases before the ball made it back to the infield. At me second at bat the "leader" of the other team told everyone to back very far back and said some complimentary things about my ability. I then bunted to the pitcher who as I said, is a neutral player and isn't allowed to participate in any defense. That might be the one and only time that anyone had ever gotten a triple off of a bunt, but I will admit that this was because the person who stepped in at 2nd base couldn't catch a ball to save her life.

Coaching is such an important part of developing skills in kids as far as sports are concerned, and the absolute lack of that existing when I was kid in terms of baseball is likely the main reason why I never developed the ability to hit until I was a legal adult. It actually was really easy to understand as well and I had it worked out in less than an hour.

It often makes me wonder if I could have been a 4-sport superstar if only someone had come along and told me these things when I was 8. Testament to my Dad, he did try. But my own father grew up not playing baseball either because he lived in a small farm town where you wouldn't be able to get that many people together to play a game anyway. He didn't know what he was doing, but he sure as hell tried.

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_{so what you want to do son, is just hit the ball really really hard every time}

I would later end up volunteering my own time to help out with youth sports, namely soccer (yes, I know the world calls it football - we can't help where we were born), and I like to think that I made a genuine difference in the lives of these kids because when they listened to my tactics, they actually did improve a great deal. The high school that I attended offered me the coaching job and while it was an honor it was terrible money they were offering and I lived nowhere near there. I would have set myself up for a life of almost certain near-poverty if I had said yes. But when I did go back for a visit I always sat in on sessions with the varsity team and it made me feel good when the coach talked about my resume and how I played for a Division-1 college on a "full-ride" scholarship. I no longer offer to do this now though, because the attitude of the kids these days is something I can no longer tolerate.

Baseball is just like any other sport though. I truly believe that if you have the mindset of achieving excellence that you can do so. It doesn't hurt of course, if you have some pretty good genetics and I'm not going to lie, that certainly helped me. But in the meantime if your kid sucks at a sport, there is a good chance that the fault may just lie in the coaching or in the times that I was playing, a near complete absence of it.