Just returned from watching son's scrimmage. He told me beforehand he would throw only one situational inning, but I nevertheless felt compelled to drive 16 hours to watch him throw what turned out to be 13 pitches.
He pitched well enough to encourage the hope that he can eventually grow into a useful role on the team, but the highlight of the trip was the dinner afterwards.
Seeing the skill of some of his teammates who clearly possess a higher order of athletic talent while still falling short of true prospect status reminded me that the rungs get farther apart the higher one climbs on the ladder and might have caused me to lower my estimate of his potential baseball ceiling.
However, talking to him over dinner raised my estimate of the quality of man he is becoming and the kind of life he is building for himself.
What I heard at dinner was a young man who is joining a community of hard working, disciplined men and learning what it takes to succeed at whatever he puts his hand to.
He is tremendously impressed by the professionalism of the coaches and the staff. He has figured out that these people have the cool jobs they do because they committed themselves to mastering their craft and they pursued it with discipline and purpose. He marvels that the coach posts a minute-by-minute practice schedule in the locker room every day, covering the activities of every player, and every player is expected to know the plan before he steps on the practice field. He further marvels that the coach has already written, subject to change, plans for every practice for the rest of the fall, and that the players are on notice that any minutes of practice lost to bad weather will be made up on the weekends because the coach is determined to use every minute the NCAA gives him to its best advantage. Similarly, the conditioning coach has a plan for every workout, and no workout ever gets repeated.
Because he has these role models setting these examples, he is taking more responsibility for organizing his own life. In order to go to dinner with me, he had had to perform that night's mandatory study hall hours in advance. A month ago, I'm not sure he would have diagnosed the time conflict in time to permit solving it.
He is also buying into what the coach is teaching about taking responsibility to meet performance standards. For example, in the scrimmage, each pitcher started with a runner on second and one out and faced four batters. After each batter, the situation was re-set to one out, but the runners stayed at whatever bases they had earned. The performance standard for the pitchers was to prevent the runner from scoring and to retire three of the four batters while throwing 15 or fewer pitches. That's the goal. Overcome whatever bad luck befalls you and take responsibility for meeting it. The batters had their own standards based on the situations they faced: if there was a runner on second, their assignment was simply to get on base; if there was a runner on third, their job was to get him home one way or another.*
I see this sense of responsibility carrying over into his schoolwork. So far, his assignment and quiz grades are excellent, but more impressive to me is that he seems acutely aware of what is coming up on the horizon and how that affects what he should be doing right now. He insisted I drop him off at his dorm by 9:30 because he had to be in bed at 10:00 to get up at 5:30 and carry out a plan of the day that won't have fifteen unclaimed minutes until he goes to bed.
He is using his time wisely. He respects the people he is spending it with, and it looks like he is beginning to earn their respect in return. Whatever line of work he pursues after college, he will be better at it because of what he is learning and doing now.
I went back to my hotel jubilant and encouraged, and baseball was only a small part of the reason.
*Note: In case you're wondering, he did meet the standard for the scrimmage. The runner on second stayed at second. He got three outs: a strikeout and two pop flies. Only the 2nd batter achieved his objective: he reached base by leaning into an 0-2 two-seamer and getting grazed on the forearm.