Eat, Baseball, Sleep, Repeat

Whether you’re a player or a parent of a ballplayer, you must understand the never-ending grind that is the sport of baseball. I would argue that the grind really begins with your freshman year in high school. It’s the first time in your playing career that you know where and who you’ll be playing with for the next four years. It’s also likely the first time you’ll be playing baseball daily.

Once freshman year of high school hits, the questions start to be asked: “Do you want to play at the next level?”, “Do you want to make varsity?”, “Do you want to start for this team?” Behind each response of yes is one word: work. 

Baseball is a repetition sport; those repetitions create patterns for our body to remember. Once those patterns are in place, we hope that our reactions on the field come in the shape of that pattern. There’s just one catch: our body forgets these patterns fast. You miss two weeks, it’s going to take a month to get back to where you were. Did I mention it's the same with fielding and hitting? You lose out on both. 

Let me say this, I don’t know how other sports go about preparing to be a good player. I’m definitely not saying that other athletes don’t work hard. What I do know is that baseball players have a different type of workload. There’s a big mental component to baseball that I don’t believe exists in other sports. The mental grind.

It’s often said that baseball is a game of failure; well, it’s true. Imagine working day after day on hitting baseballs, and you feel like you’re finally making progress. Game time comes, you strike out twice and hit a weak ground ball, 0-3. Coaches' advice, “keep working”. In my experience, people are not good at handling failure, they’re especially not good at handling failure when their hard work isn’t paying off. Coaches say to the upset player, “you need to handle your emotions better.” Add it to the list: hitting, fielding, mental restraint. In other sports, hard work usually pays off better results; in baseball, there’s a rare correlation.

Now that you know you’re going to have daily hitting, fielding, and workouts, with little to no expectation that it’s going to result in a positive outcome, don’t forget, you’ve still got practice. That’s right, after you’ve taken care of the very time-consuming tasks of individual work, baseball is still a team sport and you need to figure out how to all work together. Is this exhausting for you to read? Now imagine doing it; does it sound fun?

The reality is, the fun in baseball stops come high school in the lighthearted way of mom yelling “just have fun” out to her son before he takes the field. The fun in baseball is now finding a way to actually enjoy all of the above that I mentioned. The grind of showing up every day with a little sense of somewhere, someone took today off, and I just moved up one spot on the baseball list starts to become your fun. Pushing yourself a little harder than you thought you could go in the weight room becomes fun. You start to realize that the games you play aren’t where you try to have fun; they’re the place where you are expected to perform, and the only way you can have fun in a game is if you perform. The best chance you have at performing in the game is to check each of the aforementioned boxes. In baseball,it's not about falling in love with the game, that’s easy. You better fall in love with the grind.