By: Mike Carter Follow me on Twitter/X for more baseball content.
One of the biggest problems I have had in my life is thinking. Some might call it brooding.
Thinking often has gotten me into trouble.
But one thing I never had to think about was coaching baseball. When Jack first expressed interest at age 6, I immediately volunteered to help.
What I didn’t count on was the emotions it would cause me to feel as I got older.
I have been gifted the opportunity to have coached multiple kids in our town, have been supported by their wonderful families, and volunteered with some of the best people I have ever met in my life.
Jack is 13 now. He’s awkward at times as are most kids his age. He loves to play and has taken his lumps.
One day last season, we won a game 13-6 that we had been losing 6-1. One of our players, a young man I have coached several seasons, broke his femur sliding into third and had to be carted off the field via ambulance. It was a horrible experience for this young man and his family, and difficult to watch helplessly as a coach and father. Thankfully he is healing now and is planning to play this spring.
But here’s the part that caught me: I went to the dugout and asked the boys a tough question. No one would blame you if you wanted to quit today. We can play another day. What do you want to do? Unanimously, all said, we want to play. We want to win for (name redacted). And then they went out and did it. It was a grind, and they just refused to submit, and came all the way back and won the game.
It hit me afterwards: we’re not just creating kids who love to play baseball, which is important in its own way. We are creating human beings, young guys who will become men. Are we teaching them the right things? Are we helping their families teach the needed life lessons? Are we as coaches the right mix of supportive and constructive while building confidence in the boys? Sometimes I am not sure. Sometimes I doubt.
I realize as these tiny six-year-olds who couldn’t catch or throw are now teenagers on the cusp of adulthood, they are soon to be out of my reach. Some will play travel baseball, some will play in high school, some will stay in touch, some will not. I hope the lessons I learned playing baseball from the men who coached me are imparted on the boys. People like my dad, Mr. Gurgone, and Mr. Mateja taught me how to play on a team. The goal of the team was to win, and your job was to contribute in some small, meaningful way. It wasn’t about your stats or your exit velocity, or where you hit in the lineup. It was about having fun with your friends, learning the little things about playing and winning baseball games, and learning to put your own ego aside for the good of the team. I did not excel at that as a kid.
As he retired, Cal Ripken was asked why he played the way he did, why he played every day even when he was injured.
Ripken recalled hearing some players talk about their regrets. Some wished they took better care of themselves, others said they wanted to play more and a few lamented not taking the game more seriously.
“I didn’t want to be in position at the end of my career and regret not going about it a certain way,” Ripken said. “So, when I look back, I don’t have those regrets. I accomplished what my skills, ability and determination allowed me to.”
What a tremendous statement. Shouldn’t every one of us have that mindset? My daughter called it “grindset” a few months ago and that has really stuck with me. This is where mindset meets grit and grind. I love that term, even though if you Google it, you will find other meanings. When tasked with something important, grindset is important. The boys on Batavia Youth Baseball Red had that in abundance last season.
We made it to the playoffs last fall and lost in our worst-played game of the season. In the postgame, the three coaches all made comments to the players, who were in tears. You might think they were in tears because we lost, but they were in tears because they knew that this was their last game together. Some of the boys moved on to higher leagues, or travel teams out of town, and the Batavia Youth Baseball Red will ride no more. In playing baseball together over those fall months, we were on the road to making these young boys into men. I was holding back tears last night as I looked at many of them, several of whom I have known or coached since they were six years old. To see them evolve from kids flicking boogers at each other into young men embracing each other as they left the field and talking about their love for each other, and I had to turn away. Thankfully there was an infield that wasn’t going to drag itself, and I completed this task with my eyes cast down so nobody could see me cry. I was blown away by their insight and maturity. And ten minutes later, they were pushing their injured teammate around the field in his wheelchair and talking about such big ideas as farting and Ice Spice.
Where does the time go? Now they’re 13 and 14 and almost as tall as me. What an awesome responsibility and gift to be able to share this with them and their families.
Isn’t that the measure? Wins and losses fade, for sure, but friendships burnished by a shared love of baseball never really leave us. We’re creating memories for the kids as well as teaching them about the nuances of the game: getting runners over, tagging up on long flyballs, cutting the third base bag the right way to eliminate extraneous steps home. Life is measured in moments.
Jack is 13 and I am 50. I will coach him another season, maybe two. And then that part of life will be over. Maybe he will be good enough to make the high school team if he grows as a player and a person and those traits catch up to his peers. At the end of the day, I realize my crazed obsession with baseball is something I have grown to accept and cherish now, as I have been able to share that with many of the boys and our coaches.
Now we prepare for a new baseball season here in the Midwest, where we are in our second “false spring” of the season, early March, when some of the perennials have been fooled into sprouting too soon. It’s almost time to get the fields ready, for time to begin anew. Time to get the gloves out and start playing some long catch. Time for the sound of ball meeting bat, of kids laughing and making silly jokes that become the backdrop for this coming season. Time for a new crew, with some old faces and some new, to populate the baseball fields. There is a joy that comes from the start of the new baseball season that remains unparalleled in my life. It’s so easy to forget the moments that bring us joy in the world as we are in the midst of a national landscape dreading our next election. This is the time to hold on to those moments, both shared and alone, that bring us comfort, ease and pleasure.