I'm chasing a dream I know I won't reach. You may wonder why I go through a grueling baseball season? Or why I wake up at 5:30 a.m. for morning workouts? Or how do I stay motivated day in and day out, when I know I'm not going to pursue sports after college? In truth, these are questions I ponder myself.
Baseball is a game that beats you to your knees. Baseball players have to deal with the emotional roller coaster that is baseball. In baseball, if you fail seven out of 10 times, you're considered good. I have played organized baseball since I was 4, and still have yet to hang up the cleats. That is because in my 16 years of baseball experience, I have learned some of the valuable life lessons that comes with it.
Baseball forces you to grind. College baseball is nothing near as strenuous as professional baseball, as a season is roughly 60 games. Baseball is not a gladiator fight where the strongest, most talented team always wins. The underdog always has a good chance to win. A bounce here, a bounce there, and the whole game can shift.
Baseball teaches you to face adversity. Things might go the way you planned, but you have to roll with the punches and keep grinding through till the end. The feeling you get when you come from behind is unbeatable.
Baseball forces you to live on an emotional plateau. Baseball toys with your emotions, game in and game out. But it is your job to not let the things you can't control affect you. You have to have the same mindset for every play and every plate appearance; a mixture of readiness and energy. On a line graph, the two create a bell curve mapping out performance. If you are not amped and have sub-par readiness your performance will dwindle. As so, if you are too amped and too ready, your performance will also struggle. Baseball teaches a person to maintain a consistent emotional mindset.
Baseball forces you to learn from your failures. You are going to fail in baseball and in life. No one is perfect, it's a fact. You can either let those failures control your behavior or you can learn from them. The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over expecting a different result. In baseball, you have to constantly make adjustments. If you're in a slump and you're not working your tail off to change something, either with your approach or your swing, your performance will not improve, rather it will keep getting worse. Baseball teaches the fact that failure happens, but you have to face the failures head on and work to fix the scenario you are in.
So why do I still play baseball? I love the game. I love the lessons it teaches you, I love the competition. I love the feeling of triumphing over an opponent that was suppose to beat you. I love that baseball is its own world. When you step in-between the lines, nothing else matters besides the pearly white ball.
